Pedophilia Symbolism (We have to talk about it!)

[artemis]

"Paedophile of 'the most sickening order' was able to film himself abusing girls in primary school classrooms because bosses did NOTHING despite 30 warnings

Nigel Leat was jailed indefinitely for abusing five girls - some as young as six
Teachers at Hillside First School, in Weston-Super-Mare, complained... but managers did nothing about his increasingly sexual behaviour
The 51-year-old continued to work at the primary school for 15 years
He was finally arrested when victim told her mother she had been sexually abused almost every day for TWO MONTHS

A paedophile teacher filmed himself abusing girls in the classroom after school bosses failed over 14 years to act on 30 warnings about his behaviour.

Nigel Leat, 51, was described by a judge as a ‘paedophile of the most sickening order’ when he was jailed indefinitely last year for abusing five girls, some as young as six.

Yesterday a damning report showed that the primary school where he worked had catastrophically failed to protect the children in his care.

Over 14 years, concerns had been raised repeatedly about Leat’s behaviour with pupils, but his conduct was never investigated. He had abused children in the school’s computer room, resource room, staff room and even during lessons with other pupils present.

Leat also regularly filmed the pupils’ harrowing ordeals using a camera provided by the school, storing hundreds of films on more than 20 memory sticks labelled with his victims’ names.

Staff at Hillside First School in Worle, Somerset, first noticed Leat selecting girls who were ‘less academically able, emotionally needy or pretty’ as his ‘favourites’ a year after he started teaching there in 1996.

His inappropriate behaviour was so well known that staff tried to prevent children likely to become his ‘star pupils’ from being put into his Year Two and Year Three classes.

In 2004, a mother claimed Leat had been taking pictures of her daughter with a mobile phone but he denied the accusation and no action was taken.

Four years later, two children told staff that Leat, a married father of two, had been touching their legs and kissing one of them – causing her to be sick – and a teacher twice reported him to the head.

Another member of staff saw Leat projecting an indecent image of an adult on to a wall during a lesson.

Leat was also seen lifting up and groping young girls in the playground, tickling and cuddling pupils in class and sitting on cushions with a schoolgirl while visibly aroused.

But those staff members who reported Leat’s behaviour were told they should not ‘insinuate things’ and were bullied into silence, a report said yesterday.

It was later discovered that Leat would routinely hide a camera under his desk and then summon his victims, recording the subsequent horrifying images of the abuse.

In many of the videos, which are up to ten minutes in length, other children can be seen or heard in the background.

When police finally became involved, Leat first denied wrongdoing but later admitted 36 sexual offences including rape, assault and voyeurism.

Yesterday a review by the North Somerset Safeguarding Children Board concluded that his appalling crimes could have been stopped much earlier if the school had not failed to act on the warnings.

Instead, out of 30 disturbing incidents noted, only 11 were mentioned to the school’s headmaster, Chris Hood, and none was passed on to an agency outside the school.

Leat was only arrested in December 2010, when a schoolgirl told her mother he abused her ‘every day apart from when the teaching assistant was in the classroom’.

Police who raided the home he shared with his wife, also a teacher, found more than 30,000 images, including 61 pictures and 21 movies at level five, the most serious level.

At least 20 children were victims of Leat’s abuse or witnessed it at the school, which caters for 128 children aged between four and eight.

Three Ofsted inspections undertaken during the time Leat was abusing his students graded it as ‘good’ and a report in 2009 noted: ‘Pupils feel exceptionally safe and secure because they know that staff have their well-being at heart.’

Tony Oliver, who chaired the serious case review, said: ‘There was a failure at every level within the school.

‘There was a culture which just did not empower people to voice their concerns. It could be interpreted as a culture of bullying.’

He said the headmaster had been sacked following a disciplinary process."

[artemis]

"Former police worker downloaded 110,000 indecent images of children

A former police worker could face jail for possessing more than 110,000 indecent images of children.

Nicholas White, 27, admitted 20 counts of possessing indecent images and two of possessing extreme images at Cambridge Crown Court today.

He worked as a communications officer employed by Cambridgeshire Police and was deployed to a unit overseen by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

White, from Royston, Hertfordshire, had been employed since June 2008 and resigned after his arrest in February last year.

The charges cover more than 110,000 images including photographs and videos of eight-year-olds and extreme pictures of children engaged in sex acts with animals.

He was released on bail on the condition he does not approach unsupervised under-16s or access pornographic images on the internet.

Nerida Harford-Bell, defending White, asked for a psychiatric report to be compiled before sentencing, as White had a history of self harm.

She added: 'He is a very isolated individual who found himself with a growing addiction.'

Judge Gareth Hawkesworth said: 'This report should not be taken as any indication of the likely sentence.

'I keep all options, including custody, open.'

White, whose elderly father attended the hearing, will be sentenced at Cambridge in March. He covered his face as he left court.

A spokesman for Cambridgeshire Police said: 'All applications for employment with the constabulary are subject to rigorous checks and vetting, including the examination of criminal records and employment history.

'Any allegations against employees are fully investigated and disciplinary action and, if necessary, criminal proceedings, will be instigated if appropriate.'

Acpo is an independent body which brings together the expertise of chief police officers across the country."

[artemis]

"Teacher Charged with Taking Bondage Pics of Students

A former elementary school teacher in Los Angeles has been arrested for allegedly molesting nearly two dozen children after photos of students posed in bondage positions were passed to the Sheriff's Department.

Mark Berndt, 61, a teacher with over 30 years experience at Miramonte Elementary School in south Los Angeles, is charged with molesting 23 children, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Police began the investigation after a photo processing facility passed along suspicious images depicting students blindfolded with their mouths covered in tape. Female students were depicted with a blue plastic spoon containing "an unknown clear/white liquid" in front of their mouths, while other students were pictured with live cockroaches on their faces. In some photos, Berndt had his arm around the children or his hand over their mouths.

Police found the spoon, along with an empty container in the trash in Berndt's classroom and, through DNA testing, determined that both contained Berndt's semen.

The students were between the ages of 7 and 10 years old when the alleged crimes occurred, police said.

Authorities launched a widespread sex crime investigation, interviewing current and former students and school employees and searching Berndt's home. They recovered a total of 390 photographs and an adult "sexual bondage" film which mirrored the photos of the children, according to a statement by the sheriff's department today.

More than 26 children from the 390 photographs have been identified; an additional 10 children have not yet been identified, police said.

Shortly after the investigation began, in March, 2011, Berndt was fired from the school. The school did not immediately return calls for comment today.

Berndt was arrested Monday and charged with 23 felony counts of lewd acts upon a child. He is being held at LA County jail in lieu of $2.3 million bail."

[artemis]

"Second teacher arrested amid L.A. sex abuse probe

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Days after the arrest of a school teacher accused of taking bondage-style photos of students with cockroaches on their faces, a second instructor from the same school was arrested on Friday on suspicion of molesting two girls, authorities said.

Publicity surrounding the arrest of the first teacher, Mark Berndt, 61, led to complaints being brought against his colleague, Martin Springer, 49, though the two cases were believed to be otherwise unrelated, said Captain Mike Parker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Word that a second teacher had been accused of sexually abusing students at the Miramonte Elementary School heightened the anguish of parents already angry and bewildered over news of Berndt's arrest on Monday.

"I'm about to pull my child out of the school," parent Latanya Morris told reporters outside the school, located in a mostly low-income neighborhood near South Los Angeles. "There's too much going on at this school right here, right now. I don't know, so it's a lot to think about."

Adding insult to injury, Los Angeles Unified School District officials have confirmed that Berndt, terminated a year ago after coming under investigation, was still receiving a state pension of nearly $4,000 a month.

School officials suspended Springer on Thursday after receiving "allegations of possible inappropriate behavior," the LAUSD said in a statement. The district's superintendent said he would ask the school board at its meeting next Tuesday to fire Springer.

He was arrested on Friday on suspicion of performing lewd acts on two girls and was jailed on $2 million bond, Parker said. The girls accused Springer of fondling them in class during the past three years, the sheriff's department said.

DISTURBING IMAGES

Berndt, who taught third grade, was arrested on Monday and charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on children. He remained jailed on $23 million bail, officials said.

His arrest followed a year-long investigation that began when a drug store photo processor turned over pictures to police that showed students blindfolded and with their mouths covered with tape.

Some of the pictures, which were taken in a classroom, showed students with spoons of a substance later determined to be his semen held to their faces, sheriff's officials said.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Berndt was suspected of convincing the abused students they were playing some kind of a tasting game.

Johan ElFarra, a public defender for Berndt, could not be reached for comment on Friday.

The latest allegations against Berndt result from 390 photographs investigators have collected in the case, as well as interviews with more than 80 current and former students and school administrators, authorities said.

The children involved were seven to 10 years old at the time they are believed to have suffered the abuse, which prosecutors say occurred between 2005 and 2010.

In some cases, children were pictured with large, live "Madagascar-type" cockroaches on their faces and mouths, the Sheriff's Department has said.

In one aspect of the case that sheriff's officials say underpins the sexual nature of Berndt's alleged actions, the photographs show the children being offered a plastic spoon containing a milky liquid.

A spoon recovered from the trash bin in Berndt's classroom later tested positive for semen, and Berndt's DNA was found to match that of the DNA profile found on the spoon, said Sgt. Dan Scott, an investigators for the sheriff's special victims unit.

Investigators also recovered a DVD video from Berndt's home depicting adult sexual bondage activity that mirrored the bondage-type photos of the children, sheriff's officials said.

Scott said sheriff's deputies previously investigated allegations from a 9-year-old girl who claimed Berndt in 1993 had tried to reach under her desk to fondle her.

Prosecutors the following year declined to file charges in the matter after determining they lacked sufficient evidence, the District Attorney's Office said in a statement on Thursday.

LAUSD officials said the school district had no record of the previous investigation of Berndt."

[artemis]

"Scouts to turn over files in Calif. sex abuse case

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — A judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by the family of a California boy molested by his troop leader has ordered the Boy Scouts of America to hand over confidential files detailing allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders around the nation.

The Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/xG2ojb ) the judge said last month the Irving, Texas-based organization must turn over the most recent 20 years' worth of records by Feb. 24.

Known as "ineligible volunteer files," the documents are intended to keep those accused of misconduct out of Scouting.

Officials dispute that the files have been used to conceal abuse.

The trial is scheduled for April, nearly five years after the boy, then 13, was molested by volunteer troop leader Al Stein in Santa Barbara County. Stein pleaded no contest in 2009 and is in prison."

AL STEIN. Another Jewish scum abusing (goy) children.


"Boy Scouts sued in sexual abuse case

A Santa Barbara County boy was sexually abused by his Scout leader in 2007. A judge overseeing the lawsuit brought by the boy's family has ordered the Boy Scouts to hand over confidential files detailing allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders around the nation.

The mother of a Santa Barbara County teenager says he was wronged twice — once by the 450-pound Boy Scout leader who sexually abused him in 2007, and then by a local Scouts executive who she says told her not to call police.

"He said that wasn't necessary, because the Scouts do their own internal investigation," said the woman, whose name The Times is withholding to protect her son's identity. "I thought that was really weird.... I thought it was really important to call the sheriff right away."

So she did, triggering an investigation of volunteer Scout leader Al Steven Stein, then 29, who was charged with abusing her 92-pound son and two other boys. In 2009, he pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment. He was put on probation but later went to prison after authorities found pictures of nude children on his cellphone data card.

Stein's criminal case is closed. But its fallout is far from over for the boy, who is now 17 and, according to his mother, so traumatized by the ordeal that he seldom leaves the house.

Nor is it over for the Boy Scouts of America, which is being sued by the boy's family for negligence in a case whose ramifications could reach well beyond Santa Barbara.

The lawsuit contends the Scouts knew or should have known that Stein had put the boy at risk and cites the executive's reluctance to call police as evidence of an effort to conceal widespread sexual abuse.

In addition to unspecified damages, the lawsuit seeks to force the Scouts to hand over thousands of confidential files detailing allegations of sexual abuse by Scout leaders and others around the nation. It contends the files will expose the Scouts' "culture of hidden sexual abuse" and its failure to warn boys, their parents and others about the "pedophilic wolves" who have long infiltrated one of America's oldest youth organizations.

In January, after reviewing some of the files, a Santa Barbara Superior Court judge rejected the Scouts' argument that the documents are irrelevant to the lawsuit and ordered the organization to turn over the most recent 20 years' worth of records to the boy's lawyers by Feb. 24, with victims' names removed. The judge ordered the lawyers not to disclose the files publicly.

Known as "ineligible volunteer files," the documents have been maintained since the 1920s and are intended to keep suspected molesters and others accused of misconduct out of Scouting. Scouts officials have steadfastly resisted releasing them and won't discuss their contents, citing the privacy rights of victims and the fact that many files are based on unproven allegations.

They strenuously dispute that the files have been used to conceal sexual abuse.

"These files exist solely to keep out individuals whose actions are inconsistent with the standards of Scouting, and Scouts are safer because of them," said Deron Smith, public relations director of Boy Scouts of America.

Some of the estimated 5,000 files have surfaced in recent years as a result of lawsuits by former Scouts accusing the organization of failing to exclude known pedophiles, detect abuses and report offenders to police, allowing predators to remain at large.

"They have created these ticking time bombs who are walking through society and nobody knows their identities except the Scouts," said Timothy Hale, one of the lawyers for the Santa Barbara County boy.

The Oregon Supreme Court is considering a petition by media organizations in one case to release files for a 20-year period ending in 1985.

The Santa Barbara case is significant because it seeks to unlock files that have never been turned over by the Scouts, including all since 2005. It is also noteworthy because it alleges wrongdoing that took place relatively recently, even as the Scouts have stepped up protective efforts.

According to the lawsuit, Stein had a history of inappropriate behavior with children he'd met through Scouting, including "making sexual jokes and comments" in front of Scouts and in some cases pulling down their pants. In November 2007, he abused the Santa Barbara County boy, who was 13 at the time.

"Stein used his 450 pounds to pin the boy with sufficient force to cause bruising, ripped the boy's pants down to the point the boy suffered a laceration at his belt line, and then fondled the boy's genitals while commenting on them," the lawsuit states.

When the boy told his mother about the abuse a few days later, she said, she called the Scouts' offices to report it and spoke with David Tate, then the Los Padres Council scout executive. She said Tate initially tried to talk her out of calling the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department and relented only when she insisted.

Tate, now a top Scouts official in New York, declined to comment. Messages left for his lawyer and the Scouts' attorney in the lawsuit were fielded by Smith, who issued a prepared statement detailing the Scouts' efforts to curb sexual abuse.

In the last decade, the organization has among other things expanded its sexual abuse prevention training and reporting. In 2010, the Scouts set a national policy requiring any suspicion of abuse to be immediately reported to law enforcement, Smith said.

Before that, volunteers and professionals followed state laws on reporting abuse, Smith said. The California penal code lists youth organization administrators and employees as mandated reporters.

In early 2008, Stein was charged with a felony, committing a lewd act upon a child, and two misdemeanors including child pornography for photographs he took of a boy's genitals. Two of the victims were Scouts; the third was the son of a family friend.

Stein struck a deal to plead no contest to felony child endangerment and one misdemeanor. He was placed on five years' probation but violated it by having the photos of nude children on his cellphone card. He was sentenced to two years in prison but was paroled early and has been in no trouble since, said Steven Balash, his attorney in the criminal case and the lawsuit.

Balash said Stein is "a sad case," living on Social Security disability payments in a Salinas motel with other sex offenders. He said that Stein is not a threat to anyone and that his crimes were relatively minor.

"Al is probably at the way far end of having done anything serious," Balash said, questioning the merits of the civil suit. "I don't know where the damages are."

But the boy's mother said her son has been deeply affected, in part because other families from the troop accused him of lying or "hallucinating" about the abuse. He refuses to go out in public and is now tutored at home, she said.

"He's not the person he was before," she said."

[artemis]

"Ohio man accused of prostituting adopted boy

TROY, Ohio (AP) — A 10-year-old boy shook when asked about being prostituted to two other men by an adoptive father who regularly had sex with him, according to police, who said the boy was fearful of talking because he didn't want to be taken from his home or separated from his new siblings.

The adoptive father has been charged with raping three boys in his care and compelling prostitution by hiring the 10-year-old out for sex. He and two other men remained in jail Thursday on rape charges.

Federal and local law enforcement officials said they're widening the investigation into child sexual exploitation allegations against the father, who worked out of his home as an insurance claims adjuster. His name is being withheld by The Associated Press to protect the children's identities.

Troy police said they impounded the father's truck and seized four laptops from the home and a video camera and two wooden paddles from the master bedroom.

School officials said the man had recently withdrawn the three adopted children from school, saying he would home school them. A neighbor said he had no idea anything lurid might be going on in the home.

"You don't know what goes on inside people's homes," said neighbor Ed Rogers, who had lived across the street from the man the past five years in a neighborhood lined with single-story ranch homes, typical in this working class city of 25,000 people about 20 miles north of Dayton. "I'll never look at that house the same way again. I'll just look at it with sickness."

The man at the center of the investigation is a longtime Troy resident who had been involved in a local youth basketball program. Police Capt. Chris Anderson said police so far haven't found any signs of any inappropriate behavior with other children, even as calls poured in from worried parents.

"Shock and disbelief," Anderson said of the community's reaction.

Rogers and his wife, Sherry, said the man was something of a loner but would chit-chat when out mowing his lawn or when the kids were playing outside. Sherry Rogers recalled Thursday that his blinds were usually drawn shut at his home, a few blocks from an elementary school.

Police said they had hadn't found any records of past criminal charges against the man. He had adopted three children, including a 9-year-old girl, and was in the processing of adopting the fourth who lived with him.

The children came from Texas, where state officials said Thursday they have been reviewing their records but had found nothing out of the ordinary or outside of procedures, which include background checks, and parental training.

"We're sick about the results, but it's not that the process was not followed," said Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the Texas family services agency. "This appears to be a tragic but isolated incident."

Ohio children's services officials said they were also reviewing the adoptions, handled through a private agency certified by the state. Ohio spokesman Ben Johnson said the adoptive father was first certified as a foster parent in Miami County in 2005. He said Ohio and Texas officials were in communication about the case.

The case comes as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Attorney General Mike DeWine have made investigating human trafficking and exploitation of minors a priority.

"This is a horrible situation," DeWine said. "It's always shocking whenever you have children who are abused, and when children are sexually abused ... this is so reprehensible."

An undercover detective in Franklin County, part of a state task force, talked online with the adoptive father, who said he would arrange sex with a 10-year-old boy, Troy police said. He had been led to the adoptive father by another man who had posted a Craigslist ad wanting "taboo" sex, police said.

The adoptive father was going to meet the undercover detective at a McDonald's in a nearby city, but police moved in two days before the scheduled meeting, according to records. They confronted the man with text messages and online communications about arranging sex with the boy, police said in a case report filed in court.

Federal and state prosecutors and investigators and police from three Ohio cities were meeting to discuss how to proceed. The FBI said it was pursuing federal sexual exploitation charges.

The adoptive father was being held on $800,000 bond Thursday. The Miami County public defender's office didn't return a message.

Jason Zwick, 29, of the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek was being held in Miami County on a rape charge and $500,000 bond. A message was left for his attorney. Patrick Rieder, 31, was charged with four counts of child rape, the Montgomery County prosecutor's office said. Rieder was being held Thursday without bond in Montgomery County. No attorney information for him was immediately available.

The Montgomery County prosecutor on Thursday also charged the adoptive father with one count of child rape and four counts of complicity to commit child rape, based on an allegation of sexual assault in Rieder's Dayton home. Prosecutor's spokesman Greg Flannagan declined to discuss details of the new charges, filed in addition to the earlier Miami County charges."

[artemis]

"Protesters: Village Voice helps sell kids for sex

NEW YORK (AP) — The son of Norman Mailer joined a protest Thursday against the Village Voice, the New York City weekly his late father co-founded that's now accused of running ads peddling underage prostitutes.

John Buffalo Mailer, 33, an actor and writer, marched with about 100 protesters from a park to the Voice's East Village offices on Cooper Square. They want the weekly's parent company to shut down its Backpage.com adult classified section, which they say includes ads linked to child sex-trafficking.

"This was once a progressive paper, a people's paper, and to see it lose its credibility is heartbreaking," Mailer told The Associated Press. "He would not have approved of this at all."

One sign read: "Village Voice — Stop Profiting from Sex Trafficking."

The Phoenix-based Village Voice Media, which operates the paper, said Backpage.com cooperates with law enforcement, reports potential sexual exploitation of children and uses such tools as an automated filter system and manual reviews to detect and prevent sex trafficking.

"The realities and complexity of human trafficking and sexual exploitation are such that to announce that a single website — Backpage.com or other — is the primary source of the scourge and therefore holds the cure to this horrendous problem is not only unsupported but irresponsible," said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media.

The Rev Galen Guengerich, senior pastor of Manhattan's All Souls Unitarian church, said he believes there's another reason the ads appear in the paper:

"It's all about the money," he said.

He said the adult ads boost the finances of a publication that's been struggling to survive in recent years. He said, "It's ironic that at its beginning, the Voice did exactly what we're doing today" — opposing corruption and social wrongdoing.

"Now, they're defending a revenue stream," he said.

Protesters set up a pile of children's sneakers.

"These are for the girl who should have been walking in these shoes, but isn't," said Guengerich, holding up a pair. "We hear the silent cries of those who have been used and discarded."

The coalition of protesters — religious leaders, activists and politicians — delivered a petition signed by almost a quarter of a million people demanding that Village Voice Media stop running the ads.

Opposition to them started last year. In August, a group of attorneys general from across the country wrote a letter to Backpage.com saying its efforts to curtail the ads had failed.

"While Backpage.com professes to have undertaken efforts to limit advertisements for prostitution on its website, particularly those soliciting sex with children, such efforts have proven ineffective," the prosecutors said.

They said that over three years, they had tracked more than 50 instances, in 22 states, of charges filed against those trafficking or attempting to traffic minors on the site.

In some cases, adults are pictured but minors are substituted at the point of sale in a grossly illegal transaction, the prosecutors said.

Several New York City Council members have introduced a resolution asking Village Voice Media to close down the adult section being used as a "platform to traffic minors for sex."

Such classifieds often use veiled words like "petite" and other codes to signal underage sex, said one protester, Katrina Eugenia, 24, a photographer and painter.

Thursday's rally was organized by Groundswell, the social action initiative of the New York-based Auburn Theological Seminary, which trains Presbyterian clergy."

[artemis]

"Strictly Baby Disco: Inside the highly competitive world of pre-teen dancing (where children collapse with exhaustion)"

*Channel 4 documentary highlights the surreal world of child disco dancing
*Teacher describes students as young as nine as: 'Lazy, lazy, lazy'
*Doctor tells mother that her daughter's illness was stress-related

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2128692/Strictly-Baby-Disco-Inside-highly-competitive-world-pre-teen-dancing-children-collapse-exhaustion.html

[artemis]

"The designer baby factory: Eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans, sperm from wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women

Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies.

The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking — in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.

They are all uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages — and given the emotional turmoil that awaits them, one would have thought the very last thing they would wish to do is spend their enforced nine months of confinement here gazing upon images of maternal bliss.

Nominally, this forlorn place is a care home for surrogate mothers — at least that is how it is described by the company that runs it, Wyzax Surrogacy Consultancy, which is cashing in on India’s booming new babies-for-sale business.

It boasts of being the country’s first ‘one-stop shop for outsourced pregnancy’. In truth, though, it is nothing less than a baby factory; the end of a grim production line on which children are being designed to order for wealthy couples, mainly from Western countries including Britain, as if they were custom-built cars.

Indeed, as I have discovered during an eye-opening three-week investigation into India’s burgeoning, billion-dollar surrogacy industry, the motor-manufacturing analogy is all too apt.

For under an astonishing — and many will think nightmarishly futuristic — programme devised to make the most efficient use of resources, or ‘optimise’ their baby producing system, as they put it, Wyzax and their partner agencies now source and assemble the ‘components’ of some babies in a variety of different countries before flying the resulting embryo to India to be implanted in the surrogate.

According to the Delhi-based agency’s whizz-kid young bosses, Vivek Kohli and Jagatjeet Singh, they do this for a small but growing number of clients — about 15 per cent — who, for various reasons, don’t wish to use Indian eggs or an Indian fertility clinic, or even set foot in India until they take delivery of the baby they have ordered.

For all their apparent desperation to start families, these so called ‘IPs’, or intended parents, have also become ever-more demanding in their specifications; many want babies who emanate from a gene pool which maximises the possibility that they will not only resemble them but have, say, blond hair and blue eyes (and hopefully be attractive, sporty and intelligent into the bargain).

Kohli and Singh have therefore devised a ‘protocol’ that works roughly like this: after careful screening for genetic illnesses and an IQ test, attractive young female egg donors from countries such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Belarus are advertised in an online catalogue for prospective parents to browse.

In Eastern Europe, there are all too many hard-up women willing to endure fertility treatment, a long flight to California or Boston, and an uncomfortable operation under anaesthetic to sell their eggs for up to £750 a batch.

And as human eggs cannot be frozen and transported, and there are few surrogacy clinics or wombs available for rent in Eastern Europe, these donors travel, at the height of their monthly cycle, to the United States, where the eggs are extracted and fertilised with the father’s sperm (which can be transported, frozen, from his country of residence, and stored indefinitely).

Lesbian couples or couples where the male partner is infertile can use donor sperm, which is widely available in America and some European countries.

Another advantage of creating babies in a U.S. laboratory is that many couples have a preference for gender, and the ‘sexing’ of test-tube babies is permitted in some states there. It is banned in India, where the preference for sons drives many to female infanticide.

Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style ‘global baby’ boom.

Once created, the embryos are frozen to minus 196c, placed in liquid nitrogen canisters resembling small milk-churns, then flown 8,000 miles from the U.S. to cities such as Delhi and Bombay, where they are implanted.

Here, though, the comparison to a car production line ends. As I saw when visiting the ‘baby factory’, the women who incubate and hatch these identikit children would be better compared to brood mares.

They are so desperate to feed, clothe and educate their own families that they are prepared to risk being shunned by their husbands and communities for a fee of up to £4,000; an amount they wouldn’t earn in ten years working in their traditional jobs as domestic servants. All they need do to reap this vast sum — or so these often illiterate souls are told when they make agreements often put together by shady fixers — is to lie around watching TV all day, eating nutritious food they would never ordinarily be able to afford, and be dosed with vitamins and hormones.

Oh, yes, and they must hand over their white, blue-eyed babies (often delivered prematurely by Caesarean section to minimise the risk of perinatal complications) without so much as one, brief parting cuddle — to ensure there is no danger of them bonding.

How does it feel to be carrying a child destined to be removed from her and handed to a foreign couple she will never meet, I ask 25-year-old surrogate Pakhi, whose much older husband recently died of a heart attack, leaving her to care for their five-year-old daughter in penury.

‘I haven’t told my neighbours in the village, only my close family know,’ she says, grinning with embarrassment. ‘I try not to think about whose baby I’m having. If I see the baby I think I’ll be sad, but if I don’t see it, I think I won’t.’

Uneasy with her answer, one of the agency staff interjects snappily. ‘I’m telling you — they are not very much emotionally attached with the babies. They are mentally prepared and they’ll get their money, and that’s it.’

Like all the major players in the lucrative surrogacy industry — the fertility gurus, recruitment agents, and egg donor companies — Wyzax is flourishing for a variety of reasons that make India the destination of choice for many desperate western couples.

Whereas commercial surrogacy is illegal in most European countries, including Britain, in India it is not only permitted but tacitly encouraged and regulated only by an ill-enforced code of practice, not by law. A new surrogacy bill is being discussed, but is years away from the statute books.
Starting at just £15,000, package prices for a baby here are also up to five times cheaper than in the United States.

An increasing proportion of clients are gay couples — though as homosexuality was only recently decriminalised in India, and remains widely taboo, I was urged not to tell the surrogates I met that they might be carrying babies for same-sex parents.
During my visit to the ‘factory’, however, the sheer confusion that can occur when babies are created and bought on demand became farcically apparent.

As I spoke to Rahima, who is staying there with her children, aged two and three months, she told me how she was recently introduced to the Israeli father of the twins she is expecting. In fact, I later discovered, this man was a Tel Aviv agency boss visiting the ‘factory’.

Wyzax bosses told me they had discussed a possible partnership deal with Bourn Hall, the world-renowned, Cambridge-based fertility centre where IVF pioneers Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards created the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978.

Although the clinic has recently opened two branches in India which offer surrogacy, a spokeswoman categorically denied they had any involvement with this so-called ‘one-stop shop’.

Bourn Hall says its new clinics will serve childless Indians, not foreigners, and doubtless they will be run to its exacting moral and ethical standards; would that the same could be said for all India’s surrogacy practitioners.

During my inquiries among companies who offer such services, I uncovered some deeply disquieting practices, such as the termination of unwanted pregnancies that can occur when clients pay a premium for multiple embryos to be implanted to maximise the chances of conception. If too many embryos develop, some are then selectively terminated.

Euphemistically, the Indians call this ‘reduction’. Many would call it abortion, even though it takes place only a couple of weeks into the pregnancy.

I was also told how imported sperm and embryo canisters are sometimes ‘mistakenly’ opened by customs officers, so that the contents thaw and have to be destroyed. The potential for mistakes is terrifying.

Take the Canadian couple who used one such agency to have a family. They were denied a passport for one of their twins after a DNA test — compulsory under their government’s law — revealed they had been duped and the baby had been fathered by someone else.

Another current example of how wrong these Brave New World baby-making arrangements can go is illustrated by the Kafkaesque legal nightmare that has beset a gay British marketing consultant and his partner. Their case is quietly rumbling on in a British court.

When the two men — one in his 30s, the other in his 40s — decided to start a family, they prepared meticulously, checking many of the country’s 600-plus clinics before choosing the family-run Kiran Infertility Centre, hundreds of miles from Delhi in Hyderabad.

‘Ironically, one of the reasons that attracted us to it was that it seemed more ethical and less hard-sell than the others,’ one of them told me from their West Country home this week.
They used a donor whose eggs were fused with one of the men’s sperm so that he could be the biological father.

Soon afterwards they were told, to their delight, that their 30-year-old surrogate (whom they opted not to meet) was pregnant with twins.

They had agreed to pay the clinic about £20,000 — some £4,000 of which was to go to the surrogate — and in June last year, when they were handed two beautiful, healthy sons, it seemed a cheap price to pay for such unbridled joy.

By then the warning bells had already sounded, however. They say their embryologist Dr Sekhar Samit got the date of conception wrong meaning they were not in Hyderabad at the time of the birth as planned, and only discovered that the most momentous event of their lives had taken place when they checked their email.

They flew to India and met their babies, but it was only when they applied for the UK passports they needed to take the boys home, and the British court order that establishes them as legal parents, that their troubles really began.

As Kiran claimed to have handled a good number of British cases, and to know how to circumvent red-tape, the couple had paid an extra £1,500 for their legal services — only to be told by the British High Commission (who were extremely unhelpful, they say) that they had dealt with this clinic just once previously.

They had to wait for three worrying months in India before the passports were finally issued. But worse was in store when they went to court in Britain and applied for the parental order, without which the birth mother remains the babies’ legal guardian in British law.

Before issuing this vital order, the court must be presented with a document signed by the surrogate, saying she relinquishes all rights to the children, and, crucially, her signature must have been obtained at least six weeks after the birth, so she has had time to gather her emotions and consider her wishes.

But according to the babies’ biological father, the only document the clinic has provided was signed by the surrogate just a few days after she bore the twins — and despite repeated requests, and a costly legal wrangle, they still haven’t received the key piece of paper. Bizarrely, in fact, they say the last document they received from Dr Samit — who this week told me he runs the ‘biggest surrogacy practice in the country’ and is helping six British couples — was a stencilled one-finger salute (the Indian equivalent of a V-sign) sent by courier.

As a result, says the babies’ father, the twins are in ‘legal limbo’, and he and his partner have no lawful right to make any major parental decision about their care, such as whether they should have medical treatment or where they should be educated.

On April 23, when the case was last in court, the judge granted them a six-week extension to present the signed document. If they can’t, their only option will be to apply to adopt the twins. It could be a lengthy, costly, and emotionally draining process — but gauging from my inquiries into this extraordinary and unedifying fiasco this week, I fear it will be the couple’s only recourse.

For I discovered the address given for the surrogate was that of Dr Sesha Sai, the ‘caretaker/arranger’ who recruited her, no doubt for a handsome fee; and Dr Samit told me the surrogate had decamped back to her village, and couldn’t be traced.

He also claimed to have forwarded the requisite document months ago and said the British couple were out to smear his reputation because he had rejected their offer to supply him with would-be British parents — an allegation the babies’ father dismisses as ‘totally outrageous’.

If we believe Wyzax boss Jagatjeet Singh, agencies like his will end such wrangles by ‘systemising and optimising’ the surrogacy service in much the same way as Indian call-centres have for insurance and mobile phone providers.

‘Globalisation is here in the surrogacy business!’ he proclaimed, with a zealous look in his eye.

Much as one feels for the desperate couples who beat a path to his Delhi office, it is a deeply depressing thought. And the sale of cheap, designer babies, made from Ukrainian eggs and British sperm, concocted in an American lab, and spawned in a factory in the backstreets of India, should send chills down the spine."

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139708/The-designer-baby-factory-Eggs-beautiful-Eastern-Europeans-Sperm-wealthy-Westerners-And-embryos-implanted-desperate-women.html

[treegenus]

May 5, 2012 7:38:28 GMT -5 artemis said:

"The designer baby factory: Eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans, sperm from wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women

Yes, I read this last week and thought "cattle" We're considered cattle by the ancient non-human PTB.

[artemis]

Making paedophilia acceptable:

"Viewing child pornography online not a crime: New York court ruling

In a controversial decision that is already sparking debate around the country, the New York Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that viewing child pornography online is not a crime.

"The purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York," Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick wrote in a majority decision for the court.

The decision came after Marist College professor James D. Kent was sentenced to prison in August 2009 after more than 100 images of child pornography were found on his computer's cache.

Whenever someone views an image online, a copy of the image's data is saved in the computer's memory cache.

The ruling attempts to distinguish between individuals who see an image of child pornography online versus those who actively download and store such images, MSNBC reports. And in this case, it was ruled that a computer's image cache is not the same as actively choosing to download and save an image.

"Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law," Ciparick wrote in the decision.

See a copy of the court's full ruling on the child pornography decision.

The court said it must be up to the legislature, not the courts, to determine what the appropriate response should be to those viewing images of child pornography without actually storing them. Currently, New York's legislature has no laws deeming such action criminal.

As The Atlantic Wire notes, under current New York law, "it is illegal to create, possess, distribute, promote or facilitate child pornography." But that leaves out one critical distinction, as Judge Ciparick stated in the court's decision.

"ome affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen," Ciparick wrote. "To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of (state law) to conduct—viewing—that our Legislature has not deemed criminal."

The case originated when Kent brought his computer in to be checked for viruses, complaining that it was running slowly. He has subsequently denied downloading the images himself."

[artemis]

"Insight: German sect victims seek escape from Chilean nightmare past

KREFELD, Germany (Reuters) - - Werner Schmidtke has a recurring nightmare: he is in a room full of boys strapped to metal beds, naked and blindfolded with wax plugs in their ears, being tortured by a man with an electric prod. Any boy who screams is plunged into a tub full of freezing water and given more electric shocks.

For Schmidtke, who is now 51, the scene is all too real. He was subjected to this treatment as a youngster in a building known as "Neukra" (short for "New Hospital" in German) in Colonia Dignidad, a secretive sect set up in central Chile in 1961 by Paul Schaefer, a German World War Two medic turned evangelical preacher.

To this day, Schmidtke does not know why he was among the boys singled out for the torture from among Schaefer's 300 German followers, who endured decades of virtual slavery until Schaefer fled the Chilean police in 1997. Schaefer was arrested in Argentina and died in a Santiago prison in 2010 aged 88.

Poor, badly educated, and physically and mentally traumatized, some 100 sect members drifted back to their roots in the area north of the German city of Duesseldorf where the sect was born and where state welfare offered them help.

To their horror, Schaefer's right-hand man, Hartmut Hopp, a doctor who received a five-year jail term in Chile in 2011 for his role in the abuse, also turned up there last May.

Hopp, 67, had skipped Chile before his final sentencing, and Chile wants him back. But the German constitution forbids the extradition of its own citizens.

So Schmidtke and about 120 other Colonia Dignidad survivors, backed by a German rights group, are now plaintiffs in a German investigation into Hopp, for aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of 25 children between 1993 and 1997. They plan to sue the Chilean and German states for failing to protect them despite decades of warnings about what was going on inside the fortified enclave.

Schmidtke wants official acknowledgement of what happened, as well as money to help him and his wife Katharina - another Colonia Dignidad survivor - raise their two young daughters.

"The people of Germany have a right to know what happened too," said Schmidtke in his tidy flat, which features two canaries singing in a cage, artificial flowers and a print of an Alpine landscape.

When Reuters tried to talk to Hopp at his home in Krefeld town centre, he called the police.

Hopp's lawyer, Helfried Roubicek, also declined to be interviewed. But he wrote in an email that Hopp was cooperating with the court and that he might one day present the media with evidence that "the charges he is being investigated for by the prosecutors in Krefeld will, in the end, not be upheld under the German penal code and trial law". Asked to explain, he would only say his arguments would be based on "German law".

Chile filed an extradition request for Hopp last August. The Chilean judge leading the investigations into Colonia Dignidad said he could not discuss the case.

Germany's foreign ministry confirmed that Hopp could not be extradited but declined to comment further.

LOOKING FOR GOD

A smiling man with spectacles, a sparse beard and lank blond hair, Schmidtke's voice falters as he recounts his childhood of hard labor clearing woods and stony fields from dawn to dusk, often on a diet of bread and water.

He sailed to Chile in 1962 as a two-year-old, along with his mother and nine brothers and sisters, one of whom died as a child in Colonia Dignidad. His parents were convinced to sell the family home and follow Schaefer to South America by his powerful preaching and promise of a more godly life. Schmidtke's father stayed on in Germany to look after the sect's business interests and joined them in Chile eight years later.

On board the ship the children were separated from their mother, whom Schmidtke remembers as a "good-hearted woman", and were then kept apart like the other families in the enclave. In their new home, Schmidtke lived in the timber "Kinderhaus", or Children's House, where Schaefer had his private apartment. It was here that he first encountered the charismatic leader.

"One or two boys would be taken to his room every day, and one day I was called," Schmidtke told Reuters. "He sat me down on his bed and started to stroke me and ask me questions, to talk the way a father talks to his child, and I had no parents anymore.

"I have never forgotten it, my first dealings with Schaefer," he said. "I was about seven or eight. That is when the abuse and rape started."

Schaefer followed the teachings of American preacher William M. Branham, one of the founders of the "faith healing" movement in the 1940s and ‘50s. Born in a log cabin in Kentucky, Branham said he had been visited by angels and attracted tens of thousands of followers with sermons that advocated a strict adherence to the Bible, a woman's duty to obey her husband and apocalyptic visions, such as Los Angeles sinking beneath the ocean.

Former members of the sect say that Schaefer preached against "sins of the flesh." He also segregated men and women, they say, subjecting all but a few to enforced celibacy. Anyone who disobeyed was brutally punished, often by Schaefer personally.

When accusations of abuse and torture first cropped up in the media in the 1970s, Schaefer, known to his followers as "Permanent Uncle", urged sect members to stage hunger strikes in protest. Appearing frail and confused on his arrest, he was taken in a wheelchair to court where his lawyers said he was too ill for trial. He never acknowledged his crimes publicly, though in 2006 some sect members issued an apology through the Chilean press.

"I have to live every day with the consequences of what he did to me, to us," said Schmidtke.

He says he tried to escape the enclave five times, but always returned. "I had nobody to go to. As a child you need your parents to go and cry to and say 'I can't take any more'. But the only answer was to run away."

"ONE BIG FAMILY"

Public opinion in Germany turned against Schaefer in 1988, when two sect members who managed to escape via Canada - Georg and Lotti Packmor - gave testimony to a parliamentary hearing in the then-capital, Bonn, into whether German citizens were being forced to live in the enclave against their will.

When Lotti testified, she not only spoke about Schaefer but implicated Hopp, whom Schaefer had sent to medical school, and allowed to marry and own a car. As well as running the sect's hospital, Hopp had contact with officials and diplomats and when Packmor's first escape bid in 1980 failed, Hopp was one of those sent to fetch her. "Another peep out of you and you'll get an injection to keep you quiet," she recalled him saying.

In the secretive community, whose members were ruled by fear and ordered to spy on each other, it was not always easy to categorize victims and perpetrators. As a youngster, Hopp had also tried to flee, Packmor said, getting as far as Argentina.

Hopp, who travelled to Bonn to defend the sect at the 1988 hearings, testified that the group was "one big family" which in a quarter of a century had not had a single divorce or suicide, and whose members were free to leave at any time and were not subjected to forced labor.

"Despite that, there have always been people or groups who have slandered our society or individual members in an incredibly scandalous way by feeding misinformation to the press," Hopp said in his testimony to the Bundestag.

SECT DOCTOR

German prosecutors began to investigate Hopp after the Bundestag hearing, but it was not until Schaefer's downfall a decade later that Chilean authorities began investigating and arresting other leaders of the sect.

After Hopp was convicted of being an accomplice in the sexual abuse of children in Chile in 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison, he fled to Argentina and then to Krefeld.

About a dozen former sect members now attend an evangelical church in Krefeld run by Ewald Frank, who, like Schaefer before him, follows the teachings of Branham. Frank, who travels the world preaching, took legal action against local news outlets for reporting that his "Free Mission Krefeld" sheltered former sect leaders like Hopp. He said in a statement that his congregation shielded victims of the sect, not its leaders, and added in an email to Reuters: "For us, that unpleasant chapter for the time being is closed."

After Hopp's return to Germany, the doctor and his wife were hounded out of one home by neighbors who learned of his past as the "Sektenarzt" ("sect doctor"). Local authorities placed him in a new home for his own protection.

COLLABORATORS

In Germany, crimes against children must be prosecuted within 10 years of the victims reaching 18 years of age, which is why the charges Hopp is being investigated for - aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of 25 children of German and Chilean nationality - date from 1993 to 1997. The suspicion is that Hopp knew children in his care were being abused "but did nothing about it", said the prosecutor.

Krefeld's Chief Public Prosecutor Hans-Dieter Menden said the case will take time, not least because the legal documents between Chile and Germany require translation. He declined to speculate exactly how long.

The former sect members involved in the civil suit against the German and Chilean states are represented by Manfred Hempel, himself born in Colonia Dignidad in 1967.

Hempel escaped at the age of 20, when security briefly relaxed after Schaefer's flight to Argentina, and worked his way through school and university. He is now a lawyer at the Supreme Court in the Chilean capital Santiago.

Hempel and lawyers at the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights say they have catalogued testimonies of physical and sexual abuse, the use of electric shocks and of drugs to dope young sect members and keep them obedient.

On a visit to Berlin the softly-spoken lawyer said that his suit would charge "that nearly 300 German citizens were enslaved for decades and abused, and that the Chilean and German states connived with this and were collaborators with the (former Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet regime in this violence".

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1990, Chile's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a panel on political imprisonment and torture have documented the sect's links to the dictator's DINA secret police, which used it as a secret torture centre. In January, former DINA chief Manuel Contreras received a 10-year jail sentence for the 1976 kidnap of three left-wing opponents of the Pinochet regime - one of them a pregnant woman - last seen alive in Colonia Dignidad. Condemned with him were other DINA officers and sect leaders including Hopp, who could not be sentenced as he had already fled Chile.

FROM TORTURE TO TOURISM

Today Colonia Dignidad, rebranded as "Villa Baviera" in the late 1980s, wants to put its macabre history behind it and promote itself as a tourist destination. After Schaefer's death the Chilean state put the property under legal administration to make provisions for the payment of compensation to Schaefer's victims. It has a hotel, and offers horse riding and weddings. Ageing survivors of the sect now relax together watching television, strictly forbidden in Schaefer's time.

"The idea is for Villa Baviera to no longer be isolated but open to visitors all year long," said tourism manager Anna Schnellenkamp.

For Schmidtke, there is no forgetting. He says Hopp is a coward for failing to use his position to speak out about what was happening. He also believes Hopp knows where the sect's fortunes have been stashed offshore, money he says should go to Schaefer's victims.

"So many people have to live with the consequences of this evil regime and Dr. Hopp is one of the people most to blame," said Schmidtke.

For now Hopp, who keeps a low profile, is free to move about Germany or even leave the country, but will probably not do so "because he would run the risk of being extradited to Chile", prosecutor Menden said. "He's relatively safe here."

news.yahoo.com/insight-german-sect-victims-seek-escape-chilean-nightmare-120321764.html

[artemis]

"Ultra-Orthodox Shun Their Own for Reporting Child Sexual Abuse

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

“Try living for one day with all the pain I am living with,” Mr. Jungreis, spent and distraught, said recently outside his new apartment on Williamsburg’s outskirts. “Did anybody in the Hasidic community in these two years, in Borough Park, in Flatbush, ever come up and look my son in the eye and tell him a good word? Did anybody take the courage to show him mercy in the street?”

A few blocks away, Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, said her community had failed her too. In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23, too old to file charges under the state’s statute of limitations, they returned the man to teaching.

“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

Keeping to Themselves

The New York City area is home to an estimated 250,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews — the largest such community outside of Israel, and one that is growing rapidly because of its high birthrate. The community is concentrated in Brooklyn, where many of the ultra-Orthodox are Hasidim, followers of a fervent spiritual movement that began in 18th-century Europe and applies Jewish law to every aspect of life.

Their communities, headed by dynastic leaders called rebbes, strive to preserve their centuries-old customs by resisting the contaminating influences of the outside world. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now argue that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and consider publicly airing allegations against fellow Jews to be chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name.

There are more mundane factors, too. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews want to keep abuse allegations quiet to protect the reputation of the community, and the family of the accused. And rabbinical authorities, eager to maintain control, worry that inviting outside scrutiny could erode their power, said Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish studies at Queens College.

“They are more afraid of the outside world than the deviants within their own community,” Dr. Heilman said. “The deviants threaten individuals here or there, but the outside world threatens everyone and the entire structure of their world.”

Scholars believe that abuse rates in the ultra-Orthodox world are roughly the same as those in the general population, but for generations, most ultra-Orthodox abuse victims kept silent, fearful of being stigmatized in a culture where the genders are strictly separated and discussion of sex is taboo. When a victim did come forward, it was generally to rabbis and rabbinical courts, which would sometimes investigate the allegations, pledge to monitor the accused, or order payment to a victim, but not refer the matter to the police.

“You can destroy a person’s life with a false report,” said Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a powerful ultra-Orthodox organization, which last year said that observant Jews should not report allegations to the police unless permitted to do so by a rabbi.

Rabbinic authorities “recommend you speak it over with a rabbi before coming to any definitive conclusion in your own mind,” Rabbi Zweibel said.

When ultra-Orthodox Jews do bring abuse accusations to the police, the same cultural forces that have long kept victims silent often become an obstacle to prosecutions.

In Brooklyn, of the 51 molesting cases involving the ultra-Orthodox community that the district attorney’s office says it has closed since 2009, nine were dismissed because the victims backed out. Others ended with plea deals because the victims’ families were fearful.

“People aren’t recanting, but they don’t want to go forward,” said Rhonnie Jaus, a sex crimes prosecutor in Brooklyn. “We’ve heard some of our victims have been thrown out of schools, that the person is shunned from the synagogue. There’s a lot of pressure.”

The degree of intimidation can vary by neighborhood, by sect and by the prominence of the person accused.

In August 2009, the rows in a courtroom at State Supreme Court in Brooklyn were packed with rabbis, religious school principals and community leaders. Almost all were there in solidarity with Yona Weinberg, a bar mitzvah tutor and licensed social worker from Flatbush who had been convicted of molesting two boys under age 14.

Justice Guston L. Reichbach looked out with disapproval. He recalled testimony about how the boys had been kicked out of their schools or summer camps after bringing their cases, suggesting a “communal attitude that seeks to blame, indeed punish, victims.” And he noted that, of the 90 letters he had received praising Mr. Weinberg, not one displayed “any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgment for these young victims, which, frankly, I find shameful.”

“While the crimes the defendant stands convicted of are bad enough,” the judge said before sentencing Mr. Weinberg to 13 months in prison, “what is even more troubling to the court is a communal attitude that seems to impose greater opprobrium on the victims than the perpetrator.”

Silenced by Fear

Intimidation is rarely documented, but just two weeks ago, a Hasidic woman from Kiryas Joel, N.Y., in Orange County, filed a startling statement in a criminal court, detailing the pressure she faced after telling the police that a Hasidic man had molested her son.

“I feel 100 percent threatened and very scared,” she said in her statement. “I feel intimidated and worried about what the consequences are going to be. But I have to protect my son and do what is right.”

Last year, her son, then 14, told the police that he had been offered $20 by a stranger to help move some boxes, but instead, the man brought him to a motel in Woodbury, removed the boy’s pants and masturbated him.

The police, aided by the motel’s security camera, identified the man as Joseph Gelbman, then 52, of Kiamesha Lake, a cook who worked at a boys’ school run by the Vizhnitz Hasidic sect. He was arrested, and the intimidation ensued. Rabbi Israel Hager, a powerful Vizhnitz rabbi in Monsey, N.Y., began calling the mother, asking her to cease her cooperation with the criminal case and, instead, to bring the matter to a rabbinical court under his jurisdiction, according to the mother’s statement to the court. Rabbi Hager did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

“I said: ‘Why? He might do this again to other children,’ ” the mother said in the statement. The mother, who asked that The New York Times not use her name to avoid identifying her son, told the police that the rabbi asked, “What will you gain from this if he goes to jail?” and said that, in a later call, he offered her $20,000 to pay for therapy for her son if the charges were dropped.

On April 24, three days before the case was set for trial, the boy was expelled from his school. When the mother protested, she said, the principal threatened to report her for child abuse.

Prosecutors, against the wishes of the boy’s parents, settled the case on April 27. Mr. Gelbman was given three years’ probation after pleading guilty to endangering the welfare of a child.

Mr. Jungreis, the Williamsburg father, had a similar experience. He first suspected that his son was being molested after he came home with blood in his underwear at age 12, and later was caught touching another child on the bus. But, Mr. Jungreis said, the school principal warned him to stay silent. Two years later, the boy revealed that he had been molested for years by a man he saw at a mikvah, a ritual bath that observant Jews visit for purification.

Mr. Jungreis, knowing the prohibition on calling secular authorities, asked several rabbis to help him report the abuse, but, he said, they told him they did not want to get involved. Ultimately, he found a rabbi who told him to take his son to a psychologist, who would be obligated to notify law enforcement. “That way you are not the moser,” he said the rabbi told him, using the Hebrew word for informer. The police arrested Meir Dascalowitz, then 27, who is now awaiting trial.

Prosecution of intimidation is rare. Victims and their supporters say that is because rabbinical authorities are politically powerful; prosecutors say it is because there is rarely enough evidence to build a criminal case. “The intimidation often works, at least in the short run,” said Laura Pierro, the head of the special victims unit at the Ocean County prosecutor’s office in New Jersey.

In 2010, Ms. Pierro’s agency indicted Shaul Luban for witness tampering: he had sent a threatening text message to multiple recipients, urging the Orthodox Jewish community of Lakewood, N.J., to pressure the family of an 11-year-old abuse victim not to cooperate with prosecutors. In exchange for having his record cleared, Mr. Luban agreed to spend about a year in a program for first-time offenders.

Mr. Luban and others “wanted the phone to ring off the hook to withdraw the complaint from our office,” the Ocean County prosecutor, Marlene Lynch Ford, said.

Threats to Advocates

The small cadre of ultra-Orthodox Jews who have tried to call attention to the community’s lack of support for sexual abuse victims have often been targeted with the same forms of intimidation as the victims themselves.

Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg of Williamsburg, for example, has been shunned by communal authorities because he maintains a telephone number that features his impassioned lectures in Yiddish, Hebrew and English imploring victims to call 911 and accusing rabbis of silencing cases. He also shows up at court hearings and provides victims’ families with advice. His call-in line gets nearly 3,000 listeners a day.

In 2008, fliers were posted around Williamsburg denouncing him. One depicted a coiled snake, with Mr. Rosenberg’s face superimposed on its head. “Nuchem Snake Rosenberg: Leave Tainted One!” it said in Hebrew. The local Satmar Hasidic authorities banned him from their synagogues, and a wider group of 32 prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis and religious judges signed an order, published in a community newspaper, formally ostracizing him.

“The public must beware, and stay away from him, and push him out of our camp, not speak to him, and even more, not to honor him or support him, and not allow him to set foot in any synagogue until he returns from his evil ways,” the order said in Hebrew.

“They had small children coming to my house and spitting on me and on my children and wife,” Rabbi Rosenberg, 61, said in an interview.

Rabbi Tzvi Gluck, 31, of Queens, the son of a prominent rabbi and an informal liaison to secular law enforcement, began helping victims after he met troubled teenagers at Our Place, a help center in Brooklyn, and realized that sexual abuse was often the root of their problems. It was when he began helping the teenagers report cases to the police that he also received threats.

In February, for example, he received a call asking him to urge an abuse victim to abandon a case. “A guy called me up and said: ‘Listen, I want you to know that people on the street are talking about what they can do to hurt you financially. And maybe speak to your children’s schools, to get your kids thrown out of school.’ ”

Rabbi Gluck said he had helped at least a dozen ultra-Orthodox abuse victims bring cases to the Brooklyn district attorney in recent years, and each time, he said, the victim came under heavy pressure to back down. In a case late last year that did not get to the police, a 30-year-old molested a 14-year-old boy in a Jewish ritual bath in Brooklyn, and a rabbi “made the boy apologize to the molester for seducing him,” he said.

“If a guy in our community gets diagnosed with cancer, the whole community will come running to help them,” he said. “But if someone comes out and says they were a victim of abuse, as a whole, the community looks at them and says, ‘Go jump in a lake.’ ”

Traces of Change

Awareness of child sexual abuse is increasing in the ultra-Orthodox community. Since 2008, hundreds of adult abuse survivors have told their stories, mostly anonymously, on blogs and radio call-in shows, and to victims’ advocates. Rabbi-vetted books like “Let’s Stay Safe,” aimed at teaching children what to do if they are inappropriately touched, are selling well.

The response by communal authorities, however, has been uneven.

In March, for example, Satmar Hasidic authorities in Williamsburg took what advocates said was an unprecedented step: They posted a Yiddish sign in synagogues warning adults and children to stay away from a community member who they said was molesting young men. But the sign did not urge victims to call the police: “With great pain we must, according to the request of the brilliant rabbis (may they live long and good lives), inform you that the young man,” who was named, “is, unfortunately, an injurious person and he is a great danger to our community.”

In Crown Heights, where the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement has its headquarters, there has been more significant change. In July 2011, a religious court declared that the traditional prohibition against mesirah did not apply in cases with evidence of abuse. “One is forbidden to remain silent in such situations,” said the ruling, signed by two of the court’s three judges.

Since then, five molesting cases have been brought from the neighborhood — “as many sexual abuse-related arrests and reports as there had been in the past 20 years,” said Eliyahu Federman, a lawyer who helps victims in Crown Heights, citing public information.

Mordechai Feinstein, 19, helped prompt the ruling by telling the Crown Heights religious court that he had been touched inappropriately at age 15 by Rabbi Moshe F. Keller, a Lubavitcher who ran a foundation for at-risk youth and whom Mr. Feinstein had considered his spiritual mentor.

Last week, Rabbi Keller was sentenced in Criminal Court to three years’ probation for endangering the welfare of a child. And Mr. Feinstein, who is no longer religious, is starting a campaign to encourage more abuse victims to come forward. He is working with two prominent civil rights attorneys, Norman Siegel and Herbert Teitelbaum, who are asking lawyers to provide free assistance to abuse victims frustrated by their dealings with prosecutors.

“The community is a garden; there are a lot of beautiful things about it,” Mr. Feinstein said. “We just have to help them weed out the garden and take out the things that don’t belong there.”

[artemis]

"Scandal of care firms that failed to protect girls from grooming: Teenager in children's home died from overdose after being targeted for sex

A network of private children’s homes was under fire last night over failures to protect youngsters from street grooming gangs.

As MPs accused the firms – which charge councils over £250,000 for each troubled youngster – of letting down vulnerable girls, Ofsted launched an investigation.

It came after a 15-year-old, who was meant to be receiving around the clock ‘solo’ care, went missing 19 times in three months for up to two weeks at a time.

Instead of trying to find her, they would resort to text messages asking: ‘When are you coming back?’

Staff had no idea that she was being groomed by a group of mainly Pakistani-born men until she handed them a note. It later transpired that 25 of the men sexually abused her in a single night.

Now it has emerged that another 15-year-old, who was placed at a solo home in Rochdale run by the same firm six years earlier, died of a heroin overdose after she too was groomed for sex.

The following year the company’s founders sold it to a group of private equity investors for £26million, who in turn sold it on for an undisclosed sum last month.

In the run-up to her death in 2003, Victoria Agoglia ran away from the terraced house 21 times in the space of two months, and on five occasions the police were asked to look for her.

Neighbours of the home – now closed – said she was picked up on the night she died by a car driven by Asian men.

Her grandmother yesterday told the Mail of her anger that lessons had still not been learned almost a decade later.

‘These care homes should be shut down because they are obviously not fulfilling their duty to these children,’ said Joan Agoglia, 66. ‘They are just brushing the problem under the carpet.’

Mohammed Yaqoob, 51, was later jailed for three-and-a-half years after admitting supplying the drug that killed Victoria.

Earlier this week, nine members of a Rochdale-based gang were jailed for a total of 77 years for grooming vulnerable young girls for sex.

Figures released last night reveal there are 343 solo care homes across England, many charging councils almost ten times more than the annual fees at Eton.

Often based in suburban houses, they are registered as independent boarding schools, providing lessons as well as residential care.

One of the victims of the grooming gang had been sent 200 miles by Essex County Council to a home in Rochdale, run by Green Corns.

An Ofsted report in February 2010 recommended workers there receive ‘specific training in areas such as drug awareness and sexual exploitation’.

Twice more over the next 12 months Ofsted repeated its warning, saying it had not been acted upon.

By then, the girl had been moved to another part of the country after describing her abuse in a heartbreaking note to staff.

She wrote: ‘Asians pick me up. They get me drunk, they give me drugs, they have sex with me and tell me not to tell anyone. I want to move.’
Ofsted has now launched an ‘urgent’ investigation which is likely to place all such homes under the spotlight.

In 2004, Green Corns was sold to private equity group 3i for £26million, forming part of its Continuum Care and Education Group, where annual operating profits were £2.7million.

Last month Continuum was sold for an undisclosed sum to Advanced Childcare Ltd which claims to be Britain’s largest provider of specialist children’s care and education.

It last night refused to comment on whether staff at the home warned by Ofsted had now been given training in combating sexual exploitation.

Tim Loughton, the children’s minister, said yesterday he was launching a ‘clampdown’ on councils sending children huge distances from where they grew up.

Last night, Ann Coffey, chairman of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Children Missing from Care, said: ‘These homes are paid thousands of pounds a week to care for these children, and some are manifestly failing to do this.’

Enver Soloman, of the Children’s Society, said: ‘Some of those running these homes are private companies who are ultimately about making profit.

‘The question is whether the providers of these care homes have the best interest of the child at the heart of their operation.’ "[/SIZE]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2142697/Scandal-care-firms-failed-protect-girls-grooming-Teenager-childrens-home-died-overdose-targeted-sex.html

[hotman637]

All the lies,confusion and denail about religion boil down to one fact,religion is MAGIC!! It is just as much magic as satanism and witchcraft(if not more so).So of course you get the same abuses.These religions say magic is"bad" and we are"good".Magic is not"good"OR"bad"it is using"supernatural means to manipulate reality".Politics,technology,religion,music, etc.ALL use magic.If everyone just admitted they used magic then the world makes way more sense.
I am NOT justifing abuse.Magic is NOT the same as abuse.The religions tell us that to scare us into believing their agenda(THAT is a magic trick!!).