Nazi's defense "just following orders", 5 year old detained and handcuffed (Trump's immigration order), Child abuse: 7% of Australian Catholic priests, Child Abuse Figures Rise 3rd Year in a Row

- How the Nazi's defense of ‘just following orders' plays out in the mind  "people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they're the ones committing the act."
- White House claims five-year-old boy detained in US airport for hours 'could have posed a security threat' (reportedly handcuffed)
"detained following President Donald Trump's immigration order"

- Child abuse: 7% of Australian Catholic priests alleged to be involved
- Teenage boy forced by barrister to join in 'cult’ beating of friends
"John Smyth QC, a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is being investigated by police over claims that he beat 22 teenagers"

- Federal Child Abuse Figures Rose for Third Year in a Row, Neglect at the Top of the List

Child abuse: 7% of Australian Catholic priests alleged to be involved
6 February 2017 Australia

An inquiry examining institutional sex abuse in Australia has heard 7% of the nation's Catholic priests allegedly abused children between 1950 and 2010.

In one religious order, over 40% of church figures were accused of abuse.

Over 4,440 people claim to have been victims between 1980 and 2015, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse was told.

The commission, Australia's highest form of inquiry, is also investigating abuse at non-religious organisations.

It has previously heard harrowing testimony from scores of people who suffered abuse at the hands of clergy....

Gail Furness, the lead lawyer assisting the commission in Sydney, said more than 1,000 Catholic institutions across Australia were identified in claims of sexual abuse, with a total of 1,880 alleged perpetrators between 1980 and 2015.

The average age of the victims was 10.5 for girls and 11.5 for boys. On average, it took 33 years for each instance of abuse to be reported....

Abuse survivor Andrew Collins told the BBC it had been "drummed into his head" by the four men who abused him between the ages of seven and 14 - two teachers, a priest and a Catholic Brother - that he was the one who had "done wrong".

"I did try to tell my mum once and she said it was absolute rubbish and a man of God would never do such a thing," he said....

The royal commission also detailed the number of abuse claims against 10 religious orders, with data showing that four orders had allegations of abuse against more than 20% of their members. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-38877158


Teenage boy forced by barrister to join in 'cult’ beating of friends 
by Patrick Foster Nicola Harley Peta Thornycroft, Johannesburg
5 February 2017 

A barrister accused of subjecting teenage boys to savage sadomasochistic beatings forced one of his victims to join in with the attacks, it has emerged.

John Smyth QC, a friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury, is being investigated by police over claims that he beat 22 teenagers in his garden shed in the late Seventies.

A report by the Iwerne Trust, the charity that ran the Christian camps at which Mr Smyth met many of the victims, documents how he persuaded one of the boys to assist with the attacks....

He wrote in the 1982 report: “There was considerable persuasion for anyone who held back. It had almost become a cult, with a powerful group dynamic.

“S, wanting to 'be the best for God’, beat as hard as he could. “Immediately after the beating, the man lay on the bed, while [Mr Smyth] and/or S would kneel and pray, linking arms with him and kissing him on the shoulder and back.

“[Mr Smyth] and S saw this as a 'ministry’ from God. But the 'ministry’ of discipline in this sense was secret, self-appointed and never approved by other Christian leaders.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/05/teenage-boy-forced-barrister-join-cult-beating-friends/


Federal Child Abuse Figures Rose for Third Year in a Row, Neglect at the Top of the List  Feb 8, 2017 

Neglect tops the list of abuses that children endure, according to a new report that finds cases of abuse and neglect edged up for the third consecutive year during 2015.

The Child Maltreatment 2015 report by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families noted 683,000 victims of child maltreatment or 9.2 victims per 1,000 children. The slight increase from 2014's 9.1 victims per 1,000 is concerning, experts said, because not all maltreatment is reported and in some cases abuse or neglect exists but there's not enough evidence to substantiate it, leading to the suspicion that the count is actually undercounted....

Daniel Heimpel, executive director of the nonprofit Fostering Media Connections, which produces three publications for foster and adoptive parents...."The number of kids in foster care also has gone up over this period of time," he said. "Abuse rates have gone up, reports of abuse have gone up and the number of kids entering the system has gone up after a huge decline for many years."

The report estimates 1,670 child deaths in 2015 related to maltreatment. Actual reporting from 49 states documented 1,585 child deaths....

Infants were three times more likely to die from abuse or neglect than a year-old child.

Fifty-five percent of child victims who die from abuse or neglect are boys.

At least one parent was involved in 77 percent of the deaths, and alcohol, drug abuse or domestic violence were often factors. Women were more likely than men to be perpetrators, 54 percent vs. 45 percent. In the other cases, gender wasn't known.

Three-fifths of maltreatment reports to child welfare systems came from professionals, including teachers, lawyers, social workers and police officers.

Demographically, the biggest category of victims were white at 43.2 percent, compared to Hispanic at 23.6 percent and African-American at 21.4 percent.... http://www.wtxl.com/news/federal-child-abuse-figures-rose-for-third-year-in-a/article_110684b6-ee22-11e6-a06e-73fa4a6ae341.html


How the Nazi's defense of ‘just following orders' plays out in the mind
A handwritten request for clemency by Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust, who said he shouldn't be held responsible for his actions because he and other low-level officers were following orders from their superiors. A new study released Thursday offers one reason why people can be easily coerced into carrying out heinous orders.

In other words, people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they're the ones committing the act.

In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were "forced to serve as mere instruments," shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews to his superiors. The "just following orders" defense, made famous in the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, featured heavily in Eichmann's court hearings.

But that same year Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of famous experiments that tested whether "ordinary" folks would inflict harm on another person after following orders from an authoritative figure. Shockingly, the results suggested any human was capable of a heart of darkness.

Milgram's research tackled whether a person could be coerced into behaving heinously, but new research released Thursday offers one explanation as to why.

"In particular, acting under orders caused participants to perceive a distance from outcomes that they themselves caused," said study co-author Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, in an email.

In other words, people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they're the ones committing the act.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, described this distance as people experiencing their actions more as "passive movements than fully voluntary actions" when they follow orders.

Researchers at University College London and Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium arrived at this conclusion by investigating how coercion could change someone's "sense of agency," a psychological phenomenon that refers to one's awareness of their actions causing some external outcome.

Unlike Milgram's classic research, Haggard's team introduced a shocking element that was missing in the original 1960s experiments: actual shocks. Haggard said they used "moderately painful, but tolerable, shocks." Milgram feigned shocks up to 450 volts.

According to Milgram's experiments, 65 percent of his volunteers, described as "teachers," were willing (sometimes reluctantly) to press a button that delivered shocks up to 450 volts to an unseen person, a "learner" in another room. Although pleas from the unknown person could be heard, including mentions of a heart condition, Milgram's study said his volunteers continued to shock the "learner" when ordered to do so. At no point, however, did someone truly experience an electric shock.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/how-the-nazis-defense-of-just-following-orders-plays-out-in-the-mind/



White House claims five-year-old boy detained in US airport for hours 'could have posed a security threat'
The little boy is reportedly a US citizen who lives with his mother in Maryland

The White House has said a five-year-old boy was detained for more than four hours and reportedly handcuffed at an airport because he posed a "security risk".

The boy, reportedly a US citizen with an Iranian mother, was one of more than 100 people detained following President Donald Trump's immigration order.

In a press briefing, Mr Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer was unrepentant about the incident.

He said:  "To assume that just because of someone's age and gender that they don't pose a threat would be misguided and wrong."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/white-house-five-year-old-boy-detained-dulles-international-airport-hours-sean-spicer-pose-security-a7554521.html


Child and Ritual Abuse Research   https://ritualabuse.us

Articles by Neil Brick  http://neilbrick.com