Italy's Highest Court Overturns Pedophile's Conviction Because 11-Year-Old Was 'In Love', The behavior patterns of abused children as described in their testimonies

Italy's Highest Court Overturns Pedophile's Conviction Because 11-Year-Old Was 'In Love'  Agence France Presse  Dec. 31, 2013

Italy's highest court has overturned the conviction of a 60-year-old man for having sex with an 11-year-old girl, because the verdict failed to take into account their "amorous relationship".

Pietro Lamberti, a social services worker in Catanzaro in southern Italy, was convicted in February 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison for sexual acts with a minor.

The verdict was later upheld by an appeals court.

But Italy's supreme court ruled that the verdict did not sufficiently consider "the 'consensus', the existence of an amorous relationship, the absence of physical force, the girl's feelings of love"....

Lamberti was caught naked in bed with the girl after an investigation by police based largely on wire-tap evidence, it said.
http://www.businessinsider.com/italys-highest-court-overturns-pedophiles-conviction-because-11-year-old-was-in-love-2013-12 

 Making Sad Sense of Child Abuse

Dec. 23, 2013 — When a man in Israel was accused of sexually abusing his young daughter, it was hard for many people to believe -- a neighbor reported seeing the girl sitting and drinking hot chocolate with her father every morning, laughing, smiling, and looking relaxed. Such cases are not exceptional, however. Children react to sexual and physical abuse in unpredictable ways, making it hard to discern the clues.

Now Dr. Carmit Katz of Tel Aviv University's Bob Shapell School of Social Work has found that when parents are physically abusive, children tend to accommodate it. But when the abuse is sexual, they tend to fight or flee it unless it is severe. The findings, published in Child Abuse & Neglect, help explain children's behavior in response to abuse and could aid in intervention and treatment.

"All the cases of alleged physical abuse in the study involved parents, while we had very few cases of alleged parental sexual abuse," said Dr. Katz. "More than the type of abuse, it may be that children feel they have no choice but to endure abuse by their parents, who they depend on for love and support."....

About 3.5 million cases of child abuse are reported in the United States every year. Similarly alarming situations exist in many other countries. Abused children often suffer from emotional and behavioral problems, which can later develop into sexual dysfunction, anxiety, promiscuity, vulnerability to repeated victimization, depression, and substance abuse.....

Dr. Katz says the study teaches an important lesson when it comes to parental physical abuse. Just because children do not fight or flee their parents does not mean they are not being abused. Children need their parents to survive, and in some cases, parents love, care for, and support their children when they are not abusing them. Under these impossible circumstances, children often feel their best option is accommodation. In one interview in the study, a child said, "Daddy was yelling on me because I didn't do my homework, so I told him I am sorry you are right and brought him his belt." There were many similar examples.....

C. Katz, Z. Barnetz. The behavior patterns of abused children as described in their testimonies. Child Abuse & Neglect, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.08.006
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131223181821.htm 

The behavior patterns of abused children as described in their testimonies     C. Katza, Z. Barnetz

....The results show that abuse type has a strong effect on children's behavior, with children in the sexual abuse group reporting more fight and flight behavior and children in the physical abuse group reporting more self-change behavior. This finding was interacted with the severity of abuse variable, with children in the sexual abuse group reporting less flight behavior and an increase in the self-change behavior with the highest level of severity of abuse....
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014521341300224X 

Children speaking up about crime, abuse: study

Children speaking up about crime, abuse: study (2011-01-03)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Children are increasingly stepping forward and telling school officials, doctors and the police when they have been the victims of crime or abuse, U.S. researchers said on Monday. A telephone survey of more than 4,500 U.S. children and teens done in 2008 found that nearly half who experienced violence, abuse or crime told someone at school, the police or a doctor or nurse. That compares with 25 percent of cases in a similar study done in 1992, David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire and colleagues reported in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine....

More than 58 percent of the children and teens said they had been personally victimized at least once in the past year. This included bullying but did not include witnessing crime, such as domestic assault.
Nearly 46 percent said they had informed authorities of the victimization. This was especially true of more serious problems. For example, authorities had been told about 69 percent of the cases of sexual abuse by a known adult.

But children also spoke up about other problems, with 51.5 percent telling someone about emotional bullying, 48 percent telling someone about neglect and 47 percent telling authorities about a theft....

"That 58.3 percent of the children and adolescents in the study sample reported at least one direct victimization incident within the past year speaks to the enormity of the problem of victimization experienced by children and adolescents in our society," Drs. Andrea Gottsegen Asnes and John Leventhal of Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut wrote in a commentary in the same journal.

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wbfo/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1744253/US/Children.speaking.up.about.crime..abuse.study