child abuse

November 10, 2011April 18, 2020

The Firing Of Joe Paterno Was A Business Decision

Penn State University has a mess on its hands and many heads rolled as a result – as they should have – but many people on the Internet either falsely claimed that Coach Joe Paterno was accused of molesting the children or that his lack of action upon finding out made him as guilty as the former staff member who is actually accused. Make no mistake, Paterno was fired on Wednesday so the school could protect their brand and get ahead of the massive negative story.

Child abuse, especially of a sexual nature, is, as it should be, a heinous crime. People tend to lose their mind when it becomes public. The downside of that freak out is that due process and the concept of “innocent until proved guilty” seems to fly out the window. Incidents that become news explodes all over the people involved and indirectly seeps down to people not directly involved.

November 5, 2007April 18, 2020

Revenge driving justice system

I would be the first one to say the justice system is imperfect. After all it is a human construction and I don’t know of any humans who are perfect.

The problems stem from the need to be compassionate about the people who are criminals, the victims, and the public’s need for a perfect utopia where you can walk around naked and leave your house and car unlocked.

There seems to be a perception that we coddle criminals, that they sit on their asses in jail and watch TV all the time, while the victims of crime have their life ruined by whatever degree of the crime that happened to them. People who have that perception are the one’s who want the utopia and want revenge on the criminal.

There is a disturbing trend to make people pay for their crimes for the rest of their lives even after serving a jail sentence.

You have the “3 strikes” rule (aka habitual offender laws) where a person who is convicted of a serious criminal offense 3 or more times get mandatory long term sentences which could include life without parole.

Then you have Megan Laws that require public notifications when a sex offender is released and ends up in someone’s neighborhood. There are also local laws that now prohibit sex offenders from living a certain distance from a school or other places where children are located, and some cities are starting to enact laws preventing sex offenders from even working near them.

You also have some laws that require mentally disabled criminals to be institutionalized after serving their sentences and in some states children as young as 14 can be sentenced to life in prison without parole for violent crimes.

A recent move in the Ohio state legislature would increase the time on parole after a sentence for a violent crime from 3 years to 5.

Senate Bill 228 was written because of people such as [Bruce] Lower, said Bret Vinocur, the president of findmissingkids.com. He worked with Sen. Steve Stivers, a Columbus Republican, to draft the legislation.
Vinocur testified this week before the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee.
“I’ve had much-less-violent offenders stay on parole five years,” he said in an interview the day before his testimony. “There is no uniformity. … If this law was in effect, he would still be on parole.”
It’s easier to return people to prison on a parole violation than to convict them of a new crime because parole offenses can include acts that are otherwise legal, such as drinking alcohol.
Lower was accused of raping, sodomizing and killing the child in a Columbus court. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and served 16 years in prison. Although he was accused of two parole violations, drinking alcohol and possessing pornography, parole authorities released him from supervision in August 2005 after 2 1/2 years.
Vinocur said he has found five MySpace pages and a handful of dating Web sites bearing Lower’s photo and profile.
“Why is this man out?” he asked. “Why is he out on the Internet dating?”
Fixed parole sought for felons

The article says that since Lower was released from parole he has had 2 restraining orders placed on him from two different women. That is the only bad marks he has had since 2005.

What supporters of laws such as Senate Bill 228 fail to take into consideration is that the victims aren’t the only people who suffer from the crime. The criminal and their friends and family suffer as well.

This side effect is called “collateral consequences of criminal charges”. Not only does a convicted criminal serve a court imposed sentence but they can also lose their job, experience disenfranchisement, loss of federal loans for education (for drug charges) or eviction from public housing, not to mention the effects of the “3 Strikes” and Megan’s Law. The criminal’s family also experiences social and economic punishment.

When I was young, the brother of a friend of mine was accused of rape. Even before a trial, my friend’s mother was fired from the scout troop she supervised and many family friends shunned them.

Tougher sentences coupled with these collateral consequences of criminal charges have filled the prisons and ruined many lives and for what? Why not just get to the extreme some people want? Let’s just require automatic life sentences without parole for any violent criminals – even first time offenders. Or better yet let’s just execute them and save on the money and resources needed to warehouse them. Laws like Senate Bill 228 just setup felons to fail after their sentence and comes pretty close to violating the 8th amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishments.

Listening to the arguments of the supporters of revenge, one would think a pedophile was lurking behind every bush. But some statistics show that most child abuse happens in the home from parents:

In 2003, 83.9% of victims were abused by a parent. 40.8% of child victims were maltreated by their mothers acting alone and 18.8% by fathers acting alone.
Neglect made up 61% of abuse cases, physical abuse 19%, and sexual abuse 10%
2006 Statistics

People make mistakes. They should be held responsible for those mistakes, but how long should they be held responsible. It seems like many people like Ohio State Sen. Steve Stivers and Bret Vinocur want you to pay forever for your mistakes. Even though such laws won’t create the abuse free utopia they want.

Childhelp says:

Children who experience child abuse & neglect are 59% more likely to be arrested as a juvenile, 28% more likely to be arrested as an adult, and 30% more likely to commit violent crime.
National Child Abuse Statistics

Wouldn’t it make more sense to treat those who abuse children and their child victims. Treat the cause of the violence and just maybe the cycle of violence would be broken and the desire for collateral consequences of criminal charges would disappear.

Our legal system is suppose to be called a system of justice – not revenge. The Rack, public stockades, and public hangings have moved into the dustbin of history, why does it seem to me we are going back to those times. What’s next – the return of the scarlet letter?

October 1, 2006April 18, 2020

When moralists throw stones….

Less than a week after former President Clinton handed the right wing their ass on Bin Laden and President Bush had more proof of his lies thrown in his face when the National Intelligence Estimate came out, a sex scandal has erupted in the US House of Representatives.

Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) resigned suddenly after learning a report on his inappropriate Internet contact with a 16 year old House page was about to be reported on ABC News.

What made me bust out laughing was when I heard that Foley was a leader on the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. He worked to help gain passage of the “Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006” which, among other things, increases penalties for adults who use the Internet to discuss or solicit sexual acts with “minors” (defined as an “individual who has not attained the age of 18 years”). GOP leaders hailed this law as a vital tool in protecting our nation’s children against Internet predators.

Now one would think that the GOP would bounce Foley and stick to their scripts about “protecting children”, but it seems the speaker and majority leader knew back in 2005! about Foley and his obsession with male pages.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday — contradicting the speaker’s assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.
Hastert did not dispute the claims of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and his office confirmed that some of Hastert’s top aides knew last year that Foley had been ordered to cease contact with the boy and to treat all pages respectfully.
House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post on Friday that he had learned in late spring of inappropriate e-mails Foley sent to the page, a boy from Louisiana, and that he promptly told Hastert, who appeared to know already of the concerns. Hours later, Boehner contacted The Post to say he could not be sure he had spoken with Hastert.
GOP Knew of Foley’s Messages

Any time an adult has some kind of contact with a minor of a sexual nature, people get quite upset, and the adult usually is vilified. Unless you are a Republican and your PR comes from Fox News:

Discussing the recent resignation of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) with host Chris Wallace on the October 1 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, Fox News political analyst and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) claimed that House Republicans would have “been accused of gay bashing” if they had “overly aggressively reacted” to Foley’s allegedly inappropriate email communications with a 16-year-old male congressional page when House Republicans reportedly first learned of Foley’s actions in late 2005.
Gingrich: House GOP would have “been accused of gay bashing” if it “overly aggressively reacted” to Foley’s emails in 2005
On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume asserted that there is a “difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties because former Republican Rep. Mark Foley is “out of office and in total disgrace in his party” after allegedly engaging in sexually explicit communications with underage congressional pages, while President Bill Clinton and Rep. Barney Frank were not similarly reprimanded for their “inappropriate behavior.” However, neither the Clinton nor the Frank allegations involved minors.
Hume compared Foley scandal to those involving Clinton, Frank, ignoring key difference
On Fox News’ The Big Story Primetime, Ann Coulter claimed that reports that the House Republican leadership was previously aware of communications former Rep. Mark Foley allegedly had with underage congressional pages are “somewhat incredible,” asking: “Why wait until right before the election to let it break?” and dismissing such reports as gossip, saying: “It’s something you hear.”
Coulter spinning on Foley scandal

Wow!

Brian Ross, who broke the story on Friday on ABC (US), is not one to report hearsay. More than one page has come forward and there are reports that pages were warned about Foley when they started their assignments.

Fox News is trying to spin the scandal like when they claimed that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was nothing more than Fraternity hazing.

So I guess we can add Republicans to the list of those who get a free pass on child abuse – along with Catholic priests.

The Cucumber Incident: Revisited

Back in July, 2004, I posted some thoughts on the documentary called The Cucumber Incident.

The film told the story surrounding an incident that made national headlines in 1997. Three women had attacked, stripped, and forced a cucumber in the butt of a convicted child molester. They then drove the man back to his home town of McComb, Ohio and dumped him outside a pizza shop. The women were arrested and served time in jail as well as being labeled sex offenders.

The twist was the man was the husband of one of the women and the other two were the wife’s relatives. The guy had served time in prison for molesting his daughter and had been suspected of doing it again.

Someone posted my article in full on the Indymedia network of websites and comments flooded in to my article.

Most of the comments took me to task because I refused to applaud the women’s revenge. I was also taken to task for not being outraged at the husband’s acts and one person commented that it was no surprise as I was man. Several comments mentioned that if one was a victim of abuse then one would understand.

I reject all of those comments.

Revenge is not justice even if it is for a heinous act. The child was examined by the proper authorities and there was not enough evidence to arrest Randy, the husband.

The fact remains that Jewel chose to allow Randy back into house after he got out of prison. If she had kicked him to the curb then it is less likely another incident would have happened. Even after the alleged incident Jewel had the choice to leave him or kick him out of the house.

I do not look on child abuse of any kind lightly but it still doesn’t trump the fact that revenge is not justice.

My gender has nothing to do with my views on the woman’s acts. Revenge is not justice. I would feel the same way if it were 3 men attacking a female molester.

Although I have not been personally been abused, there was an incident in my family several years ago that still has a negative impact on me and the family.

Originally posted on the blog “Hancock County Politics Unfiltered”

July 29, 2004April 18, 2020

The Cucumber Incident

I saw a good documentary on July 26th, on the Sundance Channel. It is called “The Cucumber Incident” and tells the story behind a true event that involved 3 women from Delaware, Ohio and one of the women’s estranged husband who was born and raised in McComb (about 10 miles west of Findlay). It happened in July 1997.

It seems that the husband, Randy, who had been convicted of child molestation of his young step daughter, was accused of further abuse of the girl shortly after getting out of prison. The main accusation was that he had french kissed the child.