While child molestation is a detestable crime, in entirely too many cases
it is alleged without any sort of proof whatsoever and is the result of
mass-hysteria and/or the implantation of false memories by
"therapists"...
THIS is the true child abuse.
I wouldn't be surprised to discover that nothing happened here or if it
did, it would have been limited to a perpetrator or two, not dozens.
I trace the problem to people whose lives are bland middle-class vacuums
and who don't have the courage to seek real excitement by joining the
French Foreign Legion or a mountain rescue team or something. Instead
they live bland little lives and become enamored of TV and the fantasy
life it offers. They truly WANT to be victims of the crime-of-the-week
so that they gain status in their own eyes and others.
Suddenly they are special and their life has excitement. But no one
actually wants to be raped so they do the next best thing: imagine it
happened to their kid.
I live right next door to Fall River MA and there are a couple of hopelessly
innocent grandparents doing time for molesting their grand kids. In the
local coverage of the story it was revealed that that the therapist asked
repetitive leading questions of these 5 or 6 year olds regarding events that
supposedly happened when they were 3 or so. The "therapist" is
a "true believer" who thinks that kids don't lie or fantasize;
that 30-50% of all kids are fucked regularly by their caretakers; that
you can't implant memories; and the assertion by a child that nothing
happened is proof of sexual abuse.
Talk about your fucking witch hunt.
If the kid says they were abused, they were abused. If the kid says
they weren't abused they were abused.
The insanity of true believers is not limited to the religiously
inclined although a good case could be made that the so-called talking
therapies (which do not work any better than no therapy at all) are but
superstitions themselves. As I understand it '"real scientists"
such as Sagan laugh(ed) at the pretensions of the talking therapists when
they consider their practice a science. It is an art; perhaps useful for
some folks, but the talking therapies are an art more akin to novel
writing, not science.
Sincerely,
4 Exonerated in Sex Case Now Suing
By PEGGY ANDERSEN
SEATTLE (AP) - Horror stories began spilling out of Wenatchee four years ago,
when dozens of parents were accused of having orgies with children - their own
and others'. Another mass child-molestation case from a little-known town had
found its way onto the map.
Ultimately, 19 people were convicted or pleaded guilty. But at least four
others were exonerated, and now they are back in court, suing their accusers
for $100 million.
Pentecostal pastor Robert ``Roby'' Roberson, his wife, Connie, Sunday school
teacher Honnah Sims and parishioner Connie Rodriguez say they were victimized
by investigators who bullied children into giving false testimony and adults
into confessing to crimes they didn't commit.
The case, they say, was the twisted obsession of the chief investigator,
Wenatchee police Officer Robert Perez, whose two foster daughters were among
the dozens of child accusers.
The four are suing the city and its police force, Douglas County and its
sheriff's department, the state and its Department of Social and Health
Services, and one social worker. The civil trial has been going on for nine
weeks.
Authorities from Wenatchee, an apple-growing community of 35,000 on the
eastern slopes of the Cascades 150 miles east of Seattle, stand by their
handling of the investigation.
Twenty-eight people were charged in the case. Of those who pleaded guilty or
were convicted, 12 remain in prison, their children scattered in foster care
or adoptive homes. One conviction was overturned on appeal, five appeals
failed and three are pending.
The Robersons, who were accused of being leaders of the sex ring, and Sims
were acquitted in 1995. Charges against Rodriguez were dropped when four of
five young accusers recanted.
Attorney Robert Van Siclen, who won the acquittals and is representing the
four in the civil trial, told the jury that the investigation was a locomotive
that ``slipped its brakes and is careening down a hill.''
Perez's name has come up often in testimony.
A former social worker who said he was fired for criticizing the investigation
testified that Perez was abrasive and threatening when he questioned people.
Once in 1994, the former social worker said, Perez placed his gun on the table
as he repeatedly told a third-grader that she wouldn't be allowed to go back
to school until she told him about abuse. ``She was very scared and she
started to cry,'' the witness said.
The biological parents of the two foster children in Perez's home confessed to
sex abuse during the scandal, but their mother - who is illiterate, with an IQ
of 68 - told the civil jury she confessed only because ``I was scared and I
didn't know what to do.''
She said Perez told her ``if I would tell him something, he would let me go -
he wouldn't put me in jail.''
In the years since the case first made headlines, fears of child molestation
have given way to concerns that the accused - mostly ignorant, poor people
with limited resources and few allies - were trampled by a criminal justice
system out of control, driven by community hysteria.
It wouldn't be the first time.
Among other lurid mass child-abuse cases of the 1980s to fall apart in the
courts under similar circumstances are the McMartin preschool case in
California, the Little Rascals case in North Carolina, the Margaret Kelly
Michaels case in New Jersey and the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts.
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle
who has sided with defendants in other sex cases, testified that authorities
in Wenatchee should have been more skeptical.
``The sheer number of rapes and sodomy going on for so many years while nobody
noticed, you'd think, would have raised a red flag in someone's mind,'' she
said.
Roberson said he was targeted for prosecution after he stood up for the
parents of the two girls who lived with Perez. Similarly, Ms. Sims testified
that she was charged after she tried to raise money to help the Robersons
fight.
``It was nothing I thought would happen in America,'' Ms. Sims said. She and
her husband were ``scared to death. We felt we were being swept up in
something bigger than we could handle.'' And the acquittal didn't help.
``They're still calling me a child molester to this day,'' Ms. Sims said.
One of the girls who lived in Perez's home, now 14 and in foster care
elsewhere, testified that her sex allegations were true. She said dozens of
adults assaulted dozens of children in the basement of Roberson's church and
in homes several times a week.
The other of Perez's former foster daughters is hospitalized for emotional
problems and didn't testify.
Perez said in an interview that he did his job properly.
``I'll never apologize for the work I did,'' he said. ``Obviously no
investigation is perfect, but it was as perfect as I could make it within the
constraints I was bound by.''
AP-NY-06-04-98 1528EDT
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Caroline
.c The Associated Press
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