Jehovah’s Witnesses Leaders Hid Child Abuse Secrets, UK Child Abuse Suspects at Soccer Teams, Soviet dissident thousands of child abuse images

- How Jehovah’s Witnesses Leaders Hide Child Abuse Secrets At All Costs
- U.K. Police Identify Suspects in Probe of Child Abuse at Soccer Teams
- Soviet dissident had thousands of child abuse images, UK court told

How Jehovah’s Witnesses Leaders Hide Child Abuse Secrets At All Costs
Monday, December 12, 2016
Trey Bundy / Reveal

The leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses has boldly defied court orders to turn over the names and whereabouts of alleged child sexual abusers across the United States.

Since 2014, courts have slapped the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ parent corporation, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, with multimillion-dollar judgments and sanctions for violating orders to hand over secret documents.

The documents could serve as a road map to what are likely thousands of alleged child abusers living freely in communities across the country, who still could be abusing kids. The files include the names of known and suspected perpetrators, the locations of their congregations and descriptions of their alleged crimes....

For more than 25 years, Jehovah’s Witnesses officials have instructed local leaders — known as elders — in all of the religion’s 14,000 U.S. congregations to hide sexual abuse from law enforcement. Instead, abusers were to be handled internally.

That secrecy is a tenet of the religion. Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught to avoid the outside world. They don’t vote or serve in the military and usually don’t go to college.

Predators purposefully exploit that isolation, said Kathleen Hallisey, a London attorney spearheading similar civil lawsuits in England.

“I think they choose those types of environments very carefully, where they know they can operate with impunity, and unfortunately, the policies of the Watchtower allow them to continue to do that again and again and again,” Hallisey said....

Zalkin is quite familiar with the details of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. In 2007, he negotiated a $200 million settlement for more than 100 victims of clergy abuse. After that case made news, he began receiving calls from victims of abuse in all sorts of institutions, including universities and the Boy Scouts of America.

About a dozen of those calls came from ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. Several of them named the same abuser: Gonzalo Campos. Those cases led Zalkin to the Watchtower’s secret documents.

Campos was a Jehovah’s Witness who sexually abused at least seven children in San Diego congregations in the ’80s and ’90s. During that time, Watchtower leaders knew Campos was abusing children but did not report him to law enforcement, according to testimony by congregation elders. Instead, they promoted him to the position of elder....

Campos has admitted to abusing Jehovah’s Witness children in a sworn deposition....
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2016/dec/12/how-jehovahs-witnesses-leaders-hide-child-abuse-se/

https://www.revealnews.org/article/how-jehovahs-witnesses-leaders-hide-child-abuse-secrets-at-all-costs/


U.K. Police Identify Suspects in Probe of Child Abuse at Soccer Teams
Child sex abuse allegations involving soccer teams are latest to rock some of Britain’s most respected institutions
By Jenny Gross  Dec. 9, 2016  

LONDON Authorities have identified 83 suspects linked to allegations of child abuse at professional and amateur soccer teams, British police said Friday, in an escalating scandal that is again rattling trust in a pillar of British society.

The announcement comes the day after a report said hundreds of police officers and personnel used their positions of authority to sexually abuse vulnerable people, some of whom were in custody at the time. According to the inquiry by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate Constabulary, police forces in England and Wales received 436 reported allegations of abuse of authority for sexual gain in the two years to the end of March.

In recent years, Britain has been stung by revelations of sexual abuse in some of its most respected institutions, prompting soul-searching about how such abuse persisted, in some cases for decades....

In the latest case, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse in U.K. soccer have emerged since the Guardian newspaper last month published the account of Andy Woodward, a former professional soccer player, who said he was abused by his coach.

Nearly 350 people have come forward to allege sexual abuse in soccer and other sports in recent weeks, most of them men who were between seven and 20 years old when the abuse happened, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates police operations, said. The alleged offenses occurred between the 1960s and the early 2000s....
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-police-identify-suspects-in-probe-of-child-abuse-at-soccer-teams-1481316245 


Soviet dissident had thousands of child abuse images, UK court told
Vladimir Bukovsky downloaded indecent images and films over 15-year period, Cambridge crown court hears
The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky downloaded thousands of indecent images of children over a 15-year period, most of them featuring boys, a court has been told.

Bukovsky, 73, is charged with 10 counts of making and possessing indecent photos and one count of possessing an indecent computer-generated graphic. He denies all charges.

William Carter, prosecuting, told a jury at Cambridge crown court on Monday that Bukovsky’s computer was identified during an operation by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Police arrested him in October 2014 at his home on the outskirts of Cambridge.

Bukovsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, told detectives he had indecent material, the court heard. “He [Bukovsky] responded immediately by saying he did download images and that they would be on the computer in his study,” Carter said....
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/12/soviet-dissident-vladimir-bukovsky-downloaded-thousands-of-child-abuse-images-uk-court-told 


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Articles and Research by Neil Brick  http://neilbrick.com