Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Tor's most visited hidden sites host child abuse images, Police investigating 718 cases of child abuse in Northern Ireland
Tor's most visited hidden sites host child abuse images
By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News 30 December 2014
Most traffic to sites hidden on the Tor network go to those dealing in images of child sexual abuse a study suggests. The six-month study sought to catalogue hidden services on the so-called "dark net" and work out which were the most popular.
It found lots of sites peddling illegal drugs but the most popular were those involved with abuse.
However, the researcher behind the study said it was hard to conclude that people were behind all the visits.
Tor, or The Onion Router, is an anonymising system that lets people use the web without revealing who they are or which country they are in. The anonymity offered by the network has encouraged many people to set up hidden .onion sites that offer content, services and goods that it is illegal to sell openly....
Although the number of sites dealing in images of abuse on Tor is small, traffic to them dwarfs that going to other sites, said Dr Owen. About 75% of the traffic observed in the study ended up at abuse sites, said Dr Owen....
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30637010
Police investigating 718 cases of child abuse in Northern Ireland
And calls to local NSPCC helpline show sharp rise
524 individuals have contacted the inquiry into historical abuse.
By Adrian Rutherford – 30 December 2014
Officers are probing 718 "live" cases where the victim was aged under 18.
The figure is thought to include a number of historic allegations relating to children's care homes.
It comes as a leading charity revealed it has seen the number of calls to a specialist helpline jump by almost a quarter in the last year.
The issue of child abuse has been in the headlines throughout 2014. A State inquiry into historical abuse in Northern Ireland, chaired by retired judge Sir Anthony Hart, opened in January. The inquiry, which has so far been contacted by 524 individuals, has already heard harrowing testimonies from victims.
And in November a report estimated that up to 145 children were at significant risk of exploitation in Northern Ireland....
The paper by Professor Kathleen Marshall revealed paramilitaries were using fear and intimidation to sexually exploit children. It also uncovered cases involving the military, revealing that soldiers had been disciplined for smuggling girls into two different barracks in the last three years....
The Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA) is examining allegations of child abuse in children's homes and other residential institutions between 1922 and 1995. It is the biggest child abuse public inquiry ever held in the UK, having been contacted by 524 people who said they were abused in childhood. Most complainants are from the UK, 65 are from Australia and 26 from the Irish Republic.
The HIA inquiry was set up by the First and Deputy First Minister in May 2012. Its aim is to establish if there were "systemic failings by institutions or the state in their duties towards those children in their care".
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/child-abuse-media-coverage-of-highprofile-cases-has-given-more-children-courage-to-seek-help-30869078.html
Monday, December 29, 2014
Allegations of child sex abuse are complicated by a legal maze in Indian country, Ministry of Defence pays out £2 million to settle cadets' sex abuse claims
Ministry of Defence pays out £2 million to settle cadets' sex abuse claims
One case involved a teenage girl who was sexually abused by her adult cadet instructor and gave birth to her abuser's child
By Bill Gardner 28 Dec 2014
The Ministry of Defence has paid out more than £2 million in out-of-court settlements in the last three years as a result of claims that young cadets were sexually abused.
The cases includes allegations that teenage boys performed ritual sex acts on younger cadets, and a cadet who was raped by an instructor and gave birth to her abuser’s child....
Some of the settlements are understood to relate to historic abuse, perpetrated against adults when they were children. Others relate to abuse carried out in recent years....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11315528/Ministry-of-Defence-pays-out-2-million-to-settle-cadets-sex-abuse-claims.html
A man of healing, a saga of suffering
Allegations of child sex abuse are complicated by a legal maze in Indian country
December 28, 2014
....The sexual abuse of children has long been regarded as a rampant if largely unspoken problem on Native American reservations, in part a legacy of a boarding school system that was designed to assimilate students and subjected them to widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse, according to Native leaders and prosecutors.
....Child sexual abuse on the reservations is at the root of the many problems that follow for Indian children — depression, alcohol and drug abuse, juvenile detention and suicide, according to Indian country experts. The challenge of getting victims to speak out — common in child sexual assault cases anywhere — is exacerbated by the close-knit nature of the remote communities where they live.
The U.S. attorney for South Dakota, Brendan V. Johnson, said that sexual violence is one of the most common criminal offenses on the nine reservations where he shares criminal jurisdiction with the tribes, but it is extremely difficult to bring charges.
“Victims are placed under tremendous pressure by family members and friends to recant their stories,” said Johnson, who declined to discuss details of the Chipps case. “The complaint will come in, the victims will be forensically interviewed and will provide us with specific facts about what happened and then, months later, will recant their stories.”
....Many studies tie sexual abuse to the intergenerational trauma that began in the secular and church-run boarding schools that Indian children were required to attend. Court documents and lawsuit settlements reveal how the boarding schools, especially in places like South Dakota, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse.
Many of the children who attended the schools are the parents and grandparents of today’s Native American children. “There were individuals who were willing to move out in the middle of nowhere in order to work at boarding schools with these children and there were some who had a pre-disposition for child sex abuse and many of the children were sexually abused,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, that has become a cycle that was passed down from generation to generation. You compound that with the poverty, socioeconomic and isolation issues in Indian country and unfortunately that cycle has not yet been broken.”....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/12/28/a-man-of-healing-a-saga-of-suffering/
One case involved a teenage girl who was sexually abused by her adult cadet instructor and gave birth to her abuser's child
By Bill Gardner 28 Dec 2014
The Ministry of Defence has paid out more than £2 million in out-of-court settlements in the last three years as a result of claims that young cadets were sexually abused.
The cases includes allegations that teenage boys performed ritual sex acts on younger cadets, and a cadet who was raped by an instructor and gave birth to her abuser’s child....
Some of the settlements are understood to relate to historic abuse, perpetrated against adults when they were children. Others relate to abuse carried out in recent years....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11315528/Ministry-of-Defence-pays-out-2-million-to-settle-cadets-sex-abuse-claims.html
A man of healing, a saga of suffering
Allegations of child sex abuse are complicated by a legal maze in Indian country
December 28, 2014
....The sexual abuse of children has long been regarded as a rampant if largely unspoken problem on Native American reservations, in part a legacy of a boarding school system that was designed to assimilate students and subjected them to widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse, according to Native leaders and prosecutors.
....Child sexual abuse on the reservations is at the root of the many problems that follow for Indian children — depression, alcohol and drug abuse, juvenile detention and suicide, according to Indian country experts. The challenge of getting victims to speak out — common in child sexual assault cases anywhere — is exacerbated by the close-knit nature of the remote communities where they live.
The U.S. attorney for South Dakota, Brendan V. Johnson, said that sexual violence is one of the most common criminal offenses on the nine reservations where he shares criminal jurisdiction with the tribes, but it is extremely difficult to bring charges.
“Victims are placed under tremendous pressure by family members and friends to recant their stories,” said Johnson, who declined to discuss details of the Chipps case. “The complaint will come in, the victims will be forensically interviewed and will provide us with specific facts about what happened and then, months later, will recant their stories.”
....Many studies tie sexual abuse to the intergenerational trauma that began in the secular and church-run boarding schools that Indian children were required to attend. Court documents and lawsuit settlements reveal how the boarding schools, especially in places like South Dakota, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse.
Many of the children who attended the schools are the parents and grandparents of today’s Native American children. “There were individuals who were willing to move out in the middle of nowhere in order to work at boarding schools with these children and there were some who had a pre-disposition for child sex abuse and many of the children were sexually abused,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, that has become a cycle that was passed down from generation to generation. You compound that with the poverty, socioeconomic and isolation issues in Indian country and unfortunately that cycle has not yet been broken.”....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/12/28/a-man-of-healing-a-saga-of-suffering/
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Couple accused of abusing a child in 'black magic' case are found guilty of all counts
Couple accused of abusing a child in 'black magic' case are found guilty of all counts Dec 22, 2014 By David Deans
Carolee Hickman, 64, indecently assaulted a schoolgirl and held her down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her
A woman accused of using black magic to abuse a child, and her husband, who raped the child as she held her down, have been found guilty of all charges by a jury at Cardiff Crown Court.
Carolee Hickman, 64, was on trial for indecently assaulting a schoolgirl and holding the victim down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her during the 1970s.
She had been accused of grooming and abusing the young schoolgirl when they lived in South Wales at the time, after petrifying her with black magic threats.
The couple, both of the Wheatlands, Baschurch, Shrewsbury, were found guilty on all counts....
“Carolee said she was a witch and would come and get me and would make my mother ill,” the victim said.
“She even said she could kill my mother if she wanted to.
“She had a knife with a jewelled handle kept in a wooden box with carvings on the top.
“She cut my hand and sucked the blood out of it.
“There were tarot cards, she used to tell our fortunes and she even had a black cape.”....
A large number of books on spells and the occult were found when officers arrested the grandmother and her husband at their home in Shropshire.....
Carolee Hickman told police they separated while he was serving 10 years (reduced to eight on appeal), and she five years for child sex offences, which they had been convicted of in 1982 in Northampton....
Mr Hickman was sentenced for five sex offences and Mrs Hickman for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14 year old girl as part of a devil worship ritual.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/couple-accused-abusing-child-black-8331997
Carolee Hickman, 64, indecently assaulted a schoolgirl and held her down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her
A woman accused of using black magic to abuse a child, and her husband, who raped the child as she held her down, have been found guilty of all charges by a jury at Cardiff Crown Court.
Carolee Hickman, 64, was on trial for indecently assaulting a schoolgirl and holding the victim down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her during the 1970s.
She had been accused of grooming and abusing the young schoolgirl when they lived in South Wales at the time, after petrifying her with black magic threats.
The couple, both of the Wheatlands, Baschurch, Shrewsbury, were found guilty on all counts....
“Carolee said she was a witch and would come and get me and would make my mother ill,” the victim said.
“She even said she could kill my mother if she wanted to.
“She had a knife with a jewelled handle kept in a wooden box with carvings on the top.
“She cut my hand and sucked the blood out of it.
“There were tarot cards, she used to tell our fortunes and she even had a black cape.”....
A large number of books on spells and the occult were found when officers arrested the grandmother and her husband at their home in Shropshire.....
Carolee Hickman told police they separated while he was serving 10 years (reduced to eight on appeal), and she five years for child sex offences, which they had been convicted of in 1982 in Northampton....
Mr Hickman was sentenced for five sex offences and Mrs Hickman for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14 year old girl as part of a devil worship ritual.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/couple-accused-abusing-child-black-8331997
Monday, December 22, 2014
Five Westminster paedophile rings probed by Scotland Yard, Three Current MPs And Three Lords Named In Westminster Paedophile Ring Dossier Handed To Police
Five Westminster paedophile rings probed by Scotland Yard
Claims emerge of a complex web of child abuse at the heart of government, as leading MP in campaign for justice hands list of 22 names to police
By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent 21 Dec 2014
Police are investigating claims that up to five paedophile rings operated at the heart of Westminster with the involvement of “highly influential” politicians.
A Labour MP who has handed a dossier of evidence to Scotland Yard said he now believed the complexity of child abuse networks at the heart of government in the Seventies and Eighties had been seriously underestimated.
John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, said it was “inconceivable” that police would not now arrest and interview some of the politicians he has named in a list handed to detectives earlier this month.
Mr Mann, who has spent months sifting evidence from members of the public, met Scotland Yard and handed over evidence on 22 politicians, including three serving MPs and three members of the House of Lords....
“I think the 22 names are all worthy of investigation by the police," Mr Mann told The Telegraph.
“In my opinion the evidence against approximately half of them is very compelling....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11306575/Five-Westminster-paedophile-rings-probed-by-Scotland-Yard.html
Three Current MPs And Three Lords Named In Westminster Paedophile Ring Dossier Handed To Police
Lara O'Reilly Dec. 22, 2014
Scotland Yard has been handed a document that contains names of 22 high profile figures, including three serving MPs and three members of the House of Lords, alleged to be involved in the suspected Westminster paedophile ring during the 1970s and 1980s, The Daily Telegraph reports.
Labour MP John Mann has spent months sifting through hundreds of reports from the public about the historic sex abuse cases and has now handed a dossier to the police that suggests up to five paedophile rings were operating at the heart of UK government, each them involving at least one MP.
Of the total number involved — some of whom are now dead and some who are still alive, but not active in Westminster — 14 are Conservative politicians, five are from Labour and three were from other parties. Overall, 13 former ministers are named on the list.
Mann told The Sunday Times he also received allegations that an organised criminal gang and a celebrity were involved in the trafficking of young boys to abusers at Dophin Square in London, the block of flats prominent figures allegedly used as a venue for child abuse. He added that he is receiving new information all the time and that there could be many more names added to that list....
http://www.businessinsider.com/mps-and-peers-named-in-westminster-child-abuse-evidence-handed-to-police-2014-12
Friday, December 19, 2014
'Sons Of Guns' Star Indicted On Multiple Rape Charges, Why the Torture Report Won’t Change Anything
'Sons Of Guns' Star Indicted On Multiple Rape Charges
The Huffington Post
Cavan Sieczkowski December 19, 2014
The former star of Discovery Channel's "Sons of Guns," Will Hayden, was indicted on multiple rape charges Wednesday in Louisiana.
An East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Hayden, 49, on three counts of rape involving two females, the Times-Picayune reported. The charges against him include two counts of aggravated rape and one count of forcible rape. If convicted of aggravated rape, he faces a mandatory life sentence.
Hayden is accused of raping two preteen girls, according to the Advocate. He is accused of raping a girl in East Baton Rouge beginning in March 2013, when she was 11 years old, until August 2014.
Additionally, a woman, who is now in her 30s, also came forward claiming Hayden raped her in the 1990s when she was 12 years old, the Advocate reported....
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/celebrity/sons-of-guns-star-indicted-on-multiple-rape-charges/ar-BBh07RX
Why the Torture Report Won’t Change Anything
At most, it only further proves the incompatibility of a secret intelligence service and an open democracy.
Tim Weiner December 16, 2014
The report on the brutalities of the CIA’s secret prisons is the most important work by the Senate Intelligence Committee since congressional oversight of the CIA began in the 1970s. Its descriptions of torture and deception are as compelling as the newsreels of the Nuremberg trials....
It appears that the CIA did not give President Bush a full report on the gory details of the secret prisons for four years. This is “plausible deniability,” which shields the president from legal or moral hazard by keeping him in the dark. That practice was supposed to have ended decades ago.
The CIA had also forbidden the use of torture—“not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective,” in the words of Richard Stolz, chief of the clandestine service under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stolz is cited in the Senate report. The CIA’s codes of conduct before 9/11 clearly stated, “Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”
False answers were what Congress got from Bush’s CIA directors and their underlings. They delivered deceptive testimony and destroyed videotapes of torture. Brennan had to reprimand five officers for cybersnooping on the Senate’s files. The intelligence committees cannot function if the CIA lies to them and spies on them. That, too, was supposed to have ended when the committees were created in the 1970s....
http://www.thenation.com/article/193161/why-torture-report-wont-change-anything
The Huffington Post
Cavan Sieczkowski December 19, 2014
The former star of Discovery Channel's "Sons of Guns," Will Hayden, was indicted on multiple rape charges Wednesday in Louisiana.
An East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Hayden, 49, on three counts of rape involving two females, the Times-Picayune reported. The charges against him include two counts of aggravated rape and one count of forcible rape. If convicted of aggravated rape, he faces a mandatory life sentence.
Hayden is accused of raping two preteen girls, according to the Advocate. He is accused of raping a girl in East Baton Rouge beginning in March 2013, when she was 11 years old, until August 2014.
Additionally, a woman, who is now in her 30s, also came forward claiming Hayden raped her in the 1990s when she was 12 years old, the Advocate reported....
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/celebrity/sons-of-guns-star-indicted-on-multiple-rape-charges/ar-BBh07RX
Why the Torture Report Won’t Change Anything
At most, it only further proves the incompatibility of a secret intelligence service and an open democracy.
Tim Weiner December 16, 2014
The report on the brutalities of the CIA’s secret prisons is the most important work by the Senate Intelligence Committee since congressional oversight of the CIA began in the 1970s. Its descriptions of torture and deception are as compelling as the newsreels of the Nuremberg trials....
It appears that the CIA did not give President Bush a full report on the gory details of the secret prisons for four years. This is “plausible deniability,” which shields the president from legal or moral hazard by keeping him in the dark. That practice was supposed to have ended decades ago.
The CIA had also forbidden the use of torture—“not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective,” in the words of Richard Stolz, chief of the clandestine service under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stolz is cited in the Senate report. The CIA’s codes of conduct before 9/11 clearly stated, “Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”
False answers were what Congress got from Bush’s CIA directors and their underlings. They delivered deceptive testimony and destroyed videotapes of torture. Brennan had to reprimand five officers for cybersnooping on the Senate’s files. The intelligence committees cannot function if the CIA lies to them and spies on them. That, too, was supposed to have ended when the committees were created in the 1970s....
http://www.thenation.com/article/193161/why-torture-report-wont-change-anything
Thursday, December 18, 2014
The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings
The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings
Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.
Lisa Hajjar December 16, 2014
Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.
At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies....
The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”
In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America....
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings#
Reframing the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.
Lisa Hajjar December 16, 2014
Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.
At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies....
The “war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”
In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America....
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings#
London police: we believe claims of ‘VIP’ child sex abuse and murder
London police: we believe claims of ‘VIP’ child sex abuse and murder
Scotland Yard says victim’s allegations against prominent political and establishment figures are credible and true Vikram Dodd Thursday 18 December 2014
Scotland Yard officers have said they believe allegations that a ring of prominent politicians and members of the establishment abused and terrorised children as young as seven more than 30 years ago and went on to kill three young boys.
Detectives appealed for victims and witnesses to come forward and identified a flat in Dolphin Square, London, near the Houses of Parliament, as a scene of some of the alleged abuse, as well as military premises and other locations across London and the home counties.
So far one victim, known by the pseudonym Nick, has come forward to tell of a decade of abuse he suffered at the hands of people including senior politicians and members of Britain’s establishment, and of three homicides. Police as yet have no bodies, full names of those abused or killed, or exact locations where the killings took place.
But the detective in charge of the investigation pointedly described Nick’s allegations as “true” and said Nick had been abused from 1975 to 1984, between the ages of seven and 16....
in Nick’s case experienced detectives from two teams had concluded his accounts were true. “Nick has been spoken to by experienced officers from the child abuse team and experienced officers from the murder investigation team. They and I believe what Nick is saying is credible and true.”....
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/18/london-police-vip-child-sex-abuse-murder
Claims that boys were murdered by VIP sex ring are credible and true - police
Metropolitan police launch murder inquiry into role alleged Westminster ring might have had in killings of three boys Vikram Dodd Thursday 18 December 2014
Scotland Yard has said claims by a witness that a “VIP” sex abuse ring murdered three boys are “credible and true”.
The allegations made by the witness, known by the pseudonym Nick, have triggered a murder investigation.
Police said the alleged abuse by a Westminster-based paedophile ring lasted a decade at locations across London and the Home Counties, including military premises....
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/18/police-claims-vip-sex-ring-murder-three-boys
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Woman tells court of black magic fears that led to abuse and rape
Woman tells court of black magic fears that led to abuse and rape
"The court heard the couple were jailed at Northampton Crown Court in November 1982. Mr Hickman was sentenced to five sex offences and she for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14-year-old girl as part of a devil worship ritual."
'She cut my hand and sucked the blood out of it,' woman tells court of black magic fears that led to abuse and rape
Dec 16, 2014 By Liz Keen
Albert Hickman, 65 and his wife Carolee Hickman have pleaded not guilty to historic charges of rape and sexual abuse dating back 40 years....
A schoolgirl terrified by threats of black magic, made by a woman claiming to be a witch has told a jury how she was sexually abused and raped over and over again.
The alleged victim, now in her 50s, said the horror of what she believes happened to her while at comprehensive school had been buried for 40 years before memories resurfaced.
She told Cardiff Crown Court she went to Carolee Hickman’s Bridgend home while mitching school with friends, aged 11, but was soon being terrified into submission.
“Carolee said she was a witch and would come and get me and would make my mother ill - she even said she could kill my mother if she wanted to,” the alleged victim said.
“She had a knife with a jewelled handle kept in a wooden box with carvings on the top....
“There were tarot cards she used to tell our fortunes and she even had a black cape.”....
Former RAF man Albert Hickman, 65, pleads not guilty to rape....
She said the abuse came back to her bit by bit when she started having counselling following a series of family tragedies, including close bereavements and cancer.
Her counsellor said alarm bells rang for her when the woman talked of a dark cloud hanging over her, not just since the illnesses and deaths as you would expect, but for 40 years.
“I asked about her childhood but she could remember very little”, the counsellor said
“I would ask her to try to think back - it was her choice - but she was so frightened she didn’t want to look there.
“She knew she lived under a black cloud but was petrified of finding out why.”
Eventually she did think back, it was said and the first returning memories were of black magic, pornography and a woman.
“She remembered darkness and suffocating because a man was top of her and a woman was holding her down....
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/threats-black-magic-led-daily-8299644
Woman accused of using black magic to abuse a child laughed out loud when police asked if she was a witch, court hears Dec 17, 2014 By Liz Keen
Carolee Hickman, 64, denies indecently assaulting a schoolgirl in the 1970s and said she has never seen the girl before....
Carolee Hickman, 64, denies indecently assaulting a schoolgirl and of holding the girl down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her in the 1970s....
The court heard she told investigators: “I’ve got books on spells but I wouldn’t know how to do them - I wouldn’t know where to start.
“I had tarot cards too but I didn’t understand them either and a cloak ......and a wand which I bought on eBay. It was just a bit of stick -a right rip off.”
Detective Constable Joanne Lewis told the jury she had found a large number of books on spells and the occult when she arrested the grandmother and her husband, who denies the rape allegation, at home in Shropshire....
She accepted she has an interest in witchcraft but said that had not developed until she left Bridgend and was married for the second time following her divorce from Hickman in 1985.
The court heard the couple were jailed at Northampton Crown Court in November 1982. Mr Hickman was sentenced to five sex offences and she for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14-year-old girl as part of a devil worship ritual.
Pornographic material and items used in black magic were seized from that other man’s home....
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/woman-accused-using-black-magic-8306843
"The court heard the couple were jailed at Northampton Crown Court in November 1982. Mr Hickman was sentenced to five sex offences and she for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14-year-old girl as part of a devil worship ritual."
'She cut my hand and sucked the blood out of it,' woman tells court of black magic fears that led to abuse and rape
Dec 16, 2014 By Liz Keen
Albert Hickman, 65 and his wife Carolee Hickman have pleaded not guilty to historic charges of rape and sexual abuse dating back 40 years....
A schoolgirl terrified by threats of black magic, made by a woman claiming to be a witch has told a jury how she was sexually abused and raped over and over again.
The alleged victim, now in her 50s, said the horror of what she believes happened to her while at comprehensive school had been buried for 40 years before memories resurfaced.
She told Cardiff Crown Court she went to Carolee Hickman’s Bridgend home while mitching school with friends, aged 11, but was soon being terrified into submission.
“Carolee said she was a witch and would come and get me and would make my mother ill - she even said she could kill my mother if she wanted to,” the alleged victim said.
“She had a knife with a jewelled handle kept in a wooden box with carvings on the top....
“There were tarot cards she used to tell our fortunes and she even had a black cape.”....
Former RAF man Albert Hickman, 65, pleads not guilty to rape....
She said the abuse came back to her bit by bit when she started having counselling following a series of family tragedies, including close bereavements and cancer.
Her counsellor said alarm bells rang for her when the woman talked of a dark cloud hanging over her, not just since the illnesses and deaths as you would expect, but for 40 years.
“I asked about her childhood but she could remember very little”, the counsellor said
“I would ask her to try to think back - it was her choice - but she was so frightened she didn’t want to look there.
“She knew she lived under a black cloud but was petrified of finding out why.”
Eventually she did think back, it was said and the first returning memories were of black magic, pornography and a woman.
“She remembered darkness and suffocating because a man was top of her and a woman was holding her down....
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/threats-black-magic-led-daily-8299644
Woman accused of using black magic to abuse a child laughed out loud when police asked if she was a witch, court hears Dec 17, 2014 By Liz Keen
Carolee Hickman, 64, denies indecently assaulting a schoolgirl in the 1970s and said she has never seen the girl before....
Carolee Hickman, 64, denies indecently assaulting a schoolgirl and of holding the girl down while her husband Albert John Hickman, 65, raped her in the 1970s....
The court heard she told investigators: “I’ve got books on spells but I wouldn’t know how to do them - I wouldn’t know where to start.
“I had tarot cards too but I didn’t understand them either and a cloak ......and a wand which I bought on eBay. It was just a bit of stick -a right rip off.”
Detective Constable Joanne Lewis told the jury she had found a large number of books on spells and the occult when she arrested the grandmother and her husband, who denies the rape allegation, at home in Shropshire....
She accepted she has an interest in witchcraft but said that had not developed until she left Bridgend and was married for the second time following her divorce from Hickman in 1985.
The court heard the couple were jailed at Northampton Crown Court in November 1982. Mr Hickman was sentenced to five sex offences and she for indecent assault and for aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14-year-old girl as part of a devil worship ritual.
Pornographic material and items used in black magic were seized from that other man’s home....
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/woman-accused-using-black-magic-8306843
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Briton Simon Harris guilty of child sex abuse in Kenya, Is This German Scouting Ritual Child Abuse?
Briton Simon Harris guilty of child sex abuse in Kenya 16 December 2014
The BBC's Phil Mackie: "Harris would drive into the town of Gilgil and offer street children food and money to go home with him"
A British charity boss who preyed on vulnerable Kenyan street children has been found guilty of sexual abuse.
Simon Harris was convicted of eight charges of indecent and sexual assault on youngsters in Gilgil, and four of possessing indecent images of children.
Birmingham Crown Court heard he would lure boys to his house in Kenya by offering them food, shelter and money.
Harris, 55, of Pudleston, near Leominster, Herefordshire was cleared of 10 further charges, including rape....
Before the trial, Harris also admitted six offences of indecent assault against three boys aged between 13 and 14, when he was a teacher at Shebbear College, Devon in the 1980s....
Harris had faced 23 charges in total, including 18 allegations relating to assaults....
The offences in Kenya were committed while Harris was running a gap year charity he set up in the East African country, in the 1990s....
Harris was head of the gap-year charity VAE, which placed British volunteers in Kenyan schools....
It also emerged during the trial Harris had spent 15 months in a British jail for possession of indecent images of children following a 2009 conviction.... http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-30495511
Is This German Scouting Ritual Child Abuse?
Though the country's major scouting associations say the practice of "Pflocken," in which children are tied down, isn't acceptable, the timeworn practice continues.
Markus C. Schulte von Drach (2014-12-16)
MUNICH — It's spring 2014 at a boy scout camp in southern Germany. Younger boys and adolescents are cavorting about, practicing, learning and generally having fun. Then word spreads that a boy named Mark is about to be targeted for "Pflocken," so the boys gather to watch what's about to happen. Mark, who's about 11, has done something wrong, "something bad," and he's going to be punished.
Group leaders set him down on a table and bind his arms and legs, which are spread out. Gummy snake candy is then stuffed into his mouth. "Almost everybody thought it was funny," say some of the kids who were there. But some boys didn't find it funny at all. They may have worried they would face similar treatment one day.
The practice of so-called "Pflocken" usually happens outdoors. Online descriptions and photos confirm that. Four tent pegs are hammered into the ground, and the boy is tied to them with rope. The bound child doesn't know what awaits him, so uncertainty and fear are part of the equation. He's then tickled, body-marked with felt-tip pens and sometimes doused with water. There are stories on the Internet of kids being smeared with honey or leftover food.
How often this goes on is unclear. The Cologne-based Zartbitter association, whose mission is to protect boys and girls from abuse, reported in 2011 that groups used Pflocken either as punishment or as part of an induction ritual....
The three largest scout associations in Germany tell us that the practice is very well-known. In fact, according to Kerstin Fuchs, federal chair of the Catholic Saint George German Scout Association (DPSG), it used to be a timeworn tradition. But the associations all express surprise that the ritual is still happening.... http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/is-this-german-scouting-ritual-child-abuse-/pflocken-bullying-torture-scouts-punishment-violence-controversy/c3s17675/#.VJEHRy7A3uA
Monday, December 15, 2014
Police vent fury over cancelled inquiries into VIP child abuse: Officers claim covert investigations were shut down as they closed in on Establishment figures
Police vent fury over cancelled inquiries into VIP child abuse: Officers claim covert investigations were shut down as they closed in on Establishment figures
Serving and former detectives vented their fury on internet chat forum
They claim child sex abuse investigations in 80s and 90s were 'canned'
Comes as senior MP said he was aware of six police probes being shelved
Cover-up claims will heap pressure on Government and Scotland Yard
By Rebecca Camber, Crime Correspondent For The Daily Mail
15 December 2014
A series of covert police investigations into alleged VIP paedophile rings were shut down as they went ‘to the heart of the Establishment’, officers have claimed.
Serving and former detectives have vented their fury on an internet chat forum, claiming Scotland Yard investigations into child sex abuse were ‘canned’ during the 1980s and 1990s as they closed in on powerful figures, some of whom were said to be at ‘cabinet level’.
It comes as a senior MP said he was aware of six police probes into child sex abuse being shelved, five of which were run by Scotland Yard.
‘This is about kids being raped by those in power that included politicians of all sorts. It goes to the very heart of our Establishment.
‘There is very clear evidence that the general nature of the allegations are true.
‘There are enough officers on this site who have mentioned paedophile ops involving high-profile politicians being stopped at the eleventh hour.’
Labour MP John Mann yesterday admitted that he was aware of six inquiries which were shelved for 'no good reason'
A former detective constable said: ‘In the 90s I uncovered a middle class paedo ring at [a police station in east London]. It linked into a massive UC [undercover] paedo job which was being run by [a named detective sergeant].
‘The UC who shall remain nameless found that it went to cabinet level and four years of work was pulled overnight.’
Some of the officers also claimed there was a secret file dating back to the 1960s on a celebrity recently linked to historic abuse.
One civil servant, who said he had signed the Official Secrets Act, wrote: ‘The cover up began in 1985 when operations were closed for no apparent reason except that prominent persons were allegedly involved and again in 1990 and again over the North Wales child abuse and successive governments have continued the practice.’ The forum is open only to those who have worked in the Metropolitan Police or closely alongside the force.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2873927/Police-vent-fury-cancelled-inquiries-VIP-child-abuse-Officers-claim-covert-investigations-shut-closed-Establishment-figures.html
Man sentenced to jail for 'execution' of cat during sex ritual
Daryl Slade, Calgary Herald More from Daryl Slade, Calgary Herald
Published on: December 15, 2014
A man who slit the throat of a cat obtained on an Internet site and used it as part of a sick sexual ritual with his girlfriend has been jailed for 20 months and banned from owning any animals for life.
Provincial court Judge Brian Stevenson said Monday in sentencing Steven Edward Alcorn, 29, that the offender committed the act on Sept. 25, 2012 — just days after it was purchased through an ad on Kijiji — for his own sexual gratification.
“This is nothing short of an execution,” the judge concluded. “He found it to be sexually arousing and violated the trust that should be present between an owner and a pet.”
Stevenson also gave Alcorn three months consecutive for an assault on his girlfriend three months after the cat was slain and one month consecutive for breaching release conditions for a total 24-month sentence. With just over three months pre-trial credit, he has just under 21 months to serve.
Alcorn, who had pleaded guilty in November 2013, was also placed on probation for three years and must take counselling for domestic abuse and anger management....
http://calgaryherald.com/news/crime/stiff-jail-sentence-for-man-for-execution-of-cat-during-sex-ritual
Friday, December 12, 2014
Tanzania: Ritual Killers On the Loose, As Authorities Appeal for Calm
Tanzania: Ritual Killers On the Loose, As Authorities Appeal for Calm
12 December 2014 By Meddy Mulisa
Bukoba — RITUAL killers, human head hunters and sexual predators are out of their lairs again. They are on the prowl. Five people have been killed in Bukoba Municipality in what seems to be an orgy of superstitious murders.
This time the killers in Bukoba harvested the genitalia out of their victims and escaped with them. Panic is high among Kagera residents. Bukoba District Administrative Secretary (DAS), Clement Ndyamukama has appealed for joint cooperation from members of the public in fighting crime, including ritual killings which are on the increase....
The United Nations human rights officials report a spike in ritual attacks and killings of people with albinism in Tanzania....This, it says, brings the number of attacks since 2000 to 151, including 74 murders....
http://allafrica.com/stories/201412121042.html
12 December 2014 By Meddy Mulisa
Bukoba — RITUAL killers, human head hunters and sexual predators are out of their lairs again. They are on the prowl. Five people have been killed in Bukoba Municipality in what seems to be an orgy of superstitious murders.
This time the killers in Bukoba harvested the genitalia out of their victims and escaped with them. Panic is high among Kagera residents. Bukoba District Administrative Secretary (DAS), Clement Ndyamukama has appealed for joint cooperation from members of the public in fighting crime, including ritual killings which are on the increase....
The United Nations human rights officials report a spike in ritual attacks and killings of people with albinism in Tanzania....This, it says, brings the number of attacks since 2000 to 151, including 74 murders....
http://allafrica.com/stories/201412121042.html
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Teen sentenced to life in satanic killing, N.C. Church Members Charged With Beating Gay Man to Banish 'Demons', 130,000 children were forced from the U.K. to Canada, Zimbabwe and Australia, GCHQ to help tackle 'dark net' child abuse images
- Teen sentenced to life in satanic killing
- Trial Begins for Teen Accused in 'Satanic Ritual' Killing - NBC News
- N.C. Church Members Charged With Beating Gay Man to Banish 'Demons'
- A Different Kind of Deportation - A Del Rey Oaks man struggles to get his unreal life story recorded before it’s too late.
- GCHQ to help tackle 'dark net' child abuse images
Teen sentenced to life in satanic killing
By Brian Rogers December 11, 2014 Houston
Corriann Cervantes' beaming smile and bright eyes lit up a Harris County courtroom Thursday, even though it was just a posterboard-sized photograph that her family brought to show Jose E. Reyes he had not beaten them.
The 15-year-old's aunt, who had just seen Reyes sentenced to life in prison for capital murder in a killing prosecutors said was part of a satanic ritual, made sure the 18-year-old saw the photo on an easel in the center of the courtroom as she berated him from the witness stand....
Reyes, who prosecutors said had bragged that he brutally killed Cervantes with a friend so they could sell their souls to the devil, showed little reaction during four days of emotional testimony and grisly photos, and was emotionless during the verdict....
Among other inflammatory evidence, the jury saw graphic photos of heinous injuries including an upside down cross carved on Cervantes' stomach....
The last piece of evidence in the trial were letters from jail in which Reyes said the Devil was in the room directing him to act during the slaying.
"He was standing there, watching me and Victor," the teen wrote in a letter read to jurors Thursday. "It's all good. It's what the Devil asked for."....
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Teen-sentenced-to-life-in-satanic-killing-5951693.php
Trial Begins for Teen Accused in 'Satanic Ritual' Killing - NBC News.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trial-begins-teen-accused-satanic-ritual-killing-n264851
N.C. Church Members Charged With Beating Gay Man to Banish 'Demons'
Five members of the Word of Faith Fellowship face kidnapping and assault charges.
BY Trudy Ring December 11 2014
Five members of an evangelical Christian church in western North Carolina have been charged with kidnapping and assault in connection with an attack on a young gay man, which he says was meant to rid him of “homosexual demons.”
Matthew Fenner, now 21, says that in January 2013, “he was threatened with confinement for two days, slapped, strangled and verbally assaulted” by members of the Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, reports North Carolina’s LGBT outlet QNotes.
In an affidavit he submitted to local law enforcement, Fenner said church members confronted him about being gay, telling him it was disgusting. They then began a ritual called “deliverance,” which, he wrote, “meant extremely rough pushing, loud screaming, and other violent measures intended to ‘break me free of the homosexual demons.’”....
The Word of Faith Fellowship has previously faced other accusations of abuse and cult-like practices. In one such instance, in 2012 another man said church members held him against his will for weeks because he is gay, and the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a hate-crime investigation, but the man then recanted his story. Now, though, he says he was manipulated into recanting and has left the church, according to the newspaper. Fenner has also left the congregation, although his mother and brother remain in the church and testified on its behalf before the grand jury....
http://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/12/11/nc-church-members-charged-beating-gay-man-banish-demons
A Different Kind of Deportation - A Del Rey Oaks man struggles to get his unreal life story recorded before it’s too late.
Thursday, December 11, 2014 by Mark Anderson
Roderick Mackay’s earliest memories are of explosions and urine.
He lived at an orphanage in London, sent there from the squalorous Edinburgh housing project where he was born. His father, fresh off a divorce from his mom, sent him there as he was heading off to fight in World War II....
Sixteen of those small children were loaded on an old banana freighter called the SS Bayano that wasn’t any safer than the shelter. As they were shipped across the Atlantic to Canada, the convoy with them lost an oil tanker and nearly an American destroyer to German torpedoes....
Suddenly his entire family was an ocean away.
He and the others were bussed from Quebec to a group home/school in rural Victoria. When he reached his new home, the Nov. 10, 1941 Victoria Daily Times headline read “‘Orphans of Blitz’ Arrive at Fairbridge School After Hazardous Journey From Britain.”
Life at Fairbridge School proved more than enough to make Oliver Twist blush, and inspired a memoir that recently topped 240 pages. Ritual humiliations, head trauma and lashings all figured in.
Decades later, then-prime minister Gordon Brown invited Mackay and company to England to personally apologize....
All told some 130,000 children were forced from the U.K. to Canada, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Australia.
“Many child migrants were sent overseas by specialist agencies such as the Fairbridge Society, established for the purpose of migrating young children to populate the empire with ‘good, white British stock,’” reports the Child Migrants Trust, which eventually sprang up to help reunite families split by the moves....
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/cover/a-del-rey-oaks-man-struggles-to-get-his-unreal/article_aa366dd8-80c7-11e4-87e0-1b60656e1968.html
GCHQ to help tackle 'dark net' child abuse images 11 December 2014
Intelligence experts and organised crime specialists will join forces to tackle child abuse images on the "dark net", David Cameron has said.
The prime minister said a joint GCHQ and National Crime Agency unit would hunt online paedophiles with the same "effort" used to track terrorists.
Speaking at a London summit, he said online child exploitation existed on an "almost industrial scale" worldwide.
He also unveiled a law to stop adults sending children "sexual" messages....
Mr Cameron said the new unit was part of a drive to remove millions of "sickening and depraved" images from the internet.
The term "dark net" refers to parts of the internet that are hidden and can be hard to access without special software, and Downing Street said the new unit would be able to analyse huge volumes of images....
Mr Cameron said children were being "abused to order" by some international gangs....
Responding to Mr Cameron's comments, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said there were "very serious gaps" in the government's plans because "thousands of cases of abuse are not being followed up by the police".
"We know the National Crime Agency has details of over 20,000 suspected of accessing images of child abuse under Operation Notarise, and yet they have only investigated a tiny proportion of these - and arrested fewer than 1,000," she said....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30426164
Fran’s Day Care/Keller Case http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/frans-day-care/
- Trial Begins for Teen Accused in 'Satanic Ritual' Killing - NBC News
- N.C. Church Members Charged With Beating Gay Man to Banish 'Demons'
- A Different Kind of Deportation - A Del Rey Oaks man struggles to get his unreal life story recorded before it’s too late.
- GCHQ to help tackle 'dark net' child abuse images
Teen sentenced to life in satanic killing
By Brian Rogers December 11, 2014 Houston
Corriann Cervantes' beaming smile and bright eyes lit up a Harris County courtroom Thursday, even though it was just a posterboard-sized photograph that her family brought to show Jose E. Reyes he had not beaten them.
The 15-year-old's aunt, who had just seen Reyes sentenced to life in prison for capital murder in a killing prosecutors said was part of a satanic ritual, made sure the 18-year-old saw the photo on an easel in the center of the courtroom as she berated him from the witness stand....
Reyes, who prosecutors said had bragged that he brutally killed Cervantes with a friend so they could sell their souls to the devil, showed little reaction during four days of emotional testimony and grisly photos, and was emotionless during the verdict....
Among other inflammatory evidence, the jury saw graphic photos of heinous injuries including an upside down cross carved on Cervantes' stomach....
The last piece of evidence in the trial were letters from jail in which Reyes said the Devil was in the room directing him to act during the slaying.
"He was standing there, watching me and Victor," the teen wrote in a letter read to jurors Thursday. "It's all good. It's what the Devil asked for."....
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Teen-sentenced-to-life-in-satanic-killing-5951693.php
Trial Begins for Teen Accused in 'Satanic Ritual' Killing - NBC News.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trial-begins-teen-accused-satanic-ritual-killing-n264851
N.C. Church Members Charged With Beating Gay Man to Banish 'Demons'
Five members of the Word of Faith Fellowship face kidnapping and assault charges.
BY Trudy Ring December 11 2014
Five members of an evangelical Christian church in western North Carolina have been charged with kidnapping and assault in connection with an attack on a young gay man, which he says was meant to rid him of “homosexual demons.”
Matthew Fenner, now 21, says that in January 2013, “he was threatened with confinement for two days, slapped, strangled and verbally assaulted” by members of the Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, reports North Carolina’s LGBT outlet QNotes.
In an affidavit he submitted to local law enforcement, Fenner said church members confronted him about being gay, telling him it was disgusting. They then began a ritual called “deliverance,” which, he wrote, “meant extremely rough pushing, loud screaming, and other violent measures intended to ‘break me free of the homosexual demons.’”....
The Word of Faith Fellowship has previously faced other accusations of abuse and cult-like practices. In one such instance, in 2012 another man said church members held him against his will for weeks because he is gay, and the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a hate-crime investigation, but the man then recanted his story. Now, though, he says he was manipulated into recanting and has left the church, according to the newspaper. Fenner has also left the congregation, although his mother and brother remain in the church and testified on its behalf before the grand jury....
http://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/12/11/nc-church-members-charged-beating-gay-man-banish-demons
A Different Kind of Deportation - A Del Rey Oaks man struggles to get his unreal life story recorded before it’s too late.
Thursday, December 11, 2014 by Mark Anderson
Roderick Mackay’s earliest memories are of explosions and urine.
He lived at an orphanage in London, sent there from the squalorous Edinburgh housing project where he was born. His father, fresh off a divorce from his mom, sent him there as he was heading off to fight in World War II....
Sixteen of those small children were loaded on an old banana freighter called the SS Bayano that wasn’t any safer than the shelter. As they were shipped across the Atlantic to Canada, the convoy with them lost an oil tanker and nearly an American destroyer to German torpedoes....
Suddenly his entire family was an ocean away.
He and the others were bussed from Quebec to a group home/school in rural Victoria. When he reached his new home, the Nov. 10, 1941 Victoria Daily Times headline read “‘Orphans of Blitz’ Arrive at Fairbridge School After Hazardous Journey From Britain.”
Life at Fairbridge School proved more than enough to make Oliver Twist blush, and inspired a memoir that recently topped 240 pages. Ritual humiliations, head trauma and lashings all figured in.
Decades later, then-prime minister Gordon Brown invited Mackay and company to England to personally apologize....
All told some 130,000 children were forced from the U.K. to Canada, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Australia.
“Many child migrants were sent overseas by specialist agencies such as the Fairbridge Society, established for the purpose of migrating young children to populate the empire with ‘good, white British stock,’” reports the Child Migrants Trust, which eventually sprang up to help reunite families split by the moves....
http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/cover/a-del-rey-oaks-man-struggles-to-get-his-unreal/article_aa366dd8-80c7-11e4-87e0-1b60656e1968.html
GCHQ to help tackle 'dark net' child abuse images 11 December 2014
Intelligence experts and organised crime specialists will join forces to tackle child abuse images on the "dark net", David Cameron has said.
The prime minister said a joint GCHQ and National Crime Agency unit would hunt online paedophiles with the same "effort" used to track terrorists.
Speaking at a London summit, he said online child exploitation existed on an "almost industrial scale" worldwide.
He also unveiled a law to stop adults sending children "sexual" messages....
Mr Cameron said the new unit was part of a drive to remove millions of "sickening and depraved" images from the internet.
The term "dark net" refers to parts of the internet that are hidden and can be hard to access without special software, and Downing Street said the new unit would be able to analyse huge volumes of images....
Mr Cameron said children were being "abused to order" by some international gangs....
Responding to Mr Cameron's comments, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said there were "very serious gaps" in the government's plans because "thousands of cases of abuse are not being followed up by the police".
"We know the National Crime Agency has details of over 20,000 suspected of accessing images of child abuse under Operation Notarise, and yet they have only investigated a tiny proportion of these - and arrested fewer than 1,000," she said....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30426164
Fran’s Day Care/Keller Case http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/frans-day-care/
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Here Are The Most Horrific Details From The Senate Torture Report, Read The Senate Torture Report
Here Are The Most Horrific Details From The Senate Torture Report
Nick Wing 12/09/2014
On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited summary of its torture report, revealing horrific details about the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.
Many of the details in the report are sickening and graphic. They are perhaps made only more disturbing by the overarching conclusion that the torture and "enhanced interrogation" employed by the CIA failed to produce the types of significant intelligence that had been used to defend the program in the past.
You can go here to read the unsealed summary of the report, including a section on initial findings and hundreds of pages of declassified documents. Below is a compilation of some of the most abhorrent details from it....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report-details_n_6295396.html
Read The Senate Torture Report Here
The Huffington Post By Paige Lavender
12/09/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report_n_6247726.html
Nick Wing 12/09/2014
On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited summary of its torture report, revealing horrific details about the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.
Many of the details in the report are sickening and graphic. They are perhaps made only more disturbing by the overarching conclusion that the torture and "enhanced interrogation" employed by the CIA failed to produce the types of significant intelligence that had been used to defend the program in the past.
You can go here to read the unsealed summary of the report, including a section on initial findings and hundreds of pages of declassified documents. Below is a compilation of some of the most abhorrent details from it....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report-details_n_6295396.html
Read The Senate Torture Report Here
The Huffington Post By Paige Lavender
12/09/2014
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/senate-torture-report_n_6247726.html
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations, More Than A Quarter Of The World's Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program, Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots
Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI DEC. 9, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.
The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.
In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”
....The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
....The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”
....The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time, before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.
Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html
More Than A Quarter Of The World's Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program 12/09/2014
....According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA's controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-countries_n_6297832.html
Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots
After waterboarding, 9/11 mastermind told interrogators what ‘he thought they wanted to hear’ By Michael Isikoff 12/9/14
After days of brutal interrogations, in which he was slammed against walls, slapped in the gut, and repeatedly waterboarded — “near drownings” that caused him to vomit — 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogators he was “ready to talk.”
The story he told in March 2003: He had sent an al-Qaida operative to Montana to recruit African-Americans for terrorist attacks inside the U.S. The alarming new claim sent FBI agents scrambling to find evidence of the plot, but they came up with nothing.
And for good reason: KSM later admitted he had fabricated the story — that because he was being subjected to such rough measures, he “simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear,” according to an internal agency cable quoted in the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday by the panel’s chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The invented Montana plot is only one example of multiple wild-goose chases and other false leads that were produced by the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — what President Barack Obama himself has labeled “torture” — in the years after 9/11, according to the 489-page Senate report.
“The methods in question ... regularly resulted in fabricated information,” the report states in its key findings....
Many of the techniques laid out in the report have been publicly known for years — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary and temperature manipulation, wall slamming and, of course, waterboarding, a practice dating back to the Spanish Inquisition in which subjects are strapped down and doused with water to simulate the experience of drowning....
A CIA prison in Afghanistan (known as the Salt Pit but referred to as COBALT in the report) was described in CIA cables as a “dungeon” where hooded prisoners were kept in complete darkness and shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music — and only a bucket to use for human waste. One of the detainees died from hypothermia after being left naked from the waist down....
The committee report examined 20 “case studies” in which agency officials had claimed they had thwarted plots or rounded up suspects based on aggressive interrogations. These assertions, the panel found, were “inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.”....
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-report-finds-cia-torture-produced--fabricated--intel-and-thwarted-no-plots---232012393.html
By MARK MAZZETTI DEC. 9, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday issued a sweeping indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, drawing on millions of internal C.I.A. documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.
The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that C.I.A. officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.
In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”
....The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
....The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”
....The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time, before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.
Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html
More Than A Quarter Of The World's Countries Helped The CIA Run Its Torture Program 12/09/2014
....According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA's controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-countries_n_6297832.html
Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots
After waterboarding, 9/11 mastermind told interrogators what ‘he thought they wanted to hear’ By Michael Isikoff 12/9/14
After days of brutal interrogations, in which he was slammed against walls, slapped in the gut, and repeatedly waterboarded — “near drownings” that caused him to vomit — 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told his CIA interrogators he was “ready to talk.”
The story he told in March 2003: He had sent an al-Qaida operative to Montana to recruit African-Americans for terrorist attacks inside the U.S. The alarming new claim sent FBI agents scrambling to find evidence of the plot, but they came up with nothing.
And for good reason: KSM later admitted he had fabricated the story — that because he was being subjected to such rough measures, he “simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear,” according to an internal agency cable quoted in the mammoth Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday by the panel’s chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The invented Montana plot is only one example of multiple wild-goose chases and other false leads that were produced by the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” — what President Barack Obama himself has labeled “torture” — in the years after 9/11, according to the 489-page Senate report.
“The methods in question ... regularly resulted in fabricated information,” the report states in its key findings....
Many of the techniques laid out in the report have been publicly known for years — forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary and temperature manipulation, wall slamming and, of course, waterboarding, a practice dating back to the Spanish Inquisition in which subjects are strapped down and doused with water to simulate the experience of drowning....
A CIA prison in Afghanistan (known as the Salt Pit but referred to as COBALT in the report) was described in CIA cables as a “dungeon” where hooded prisoners were kept in complete darkness and shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music — and only a bucket to use for human waste. One of the detainees died from hypothermia after being left naked from the waist down....
The committee report examined 20 “case studies” in which agency officials had claimed they had thwarted plots or rounded up suspects based on aggressive interrogations. These assertions, the panel found, were “inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA’s own records.”....
https://news.yahoo.com/senate-report-finds-cia-torture-produced--fabricated--intel-and-thwarted-no-plots---232012393.html
Monday, December 8, 2014
CIA Torture Report: Chinese Communist Methods, Waterboarding, Sleep deprivation, Exposure to cold, Physical isolation, Sensory deprivation, Physical degradation
"They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation."
"It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs."
also: Mind Control Documents & Links
Congress Clashes Over Release Of CIA Torture Report
December 08, 2014 Lauren Hodges
Leaders on Capitol Hill are at odds regarding a report on CIA methods — including torture — used to extract information in the so-called war on terror.
Chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been fighting for the release of her 480-page executive summary of the report since April of this year, and it finally was scheduled for a reveal this week....
NPR's Sam Sanders reported Sunday that "officials who've seen the report say it details sleep deprivation, confinement and waterboarding."
On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR's Mara Liasson spoke with host Rachel Martin about the Obama administration's view of the release.
"The administration supports releasing the report. And the State Department says Kerry told Feinstein that the timing of the release was her choice. But the administration is concerned about how the report would affect ongoing efforts against ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group, and the safety of Americans who are being held hostage around the world. And it wants those issues to be taken into account."....
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/07/369262235/congress-clashes-over-release-of-cia-torture-report
U.S. on alert for release of report on CIA's use of torture
The Canadian Press By Alexander Panetta December 8, 2014
WASHINGTON - For months, there's been a battle in the shadows of Washington over a report on torture by the CIA.
The covert conflict saw the CIA spy on Congress. Intelligence officials quietly argued against the report's release, on the basis that it would endanger American lives. The White House eventually stepped in, mediating negotiations about what to include — and what to black out.
It's being made public now.
A congressional committee that studied the use of torture during the Bush era is poised Tuesday to release a 480-page executive summary of its findings, a heavily scrutinized and edited synopsis of a broader 6,000-page document compiled by a Senate panel....
The CIA admitted to snooping on Senate staffers' computers while they prepared the report. At first, the agency denied accusations of domestic espionage against the elected body. Eventually, it confessed and apologized, ascribing its actions to the belief that staffers were consulting unauthorized documents.
Still, that failed to mollify members of Congress. Several called for the CIA director's resignation for what they described as a violation of the country's basic democratic order....
The report into the CIA comes six years after the Senate released a study into the military — and offered a glimpse into how its interrogation techniques were developed after 9-11.
It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.
The Chinese method came to be rebranded as Biderman's Principles, after the academic who researched the Korean War practice. He boiled it down to an eight-step program: physical isolation, followed by sensory deprivation, exhaustion and discomfort, threats, occasional rewards, powerlessness, physical degradation, and the enforcement of arbitrary rules.
According to the 2008 Senate report, the Navy trainers handed out a chart on those coercive techniques to the personnel at Guantanamo Bay.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-braces-release-long-awaited-report-cias-torture-221653528.html
CIA torture report: US raises security ahead of release 8 December 2014
The report appears to conclude CIA officials lied about the programme to Bush administration officials....
The full 6,000-page report, produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee, remains classified.
The 480-page summary is being released by Democrats on the panel.
President Barack Obama halted the CIA interrogation programme when he took office in 2009, and has acknowledged that the methods used to question al-Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture.
During the presidency of George W Bush, the CIA operation against al-Qaeda - known internally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation - saw as many as 100 suspected terrorists held in "black sites" outside the US.
Analysis: Jon Sopel, BBC North America editor
What more can we learn about the CIA's interrogation programme from this heavily redacted report? Based on leaks, Tuesday's release seems to answer three major questions:
First. Were the interrogation methods - torture if you like - more extensive and more brutal than previously admitted? It looks like the conclusion is yes.
Second. Did these interrogation techniques deliver life-saving intelligence to the US? That answer appears to be no.
Third. Were CIA officials at the time honest with the White House on what the programme was getting up to? Again, no....
They were interrogated using methods such as waterboarding, slapping, humiliation, exposure to cold, and sleep deprivation....
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30383924
Sexual threats, other CIA methods detailed in Senate report
By Mark Hosenball and Jeff Mason WASHINGTON Mon Dec 8, 2014
(Reuters) - Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency's anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.
The report, which the committee's majority Democrats are expected to release on Tuesday, describes how senior al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened by his interrogators with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on Nashiri.
In another instance, the report documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said....
The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA's "Rendition, Detention and Interrogation" program, which Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.
The committee's bottom-line conclusion is that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means.
That conclusion is strongly disputed by many intelligence and counter-terrorism officials, who say that there is no question such interrogations led to major breakthroughs....
While the Justice Department had authorized techniques like sleep deprivation, controls and supervision of such methods were sometimes lax when the CIA began detaining and interrogating militants starting in August 2002, said sources familiar with the interrogation program.
A more rigorous system of monitoring how the techniques were used was in place by early 2003, the sources said....
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-usa-cia-torture-idUKKBN0JM24I20141208
Mind Control Documents & Links
proof mk-ultra exists
This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case, Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Texas judge recommends against innocence finding for ex-day care operators in sex abuse case
Texas judge recommends against innocence finding for ex-day care operators in sex abuse case
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS December 02, 2014
AUSTIN, Texas — A judge in Austin has recommended against a finding of innocence for two ex-day care owners who spent 21 years imprisoned on a child sex abuse conviction.
Dan and Fran Keller, who divorced in prison, seek exoneration in a case prosecutors say involved child abuse and satanic rituals. The Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child involving a 3-year-old girl.
The Kellers were released on bond last year when the physical evidence was found to be a mistake by an examining physician.
Judge Wilford Flowers, who presided over the trial, on Monday ruled the Kellers again failed to provide proof of innocence. It's the third such decision by Flowers. His recommendation goes to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
An attorney for the Kellers plans a rebuttal.
http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/d0ad50a4181c4ddea5fb1a130e9fe9d1/TX--Ritual-Abuse-Conviction-Challenged/
Information on the Keller/Fran’s Day Care Case http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/frans-day-care/
AUSTIN, Texas — A judge in Austin has recommended against a finding of innocence for two ex-day care owners who spent 21 years imprisoned on a child sex abuse conviction.
Dan and Fran Keller, who divorced in prison, seek exoneration in a case prosecutors say involved child abuse and satanic rituals. The Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child involving a 3-year-old girl.
The Kellers were released on bond last year when the physical evidence was found to be a mistake by an examining physician.
Judge Wilford Flowers, who presided over the trial, on Monday ruled the Kellers again failed to provide proof of innocence. It's the third such decision by Flowers. His recommendation goes to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
An attorney for the Kellers plans a rebuttal.
http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/d0ad50a4181c4ddea5fb1a130e9fe9d1/TX--Ritual-Abuse-Conviction-Challenged/
Information on the Keller/Fran’s Day Care Case http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/frans-day-care/
Friday, December 5, 2014
Sandusky’s Son Speaks About Abusive Childhood, Jimmy Savile's former chauffeur 'Ugli' Ray Teret found guilty of seven rapes and 11 indecent assaults
Sandusky’s Son Speaks About Abusive Childhood
December 5, 2014 By Jim Melwert
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — One of the most prominent victims from one of the most prominent sexual abuse cases in recent memory was a keynote speaker today at a conference on investigating child sex abuse.
Matt Sandusky, the adopted son of Jerry Sandusky, and also one his many victims, shared his story with a group of hundreds — prosecutors, investigators, social workers, and therapists....
He also talked about how hard it was for him to coming forward, knowing he’d lose his adoptive family, and the anger directed at him and his children.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/12/05/sanduskys-son-speaks-on-abusive-childhood/
Sandusky's adopted son speaks out on abusive childhood
AP DEC 05, 2014
PHILADELPHIA -- Jerry Sandusky's adopted son Matt spoke out Friday about his two abusive fathers and called sexual abuse the ''single worst health epidemic that children face.''
Matt Sandusky, speaking to about 200 people at a conference in Philadelphia on child abuse intervention, said the public must work harder to end child sexual abuse.
''I will work my butt off to create a society that is safe and caring for survivors of child sexual abuse,'' he said. '' ... This is the single worst health epidemic that children face.''
Sandusky, who founded a nonprofit to raise awareness about child sexual abuse, spoke of his introduction to abuse at a young age....
Matt Sandusky met Jerry Sandusky through the former Penn State assistant football coach's youth charity. He said perpetrators ''groom'' their family and victims....
http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/story/jerry-sandusky-abuse-scandal-adopted-son-speaks-out-on-childhood-abuse-120514
Jimmy Savile's former chauffeur 'Ugli' Ray Teret found guilty of seven rapes and 11 indecent assaults on star-struck girls as young as 13
Ex-Radio Caroline DJ was mentored by Savile in early days of his career
Court heard he followed paedophile TV star around 'like a shadow'
He denied 18 counts of rape, two sexual assaults and 12 indecent assaults
Jury convict him of 7 rapes and 11 indecent assaults after deliberations
11 victims aged 13 to 15 and offences took place between 1962 and 1978
Teret played down links to Savile who he once described as 'a genius'
But prosecutors said the pair preyed on young girl they met at disco
Police officer in case said Teret was a 'devious, manipulative predator'
His lawyer urges judge not to sentence him for the rest of his life
By Richard Spillett 5 December 2014
A DJ friend of Jimmy Savile has been convicted of a catalogue of historical sex offences against 'star-struck' girls as young as 13.
Ex-Radio Caroline DJ Ray Teret, 73, used his celebrity status in the Manchester club scene in the 1960s and 1970s to prey on many of his victims.
Teret - known as 'Ugli Ray' - was mentored by Savile in the early days of his career and was described as following him around 'like a shadow', Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court heard.
Teret, of Altrincham, Greater Manchester, told the jury he had no interest in underage girls, despite a previous conviction for sexual intercourse with a 15-year-old girl in 1999, an offence he continues to deny.
He denied 18 rapes, two other serious sexual assaults, one attempted rape, 12 indecent assaults and one count of indecency with a child.
After more 60 hours of deliberations, he was convicted of seven rapes and 11 indecent assaults. He was cleared of the other charges....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2862279/Jimmy-Savile-s-former-chauffeur-Ray-Teret-guilty-string-rapes-sex-attacks-children-1960s-70s.html
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Child abuse royal commission: Victim recounts being raped during ritual at Satyananda Yoga Ashram
- Child abuse royal commission: victim recounts being raped during ritual at Satyananda Yoga Ashram
- Child abuse royal commission: Mindset of NSW yoga retreat 'as dangerous as ever', witness tells hearing
- Child abuse royal commission: Yoga leader told children sex acts would aid 'spiritual growth'
"At the ashram, family relationships were broken down and parents separated from their children, who were routinely beaten, sexually abused and deprived of adequate medical treatment and food."
Child abuse royal commission: victim recounts being raped during ritual at Satyananda Yoga Ashram
By Claire Aird December 4, 2014
A young girl was raped by the head of a global yoga movement, Satyananda Sawaswati, on his visit to a New South Wales ashram, an inquiry has heard.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing into the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain on the state's central coast was also told a group of swamis abused the girl in a ritual setting.
The girl, known as APR in the hearing, moved to the ashram with her mother, father and sister in the late 1970s.
The abuse started when she was three years old.
"The ashram was the kind of place that if you scream, no-one comes," she said.
At the ashram, family relationships were broken down and parents separated from their children, who were routinely beaten, sexually abused and deprived of adequate medical treatment and food.
Attendees were referred to as "Innamtes" by the head of the movement, handed their assets to the ashram, shaved their heads, and wore orange robes.
"I feel the entire ashram was groomed into a place of powerlessness," APR said....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-04/victim-recounts-being-raped-during-ritual-at-satyananda-ashram/5945010
Child abuse royal commission: Mindset of NSW yoga retreat 'as dangerous as ever', witness tells hearing
By Nicole Chettle December 3, 2014
A former resident of Australia's oldest yoga ashram has received applause after delivering a passionate call for justice at the child sexual abuse royal commission in Sydney.
The commission has been looking at the handling of 11 complaints made against former spiritual leader Swami Akhandananda Saraswati over the past 40 years, relating to abuse that happened in the 1970s and '80s.
The issue came to a head around Easter this year when the Satyananda Yoga Ashram in New South Wales sent an email to former members detailing a "healing ceremony" that formed part of its 40th anniversary commemorations.
One woman known as APK, who, along with her sister, endured years of physical and sexual abuse....
Akhandananda was convicted on charges of indecency and jailed in 1989, but his conviction was overturned in 1991. He died in 1997....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-03/child-abuse-royal-commission-nsw-yoga-retreat/5938936
Child abuse royal commission: Yoga leader told children sex acts would aid 'spiritual growth'
By Brad Ryan, Nicole Chettle and Emily Bourke December 2, 2014
The spiritual leader of a New South Wales yoga retreat sexually abused child residents after summoning them to a hut and asking them for a massage, an inquiry has heard.
Children were also allegedly directed to travel around Australia with the man, known as Swami Akhandananda Saraswati, and perform sexual acts in his bed.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has opened its 21st case study, focused on the the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain in the hinterland of the New South Wales central coast.
The commission is examining allegations from the 1970s and 1980s involving the ashram's former leader, Akhandananda, who was jailed for sex offences in the late 1980s but had his conviction overturned before his death in 1997.
Counsel assisting the commission, Peggy Dwyer, said nine alleged victims would give evidence of sexual and physical abuse, and statements would be tendered by another two.
"I expect that the royal commission will hear evidence that this sexual abuse often occurred in the hut that Akhandananda shared with [fellow swami] Shishy," Ms Dwyer told the Sydney hearing....
Akhandananda was jailed in 1989 for sexually abusing four teenage girls whilst they were residing at the ashram, including Ms Buchanan.
She said she felt "victimised all over again" when Akhandananda's conviction was overturned on appeal and he was released after serving 14 months in prison....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-02/yoga-leader-told-children-sex-acts-would-aid-spiritual-growth/5931610
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
20th Bill Cosby accuser comes forward, Bill Cosby Sued For Alleged Sexual Assault, DID valid disorder found around the globe - empirical overview
- Bill Cosby Sued For Alleged Sexual Assault of Teenager in 1970s
- More women detail sex abuse claims against Bill Cosby
- Dissociative identity disorder: An empirical overview
"Existing data show DID (dissociative identity disorder formerly called MPD) as a complex, valid and not uncommon disorder, associated with developmental and cultural variables, that is amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention....Because the aetiology of DID is associated with childhood relational trauma, the discomfort caused by studying DID may serve as a potent disincentive to its investigation.... to retain a comforting denial of both the occurrence of abuse and its disabling psychiatric legacy....affects approximately 1% of the general population."
- USC study challenges traditional data: points to higher rates of child abuse
"one in 20 children in California are victims of substantiated abuse or neglect before they reach their fifth birthday."
Bill Cosby Sued For Alleged Sexual Assault of Teenager in 1970s
By Maria Elena Fernandez and Andrew Blankstein December 3, 2014
A 55-year-old woman sued comedian Bill Cosby on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming sexual battery and infliction of emotional distress for allegedly molesting her in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion when she was 15 years old.
According to the complaint, Judy Huth and a friend, who was 16 at the time, met Cosby at an outdoor film set at Lacy Park in Los Angeles County in 1974 and accepted an invitation to socialize with him at a tennis club the following week. When they got together, the lawsuit alleges, they played billiards and Cosby served them alcoholic beverages....
"When Plaintiff emerged from the bathroom, she found COSBY sitting on the bed," the suit states. "He asked her to sit beside him. He then proceeded to sexually molest her by attempting to put his hand down her pants, and then taking her hand in his hand and performing a sex act on himself without her consent." ....
In recent weeks, 20 other women have come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assault — charges which began to surface a decade ago when the former director of operations for Temple's women's basketball team sued him for drugging her and assaulting her in 2004.
The comedian has not been criminally charged and many of the claims are so old, they are barred by statutes of limitations.
Huth's lawsuit, however, contends that she became aware of the serious effect the abuse had on her within the past three years. California law allows victims of sex abuse when they were minors to bring a claim after adulthood if they discover later in life that they suffered psychological injuries as a result of the abuse....
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/bill-cosby-scandal/bill-cosby-sued-alleged-sexual-assault-teenager-1970s-n260366
More women detail sex abuse claims against Bill Cosby
By Piya Sinha-Roy and Eric Kelsey, Reuters December 3, 2014 Los Angeles
20th Bill Cosby accuser comes forward
Three women on Wednesday came together and detailed allegations that comedian Bill Cosby sexually abused and groped them decades ago, a day after Cosby was sued by a woman who said he molested her when she was a teenager in 1974.
More than a dozen women have publicly accused the comedian of sexual abuse as far back as the 1960s as the allegations have scuttled Cosby's television projects and led to cancellations of numerous comedy performances, including two gigs in suburban New York that were scheduled for Saturday.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-bill-cosby-20141203-story.html
Dissociative identity disorder: An empirical overview
Martin J Dorahy, Bethany L Brand, Vedat Sar, Christa Krüger, Pam Stavropoulos, Alfonso MartÃnez-Taboas, Roberto Lewis-Fernández, Warwick Middleton, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2014, Vol. 48(5) 402–417 DOI: 10.1177/0004867414527523
Methods:
The overview is limited to DID-specific research in which one or more of the following conditions are met: (i) a sample of participants with DID was systematically investigated, (ii) psychometrically-sound measures were utilised, (iii) comparisons were made with other samples, (iv) DID was differentiated from other disorders, including other dissociative disorders, (v) extraneous variables were controlled or (vi) DID diagnosis was confirmed. Following an examination of challenges to research, data are organised around the validity and phenomenology of DID, its aetiology and epidemiology, the neurobiological and cognitive correlates of the disorder, and finally its treatment.
Results:
DID was found to be a complex yet valid disorder across a range of markers. It can be accurately discriminated from other disorders, especially when structured diagnostic interviews assess identity alterations and amnesia. DID is aetiologically associated with a complex combination of developmental and cultural factors, including severe childhood relational trauma. The prevalence of DID appears highest in emergency psychiatric settings and affects approximately 1% of the general population. Psychobiological studies are beginning to identify clear correlates of DID associated with diverse brain areas and cognitive functions. They are also providing an understanding of the potential metacognitive origins of amnesia. Phase-oriented empirically-guided treatments are emerging for DID.
Conclusions:
The empirical literature on DID is accumulating, although some areas remain under-investigated. Existing data show DID as a complex, valid and not uncommon disorder, associated with developmental and cultural variables, that is amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention....
Because the aetiology of DID is associated with childhood relational trauma, the discomfort caused by studying DID may serve as a potent disincentive to its investigation. Thus avoiding study of DID protects mainstream social institutions – at the expense of the children who are violated by them – as well as enabling researchers, clinicians and the public to retain a comforting denial of both the occurrence of abuse and its disabling psychiatric legacy. Hence avoidance of the central issues associated with DID operates not only in the patient, but in society at large....
Both universal and cultural processes influence the development and phenomenology of DID (Dorahy, 2001a). Dissociation and DD can be found in all cultural settings (e.g. Spiegel et al., 2013; Stein et al., 2013). DID has been documented in Turkey, Puerto Rico, Scandinavia, Japan, Canada, Australia, the USA, the Philippines, Ireland, the UK and Argentina, among many other cultural and geographical contexts (Rhoades and Sar, 2005)....
Every study that has systematically examined aetiology has found that antecedent severe, chronic childhood trauma is present in the histories of almost all individuals with DID....
It is important to consider health costs associated with DID. A Canadian treatment study of DID concluded that annual costs dropped from C$75,000 to C$36,000 in the 3 years after treatment for DID (Ross and Dua, 1993). This and other studies document considerable cost savings even for those who had been chronically ill before being appropriately treated for DID (Lloyd, 2011)....
Conclusion
The empirical literature on DID emerging over the past 30 years shows that, beyond the rhetoric and controversy, DID is a valid disorder characterised by amnesia, identity confusion and coexistence of dissociative identities which can be differentiated from other psychiatric disorders as well as from feigned presentations of DID. Characteristic features include a complex array of co-existing symptoms associated with psychosis, mood, anxiety, affect regulation and personality functioning. A mix of subtle and overt developmental, interpersonal and cultural drivers produce DID, with childhood attachment-based trauma appearing to be a universal factor, while social idioms of self produce components of cultural specificity.
DID is found around the globe in almost every culture in which researchers have carefully assessed for the range of dissociative symptoms. Orbitofrontal, cortico-limbic and temporal anomalies are evident in DID, with different neurobiological profiles found across identities than those in simulation....
http://anp.sagepub.com/content/48/5/402.full.pdf+html
USC study challenges traditional data: points to higher rates of child abuse
Andrea Gardner
New research from the University of Southern California's Children’s Data Network shows that approximately one in 20 children in California are victims of substantiated abuse or neglect before they reach their fifth birthday.
The study separately found that about 1 in 7 California children are reported to county Child Protective Services agencies over suspected abuse before they reach age 5....
http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/12/03/48447/usc-study-challenges-traditional-data-points-to-hi/
- More women detail sex abuse claims against Bill Cosby
- Dissociative identity disorder: An empirical overview
"Existing data show DID (dissociative identity disorder formerly called MPD) as a complex, valid and not uncommon disorder, associated with developmental and cultural variables, that is amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention....Because the aetiology of DID is associated with childhood relational trauma, the discomfort caused by studying DID may serve as a potent disincentive to its investigation.... to retain a comforting denial of both the occurrence of abuse and its disabling psychiatric legacy....affects approximately 1% of the general population."
- USC study challenges traditional data: points to higher rates of child abuse
"one in 20 children in California are victims of substantiated abuse or neglect before they reach their fifth birthday."
Bill Cosby Sued For Alleged Sexual Assault of Teenager in 1970s
By Maria Elena Fernandez and Andrew Blankstein December 3, 2014
A 55-year-old woman sued comedian Bill Cosby on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming sexual battery and infliction of emotional distress for allegedly molesting her in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion when she was 15 years old.
According to the complaint, Judy Huth and a friend, who was 16 at the time, met Cosby at an outdoor film set at Lacy Park in Los Angeles County in 1974 and accepted an invitation to socialize with him at a tennis club the following week. When they got together, the lawsuit alleges, they played billiards and Cosby served them alcoholic beverages....
"When Plaintiff emerged from the bathroom, she found COSBY sitting on the bed," the suit states. "He asked her to sit beside him. He then proceeded to sexually molest her by attempting to put his hand down her pants, and then taking her hand in his hand and performing a sex act on himself without her consent." ....
In recent weeks, 20 other women have come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assault — charges which began to surface a decade ago when the former director of operations for Temple's women's basketball team sued him for drugging her and assaulting her in 2004.
The comedian has not been criminally charged and many of the claims are so old, they are barred by statutes of limitations.
Huth's lawsuit, however, contends that she became aware of the serious effect the abuse had on her within the past three years. California law allows victims of sex abuse when they were minors to bring a claim after adulthood if they discover later in life that they suffered psychological injuries as a result of the abuse....
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/bill-cosby-scandal/bill-cosby-sued-alleged-sexual-assault-teenager-1970s-n260366
More women detail sex abuse claims against Bill Cosby
By Piya Sinha-Roy and Eric Kelsey, Reuters December 3, 2014 Los Angeles
20th Bill Cosby accuser comes forward
Three women on Wednesday came together and detailed allegations that comedian Bill Cosby sexually abused and groped them decades ago, a day after Cosby was sued by a woman who said he molested her when she was a teenager in 1974.
More than a dozen women have publicly accused the comedian of sexual abuse as far back as the 1960s as the allegations have scuttled Cosby's television projects and led to cancellations of numerous comedy performances, including two gigs in suburban New York that were scheduled for Saturday.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-bill-cosby-20141203-story.html
Dissociative identity disorder: An empirical overview
Martin J Dorahy, Bethany L Brand, Vedat Sar, Christa Krüger, Pam Stavropoulos, Alfonso MartÃnez-Taboas, Roberto Lewis-Fernández, Warwick Middleton, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2014, Vol. 48(5) 402–417 DOI: 10.1177/0004867414527523
Methods:
The overview is limited to DID-specific research in which one or more of the following conditions are met: (i) a sample of participants with DID was systematically investigated, (ii) psychometrically-sound measures were utilised, (iii) comparisons were made with other samples, (iv) DID was differentiated from other disorders, including other dissociative disorders, (v) extraneous variables were controlled or (vi) DID diagnosis was confirmed. Following an examination of challenges to research, data are organised around the validity and phenomenology of DID, its aetiology and epidemiology, the neurobiological and cognitive correlates of the disorder, and finally its treatment.
Results:
DID was found to be a complex yet valid disorder across a range of markers. It can be accurately discriminated from other disorders, especially when structured diagnostic interviews assess identity alterations and amnesia. DID is aetiologically associated with a complex combination of developmental and cultural factors, including severe childhood relational trauma. The prevalence of DID appears highest in emergency psychiatric settings and affects approximately 1% of the general population. Psychobiological studies are beginning to identify clear correlates of DID associated with diverse brain areas and cognitive functions. They are also providing an understanding of the potential metacognitive origins of amnesia. Phase-oriented empirically-guided treatments are emerging for DID.
Conclusions:
The empirical literature on DID is accumulating, although some areas remain under-investigated. Existing data show DID as a complex, valid and not uncommon disorder, associated with developmental and cultural variables, that is amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention....
Because the aetiology of DID is associated with childhood relational trauma, the discomfort caused by studying DID may serve as a potent disincentive to its investigation. Thus avoiding study of DID protects mainstream social institutions – at the expense of the children who are violated by them – as well as enabling researchers, clinicians and the public to retain a comforting denial of both the occurrence of abuse and its disabling psychiatric legacy. Hence avoidance of the central issues associated with DID operates not only in the patient, but in society at large....
Both universal and cultural processes influence the development and phenomenology of DID (Dorahy, 2001a). Dissociation and DD can be found in all cultural settings (e.g. Spiegel et al., 2013; Stein et al., 2013). DID has been documented in Turkey, Puerto Rico, Scandinavia, Japan, Canada, Australia, the USA, the Philippines, Ireland, the UK and Argentina, among many other cultural and geographical contexts (Rhoades and Sar, 2005)....
Every study that has systematically examined aetiology has found that antecedent severe, chronic childhood trauma is present in the histories of almost all individuals with DID....
It is important to consider health costs associated with DID. A Canadian treatment study of DID concluded that annual costs dropped from C$75,000 to C$36,000 in the 3 years after treatment for DID (Ross and Dua, 1993). This and other studies document considerable cost savings even for those who had been chronically ill before being appropriately treated for DID (Lloyd, 2011)....
Conclusion
The empirical literature on DID emerging over the past 30 years shows that, beyond the rhetoric and controversy, DID is a valid disorder characterised by amnesia, identity confusion and coexistence of dissociative identities which can be differentiated from other psychiatric disorders as well as from feigned presentations of DID. Characteristic features include a complex array of co-existing symptoms associated with psychosis, mood, anxiety, affect regulation and personality functioning. A mix of subtle and overt developmental, interpersonal and cultural drivers produce DID, with childhood attachment-based trauma appearing to be a universal factor, while social idioms of self produce components of cultural specificity.
DID is found around the globe in almost every culture in which researchers have carefully assessed for the range of dissociative symptoms. Orbitofrontal, cortico-limbic and temporal anomalies are evident in DID, with different neurobiological profiles found across identities than those in simulation....
http://anp.sagepub.com/content/48/5/402.full.pdf+html
USC study challenges traditional data: points to higher rates of child abuse
Andrea Gardner
New research from the University of Southern California's Children’s Data Network shows that approximately one in 20 children in California are victims of substantiated abuse or neglect before they reach their fifth birthday.
The study separately found that about 1 in 7 California children are reported to county Child Protective Services agencies over suspected abuse before they reach age 5....
http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/12/03/48447/usc-study-challenges-traditional-data-points-to-hi/
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Pedophile who ran children's homes, Victim trafficked to more than 200 men, Could be between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK
John Allen jailed for child abuse at Wrexham care homes
1 December 2014
A paedophile who ran children's homes in Wrexham has been jailed for life for sexually assaulting youngsters in a campaign of abuse spanning decades.
John Allen, 73, of Needham Market, Suffolk, had denied 40 counts of sex abuse against 19 boys and one girl in the late 1960s up to the early 1990s.
He was sentenced at Mold Crown Court on Monday after being convicted of 33 charges last week.
The judge ordered Allen must serve a minimum of 11 years in jail....
He set up the Bryn Alyn Community, which was to become one of the UK's largest providers of residential care, providing accommodation for children sent from about a dozen local authorities.
During the trial, which began in early October, the jury was told of Allen's previous conviction in 1995 for six counts of indecent assault involving repeated abuse of six boys dating from the 1970s....
In an interview with BBC Wales, he explained how Allen had groomed him and gave him gifts before he abused him.
During sentencing, Mr Justice Openshaw said that the system of supervising and monitoring of Bryn Alyn was at the time wholly inadequate, boys did not complain because they knew it was quite pointless to do so, and that "gave the defendant the belief that he was untouchable".
He went on to say that there was a common theme of Allen targeting boys who were more susceptible to grooming with payments and presents given as "inducements" or to "keep them quiet"....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-30268731
Sexual exploitation victim 'trafficked to more than 200 men'
29 November 2014
A woman says she was trafficked to more than 200 men for sex from the age of 14.
The victim from Shropshire, who wanted to remain anonymous, told BBC WM most attacks happened in Stratford Road and Ladypool Road in Birmingham....
Earlier this week a Birmingham City Council report said at least 132 children in the city were suffering from or were vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The anonymous victim said she was taken to locations across Shropshire and the West Midlands.
She said she met the traffickers through a group of younger men who would take her to cafes to meet customers and discuss payments.
She said the men who abused here were generally older - the oldest was in his 80s - and that if she did not comply with the traffickers' demands, she was beaten with a metal bar or belt....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-30241996
Slavery levels in UK 'higher than thought' 29 November 2014
There could be between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, higher than previous figures, analysis for the Home Office suggests.
Modern slavery victims are said to include women forced into prostitution, "imprisoned" domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.
The figure for 2013 is the first time the government has made an official estimate of the scale of the problem....
Data from the National Crime Agency's (NCA) Human Trafficking Centre last year put the number of slavery victims in the UK at 2,744....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30255084
1 December 2014
A paedophile who ran children's homes in Wrexham has been jailed for life for sexually assaulting youngsters in a campaign of abuse spanning decades.
John Allen, 73, of Needham Market, Suffolk, had denied 40 counts of sex abuse against 19 boys and one girl in the late 1960s up to the early 1990s.
He was sentenced at Mold Crown Court on Monday after being convicted of 33 charges last week.
The judge ordered Allen must serve a minimum of 11 years in jail....
He set up the Bryn Alyn Community, which was to become one of the UK's largest providers of residential care, providing accommodation for children sent from about a dozen local authorities.
During the trial, which began in early October, the jury was told of Allen's previous conviction in 1995 for six counts of indecent assault involving repeated abuse of six boys dating from the 1970s....
In an interview with BBC Wales, he explained how Allen had groomed him and gave him gifts before he abused him.
During sentencing, Mr Justice Openshaw said that the system of supervising and monitoring of Bryn Alyn was at the time wholly inadequate, boys did not complain because they knew it was quite pointless to do so, and that "gave the defendant the belief that he was untouchable".
He went on to say that there was a common theme of Allen targeting boys who were more susceptible to grooming with payments and presents given as "inducements" or to "keep them quiet"....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-30268731
Sexual exploitation victim 'trafficked to more than 200 men'
29 November 2014
A woman says she was trafficked to more than 200 men for sex from the age of 14.
The victim from Shropshire, who wanted to remain anonymous, told BBC WM most attacks happened in Stratford Road and Ladypool Road in Birmingham....
Earlier this week a Birmingham City Council report said at least 132 children in the city were suffering from or were vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The anonymous victim said she was taken to locations across Shropshire and the West Midlands.
She said she met the traffickers through a group of younger men who would take her to cafes to meet customers and discuss payments.
She said the men who abused here were generally older - the oldest was in his 80s - and that if she did not comply with the traffickers' demands, she was beaten with a metal bar or belt....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-30241996
Slavery levels in UK 'higher than thought' 29 November 2014
There could be between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK, higher than previous figures, analysis for the Home Office suggests.
Modern slavery victims are said to include women forced into prostitution, "imprisoned" domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.
The figure for 2013 is the first time the government has made an official estimate of the scale of the problem....
Data from the National Crime Agency's (NCA) Human Trafficking Centre last year put the number of slavery victims in the UK at 2,744....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30255084
Monday, December 1, 2014
Jehovah's Witnesses under fire from former congregants who say child sex abuse was hushed, See Haunting Photos of the Sites of Child Abuse
Jehovah's Witnesses under fire from former congregants who say child sex abuse was hushed
$10.5 Million Lawsuit Against Jehovah's Witnesses Organizations Velicia Alston, who says she was molested as a child, wants to change the way Jehovah's Witnesses' leadership responds to child sexual abuse.
By Aimee Green December 01, 2014
Two people who say that as children they were sexually abused by a leader in a Hillsboro Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation filed a $10.5 million lawsuit Monday – among the first in Oregon to accuse the religious organization of hiding decades of sexual abuse.
Attorneys for Velicia Alston, 39, and an unnamed man said the Jehovah’s Witnesses leadership continues to cover up sexual abuse against children by leaders. They say it is more than a decade behind other organizations, such as the Catholic Church, that have been forced to address their problems through many years of civil litigation.
“There is a crisis of silence in the Jehovah's Witness organization," said Irwin Zalkin, one of several attorneys representing Alston and the man. Zalkin described the religious organization as "more concerned about protecting its reputation than it is about protecting its children."
For example, Zalkin said the seven men who make up the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Governing Body have a policy requiring a confession from the perpetrator or two eyewitnesses to the abuse before leaders will take any action.
“Even if they do disfellowship a perpetrator, they don’t tell the congregation why,” Zalkin said during a news conference Monday in Portland. “No one but the elders can ever know that there is a child predator lurking in that congregation.”
Zalkin said Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders don’t call police. Rather, Zalkin said, they take the position that although Oregon law defines clergy as mandatory reporters of child abuse, they don’t need to report the abuse because it was a privileged religious communication.....
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/12/jehovahs_witnesses_under_fire.html
See Haunting Photos of the Sites of Child Abuse
Richard Conway
The very ordinariness of both the context and the location of child abuse in Ireland struck photographer Kim Haughton as profoundly disturbing.
In a damning 2009 report, Ireland’s independently-run Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse – which spent nine years investigating thousands of allegations of abuse at religious-run institutions – spoke of a culture of “endemic sexual abuse” in the country’s Catholic boys’ schools and of the “deferential and submissive attitude” of the Irish state towards the religious orders who ran them.
What emerged from the investigation, and from a separate Dublin-specific inquiry concluded the same year, was that institutional child abuse was widespread and that it had occurred not only in schools, but in many places where young people were in the care of religious orders. The commissions also revealed that very often when children reported the abuse, they were largely ignored and even punished, with many of the adult perpetrators being relocated to new parishes by church officials. The state, too, had willfully turned a blind eye....
https://time.com/3608071/see-haunting-photos-of-the-sites-of-child-abuse/
$10.5 Million Lawsuit Against Jehovah's Witnesses Organizations Velicia Alston, who says she was molested as a child, wants to change the way Jehovah's Witnesses' leadership responds to child sexual abuse.
By Aimee Green December 01, 2014
Two people who say that as children they were sexually abused by a leader in a Hillsboro Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation filed a $10.5 million lawsuit Monday – among the first in Oregon to accuse the religious organization of hiding decades of sexual abuse.
Attorneys for Velicia Alston, 39, and an unnamed man said the Jehovah’s Witnesses leadership continues to cover up sexual abuse against children by leaders. They say it is more than a decade behind other organizations, such as the Catholic Church, that have been forced to address their problems through many years of civil litigation.
“There is a crisis of silence in the Jehovah's Witness organization," said Irwin Zalkin, one of several attorneys representing Alston and the man. Zalkin described the religious organization as "more concerned about protecting its reputation than it is about protecting its children."
For example, Zalkin said the seven men who make up the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Governing Body have a policy requiring a confession from the perpetrator or two eyewitnesses to the abuse before leaders will take any action.
“Even if they do disfellowship a perpetrator, they don’t tell the congregation why,” Zalkin said during a news conference Monday in Portland. “No one but the elders can ever know that there is a child predator lurking in that congregation.”
Zalkin said Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders don’t call police. Rather, Zalkin said, they take the position that although Oregon law defines clergy as mandatory reporters of child abuse, they don’t need to report the abuse because it was a privileged religious communication.....
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/12/jehovahs_witnesses_under_fire.html
See Haunting Photos of the Sites of Child Abuse
Richard Conway
The very ordinariness of both the context and the location of child abuse in Ireland struck photographer Kim Haughton as profoundly disturbing.
In a damning 2009 report, Ireland’s independently-run Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse – which spent nine years investigating thousands of allegations of abuse at religious-run institutions – spoke of a culture of “endemic sexual abuse” in the country’s Catholic boys’ schools and of the “deferential and submissive attitude” of the Irish state towards the religious orders who ran them.
What emerged from the investigation, and from a separate Dublin-specific inquiry concluded the same year, was that institutional child abuse was widespread and that it had occurred not only in schools, but in many places where young people were in the care of religious orders. The commissions also revealed that very often when children reported the abuse, they were largely ignored and even punished, with many of the adult perpetrators being relocated to new parishes by church officials. The state, too, had willfully turned a blind eye....
https://time.com/3608071/see-haunting-photos-of-the-sites-of-child-abuse/
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