News

By Amos Kamil, The New York Times Magazine

Stories like theirs point to why sexual abuse by teachers — or religious leaders or relatives, for that matter — is so especially damaging. As Mones said: “It’s counterintuitive, but sexual abuse emotionally binds the child closer to the person who has harmed him, setting him up for a life plagued by suspicion and confusion, because he will never be sure who he can really trust. And in my experience, this is by far the worst consequence of sexual abuse.” That’s one reason, he said, why those few victims who ever speak out at all tend to do so only after the abuser is dead or dying: telling the truth while the other person is still strong enough to deny it, or to blame the accuser, is just too terrifying

by Rekha Basu, The Des Moines Register

The girls alleged that their father had touched them improperly on multiple occasions. The appeals court canceled the rulings by a Dubuque County judge who granted the father joint, unrestricted custody of the girls, and had ordered restricted, supervised contact with their grandmother who brought the allegations to light.

“Each part of the system has an independent role to play in child protection, but they seem to have coalesced to leave vulnerable children at risk. If that happened here, how many other claims have been similarly dispensed with?”

by Sarah Okeson, News-Leader

Domestic violence advocates say batterers sometimes use child custody proceedings as a way to continue to exert control.
“Victims of domestic violence can be made to appear less healthy and less stable in court, especially without legal counsel, which is a result of the abuse they have suffered,” Seal said. “Abusers capitalize on this appearance and present a cognitive frame to the court that they are the ‘responsible parent,’ and the victim is in fact mentally unstable and financially unwise. Far too often this results in abusers being given too much control over children and the non-abusive parent.”

USA TODAY” The grand jury report reads like a textbook profile of child sexual abuse. Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State, allegedly bought one boy golf clubs and a computer, took him swimming at a hotel pool, wrestled with him and invited him to sleepovers at his home before sexually assaulting him, the report says.
The pattern repeated over 15 years with at least seven other boys who participated in a mentorship program Sandusky founded for underprivileged boys, the grand jury charges.”

by Wendy Murphy, The Patriot Ledger

“The story has little to do with football and much to do with the way institutions evade oversight and accountability from real world law enforcement, especially on matters involving child abuse and sexual violence.”

US News And World Report

Adams, Aransas County’s top judge, was elected in 2001 and has dealt with at least 349 family law cases in the past year alone, nearly 50 of which involved state caseworkers seeking determine whether parents were fit to raise their children.

ABC News

Judge William Adams, who has ruled on child abuse cases throughout his career, is seen in a webcam video from 2004 beating his daughter who has cerebral palsy with a belt and cursing at her for close to 10 minutes. The daughter, Hillery Adams, who was 16 when the video was made, said she received the beating for using her computer when she was forbidden from doing so. She recently posted on YouTube.

Researchers tracked a group of girls ranging in age from 6 to 16 for 23 years, found that they had higher rates of depression and obesity, as well as problems with regulation of brain chemicals, among other issues, compared to a control group of girls who were not abused.

WNews

A Texas teen was expelled from her cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for a football player accused of raping her. A group of former NFL cheerleaders are standing up to support her after the courts rejected her suit against the school and ordered her to pay her school’s legal expenses.

by Peter Jamison, SF Weekly

This well researched article focuses on a number of California custody cases where allegations of domestic violence or child molestation by mothers were rejected by the courts and resulted in children being abused. The abuse was later proved by criminal convictions — and, in one case, the child was murdered.