Horrific truths of treatment emerge from Catholic mother and baby homes, Norwich child abuse inquiry police charge woman with rapes, The Witch-Hunt Narrative By Ross E. Cheit

Horrific truths of treatment emerge from Catholic mother and baby homes
Niall O'Dowd June 14,2014

There are some undeniable facts about the unmarried mother’s homes in Ireland from the time they were established in the 1920s until they were closed sometime in the 1960s.

Children died needlessly by the thousands in them. Many, possibly 800 in Galway, were buried without coffins, thrown in the earth, some in a septic tank....

Here is what happened there.  A conscientious health official, Dr .James Deeny, visited, and here are his exact words written in 1951:

“Shortly afterwards, when in Cork, I went to Bessborough. It was a beautiful institution, built on to a lovely old house just before the war, and seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around about and could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them.

“Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about.

“Without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and also got rid of the medical officer.

“The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing.”

One year later under a new regime, less than one percent of babies perished from a high of over 60 percent....

It was all a part of the punishment ritual for the poor unloved unmarried mothers who suffered horrifically. Even if their children survived they were ripped away from them and sent abroad for adoption.

They were made to cut grass with scissors, forced to endure child birth without any painkilling drugs, denied stitches when wounds were opened – all testified to by local nurses and doctors who seemed helpless to stop the horrific suffering....
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Horrific-truths-of-treatment-emerge-from-Catholic-mother-and-baby-homes.html

Norwich child abuse inquiry police charge woman with rapes 14 June 2014
A woman has appeared in court accused of raping and abusing children.

Marie Black, 33, of Atkinson Close in Norwich, was charged with 24 offences on Friday night and appeared before the city's magistrates.

The charges relate to five victims under the age of 13 and are alleged to have happened between 2004 and 2010.

She faces five counts of child cruelty, four rapes and related offences. She was released on bail and is due before Norwich Crown Court on 27 June.

Ms Black is the ninth person to be charged in connection with the child abuse investigation.

Eight men and women were charged in connection with the case in February 2014. They are all on conditional bail to appear at Norwich Crown Court at a future date....
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-27850220

The Witch-Hunt Narrative By Ross E. Cheit
Based on a comprehensive examination of primary sources, The Witch-Hunt Narrative challenges the conventional wisdom about these cases. Ross Cheit uses trial transcripts and related court documents to demonstrate that many of the cases at the core of the witch-hunt narrative involved compelling evidence of abuse. He focuses on three major cases while also surveying dozens more, including some that involved injustice to the defendants. He finds that in many cases the conventional wisdom is significantly overdrawn.

Cheit’s years of research also revealed a history of minimizing and denying abuse, and a surprisingly lenient response to many child molesters. Those trends continue into the present, where there are pockets of overreaction to sexual abuse in a sea of under-reaction....

This powerful book shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with the grim reality of sexual abuse. The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy.
http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/sample-page-2/
http://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/