Christian Assemblies International: Former members detail abuse, Official campus statistics for sexual violence mislead

Christian Assemblies International: Former members detail abuse handed out by CAI leader Scott Williams ABC By Caro Meldrum-Hanna July 29, 2014

A four-year investigation by the ABC has uncovered shocking claims of abuse and torment in relation to NSW-based registered charity and religious group Christian Assemblies International (CAI).
Four Corners has revealed that self-styled religious guru Pastor Scott Williams was using his warped brand of evangelical Pentecostalism to run a clandestine homosexual sex ring while allegedly misusing vast amounts of member donations for personal use.

Courageous former members broke their silence and told of their torment living inside the group, which they said is not a Christian church but a horrendous cult run by one man.
The ex-members have remained in the shadows until now out of fear and shame. They detailed shocking acts of abuse ranging from spiritual abuse, financial abuse, verbal and physical abuse, and the sexual abuse of adult men.

They said bizarre sexual rituals were carried out in secret by Williams, who described himself as "The Anointed One" with the Lord's authorisation to sidestep biblical commands against homosexuality and sexually train his male members into submission and obedience....

Former members say they were recruited by Williams as teenagers and young adults, with many still at school. They say they were brainwashed into believing Williams was The Anointed One, filled with the Holy Spirit and gifted with the divine power of healing.....
Katja's husband, Steve, says women were treated as less than men.
"Women were second-rate citizens," he said. "They were there to have children and stand in the kitchen and make food."

Using biblical scripture, Williams also preached that children were born evil and that the evil had to beaten out of them with an iron rod.

Four Corners spoke to many children who were born into the cult who are now adults. They detailed disturbing policies of punishment, including children being publically beaten for making any noise during a Sunday sermon or for moving off a mat laid out at the front of the Assembly....
https://au.news.yahoo.com/nsw/a/24564053/christian-assemblies-international-former-members-detail-abuse-handed-out-by-cai-leader-scott-williams/


Official campus statistics for sexual violence mislead
A school with a lower rate may just be better at discouraging students from reporting assault
July 14, 2014  by Jennifer J. Freyd

Last month, The Washington Post released a compilation of reported rates of campus sexual assault nationwide. Such reports, which colleges and universities are required to release each year, are generally thought to be useful to the public. Parents of college-bound high school students who read that School A has a higher rate of reported sexual violence than School B can make more informed decisions about where their children will be safest. And they might very reasonably think that School A is a more dangerous school. However, the higher rate of reported sexual violence at School A likely indicates the opposite: that it is actually safer than School B. It means that School A is making it possible for — even encouraging — students to report sexual violence.

As a social scientist researching campus sexual violence, I know that even the highest rates of official reported victimization on campuses are substantially lower than what social science data suggest are the real rates of sexual assault. The best national estimate is that approximately 1 in 5 women experience sexual violence in college. But the reported rates are nothing like this, even at those colleges with the highest rates.

Why? Victims of abuse are often reticent about making official reports because they fear the consequences, including being stigmatized or not being believed. This tendency to remain silent is then amplified by institutional barriers to reporting. Colleges and universities have a perverse incentive to discourage sexually victimized students from reporting assault, due to the reputational hit colleges experience if their reported rates of violence are higher than those of their competitors. It’s a profoundly dangerous status quo, because encouraging reporting is one of the key ways colleges can make campuses safer.

Institutional cover-ups
Part of the challenge of tackling campus sexual assault is that sexual abuse typically starts in adolescence, prior to the beginning of college. Perpetrators have often been victimized themselves. Many college victims also have a prior history of abuse. These are important factors that my laboratory has studied for years. Ultimately we must address the underlying society-wide problem of child sexual abuse that contributes to college sexual violence. But in the meantime, college campuses offer a remarkable intervention point for sexual assault: They have resources. They are limited in number (thousands of institutions of higher education versus millions of families, for instance). They influence young people on the cusp of adult responsibility.  

But only when such violence is reported can victims access services and colleges hold perpetrators accountable. For most colleges and universities, however, discouraging reporting appears to remain the norm. Colleges can make it difficult to determine how to report; they can also make life harder for students who do report by shaming, invalidating and even punishing them. This is why the reported rates likely tell us more about the campus climate than about underlying rates of sexual violence.
When schools discourage reporting, they collude with many societal forces to cover up sexual violence. Sexual violence thrives on secrecy; if students do not feel they can safely report, the assaults will continue unchecked....
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/college-campus-sexualassaultsafetydatawhitehousegender.html

Hall: victims say abused at BBC, Ritual killing accused found hanged, How Commune Became Cult Movie, Lost in the Mall Critique, Women forced into sex 25 times a day

- Stuart Hall: victims say they were abused at BBC
- Ritual killing accused found hanged 
- Chile 'Devil Baby' Murder: Cult Leader Who Sacrificed Three-Day-Old Child Found Dead in Peru
- Movie Review  How Commune Became Cult
- DAUBERT  FRYE CRITIQUE  #1:  LOST IN THE MALL, BY LOFTUS, ET. AL.  
- U.S.: Women forced into sex 25 times a day

Stuart Hall: victims say they were abused at BBC
Steven Swinford – 03 May 2013

Two of his victims have come forward to say they were sexually abused by Hall in the 1960s and 1970s after he was hired for their school prizegivings.

Hall invited both girls to the BBC's Manchester headquarters after promising that he would help them with their careers. One victim said Hall plied her with "plenty of champagne" before raping her in his dressing room.

Another said Hall sexually assaulted her in his car after inviting her to a "mocked up" studio session at the corporation's Manchester studios.

Both said Hall was helped by his friends, amid growing concerns that other staff at BBC may have turned a blind eye to the abuse.

Angie Bray, a Conservative member of the culture, media and sport select committee, said: "They have to look at this all over again. Depressingly, we see a pattern developing. Jimmy Savile is not just a one-off."

The investigation into Hall's activities began after one of his victims wrote an anonymous letter to a columnist at The Independent newspaper.

She said that she had been groomed and sexually abused by Hall after meeting him at her school prize-giving in the 1970s, when he was a presenter on Look North, a local BBC news programme.

Hall told her headmaster he was "impressed" and thought she could have a "future in television journalism", inviting her back to the BBC's studios.

She said:"I was young for my years and easy meat for a man like him," the woman wrote. To have a man of my father's age take a benevolent interest in me seemed wonderful.

"Sadly the world is too full of girls (and boys) who are looking for love, and find out too late that they have found sex with a predator instead."....
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/stuart-hall-victims-say-they-were-abused-at-bbc-29240672.html
  

Ritual killing accused found hanged   02 May 2013

The body of a Chilean man accused in the ritual killing of a three-day-old boy has been found hanged in an abandoned house in Peru.
Ramon Castillo, 36, was found hanging from a beam on the second floor of the house in the highlands city of Cuzco.

He was wearing jeans, a gray jacket, a cap, shoes and a backpack, General Javier Avalos, the regional police chief, said.

He said the body was identified through fingerprints that Chile sent via Interpol. He said it was too early to say whether Castillo's death was suicide....
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/ritual-killing-accused-found-hanged-29237361.html 


Chile 'Devil Baby' Murder: Cult Leader Who Sacrificed Three-Day-Old Child Found Dead in Peru   By Drishya Nair    May 3, 2013
A Chilean man accused of "sacrificing" a three-day-old baby girl has been found hanged in an abandoned house in Peru.

Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, 36, is believed to have been the leader of a 12-member cult that declared the baby girl the anti-Christ and killed her by burning her alive.

The incident took place on 23 November, in the town of Colliguay. Gaete has been on the run since February.
Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete was found dead in the second floor of an abandoned house in Peru....
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/464177/20130503/chile-baby-thrown-bonfire-cult-leader-dead.htm 

Movie Review
How Commune Became Cult
‘The Source Family,’ a Documentary on Father Yod
Jim Baker, also known as Father Yod, center, used his Hollywood health food restaurant to recruit members for what became the Source Family.
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS   April 30, 2013

For anyone looking to teach a master class in brainwashing techniques, “The Source Family” might be an excellent place to start. Documenting the hippy-dippy lifestyle and hedonistic principles of Hollywood’s favorite 1970s cult — led by the self-professed guru and suspected bank robber Jim Baker, a k a Father Yod — Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille’s disturbing film is an object lesson in psychological manipulation.

Working a powerful combo of personal magnetism and easy-to-digest philosophies — what young person doesn’t want to hear that marijuana-enhanced sex is the purest route to enlightenment? — Mr. Baker became the “superrich father” to a band of gorgeous devotees (not a few of them underage girls)....
http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/movies/the-source-family-a-documentary-on-father-yod.html 


NEW ENGLAND LAW|BOSTON, JD/PHD PROJECT
DAUBERT  FRYE CRITIQUE  #1:  LOST IN THE MALL, BY LOFTUS, ET. AL.  

By: Wendy Murphy, JD; Megan Mitchell, JD (expected 2013); Alexa Sardina, PhD
(expected 2014)

Study Name and citation : Loftus, E. & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The Formation of False Memories.  Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720-725.
(Commonly known as the “Lost in the Mall”  study).

Theory Advanced by the Study: False childhood memories can be implanted into adults by repeatedly stating the false memory as true.

Conclusion: The study’s theory and methodology are not reliable under either Frye or Daubert standards.

....For example, any attempt to use the Lost in the Mall study to prove or disprove that a person is telling the truth about sexual abuse should be unsuccessful simply because memories about getting lost in a mall have nothing to do with memories of being sexually or physically violated.   Put another way, the capacity to make a person falsely believe they were once lost in a mall does not “fit” and bears no relevance in a dispute over whether a person can be made to falsely believe they were sexually abused as a child.
http://wendymurphylaw.com/LOSTINTHEMALL.pdf 


U.S.: Women forced into sex 25 times a day
Associated Press Wed May 1, 2013 12:57 PM

NEW YORK — The young Mexican women were driven to rural New Jersey, where their handlers used threats to make them have sex with 25 farmworkers a day. Or they were confined to dingy brothels in the New York City area that advertised their services with “chica cards,” business cards passed out on street corners to attract customers. They were paid very little, or nothing at all.

U.S. authorities detailed their ordeal in a criminal complaint charging 13 people with smuggling dozens into the United States and forcing them into prostitution. Some of the defendants were to appear Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan to face multiple counts including sex trafficking and interstate transportation for prostitution.

The ring “lured their unsuspecting victims to the United States and then consigned them to a living hell,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

The investigation was among several aimed at “blockading the repugnant sex trafficking corridor” used to exploit victims from Tenancingo, Mexico, said James Hayes, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York....
http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20130501new-york-sex-ring.html