Court records refer to him simply, as Victim One. Outside of a four-and-a-half page section about him in the grand jury indictment of ex-Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, little else has been discussed about him publicly.

Last week, his mother (whom I will refer to as “Mother One”) removed him from Central Mountain High School in Mill Hall, Pa., where he was a senior and an all-star athlete. In an interview conducted last week, she explained why she pulled him from the school.

“They were not helpful,” Mother One said of the school’s administrators. “They wanted me to go home and forget about it.”

Mother One also alleges that since the Sandusky scandal erupted, fellow students and the high school’s football coach (who also serves as assistant principal) have all targeted her son with verbal attacks and threats of violence.

She also claims that the school’s principal tried to convince her and her son not to report their allegations against Sandusky to the police, and that as recently as this month, refused to treat threats of violence against her son by other students as credible.

Read more here.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote back in 2003:

When I first moved abroad at the age of 21, I quickly realized that I was, like most Americans, abysmally ignorant with regard to politics. I discovered – to my great dismay – that in my host country, most of the average people around me – shopkeepers, hairdressers, taxi-drivers – knew more about what was going on in the USA and the rest of the world than I did; a LOT more! I had no IDEA of the things that were going on that were common knowledge to other peoples in the world. And here, it wasn’t simply a matter of having a different opinion than others. It was a matter of an almost complete lack of INFORMATION within the very country that promotes democracy as the rule of an “informed citizenry.” I realized with striking clarity exactly how ignorant I was at that point, and I admitted it to myself. Further, I was embarrassed for myself and other Americans who were seen (rightly so) as equally ignorant and “in the dark” politically and culturally speaking. BUT, due to this embarrassment and realization of the extraordinary extent of my ignorance, I determined to do something about it.

But there are so many Americans who – when faced with similar situations, faced with their own ignorance – deny it aggressively. And generally, the “last word” for them is: “Oh, he/she doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about! They’re ‘foreigners’.” And that’s the key: “foreigners.”

“Foreigners” can’t possibly know anything because they aren’t American. And Americans, by default of having the most bombs on the planet, always “know” what’s up. Or, at the very least, their leaders do and we just don’t have to think about such things. That’s what we elect our leaders for, isn’t it? So they will handle all that boring and tedious political stuff and leave us alone to watch “Survivor” and the Super Bowl and wash our new SUV so that the Joneses can be green with envy!

And they leave it at that. It’s the preferred way to handle all such questions. Forget the entire issue of an “informed citizenry” and any possible outrage that citizens of the US are not only NOT informed, they are being deliberately DIS-informed!

They don’t even realize that “Survivor” is programming them to the very attitudes that are being displayed by their leaders – normalizing it, so to say – and at the present moment these attitude are being manifested in their own lives in a direct and terrifying way. For many in the US, their future is that there won’t be any more Super Bowls, and the SUV certainly doesn’t get enough gas mileage to get them far enough away from the terror that will confront them when they are “voted off the island” in the global game of “Survivor.”

Why does this condition exist? Why are so many people so susceptible to the “official culture” and the mass media propaganda? Why are so many people willing slaves to it? And why do some others – once the questions have been raised – begin to seek the knowledge that reveals the man behind the curtain?

Perhaps it is more than simply a matter of very clever and intense programming. Perhaps it is also a matter of the nature of a person?

LKJ: In recent times, I have considered many ideas in an attempt to answer this question. The members of the Quantum Future School have been engaged in studying psychopathy and pseudo-psychopathy for about two years now. This has certainly prepared most of us to be able to see the man behind the curtain, or, in this case, behind the “mask of sanity.” But it still doesn’t answer the question as to why psychopathic behavior seems to be so widespread in the US. (That is not to say that it doesn’t exist everywhere – that’s a given.)

Linda Mealey of the Department of Psychology at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, has recently proposed certain ideas in her paper: The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model. These ideas address the increase in psychopathy in American culture by suggesting that in a competitive society – capitalism, for example – psychopathy is adaptive and likely to increase. She writes:

I have thus far argued that some individuals seem to have a genotype that disposes them to [psychopathy].

[Psychopathy describes] frequency-dependent, genetically based, individual differences in employment of life strategies. [Psychopaths] always appear in every culture, no matter what the socio-cultural conditions. [...]

Competition increases the use of antisocial and Machiavellian strategies and can counteract pro-social behavior

Some cultures encourage competitiveness more than others and these differences in social values vary both temporally and cross-culturally.[...] Across both dimensions, high levels of competitiveness are associated with high crime rates and Machiavellianism.

High populaton density, an indirect form of competition, is also associated with reduced pro-social behavior and increased anti-social behavior. [...] [Mealey, op. cit.]

The conclusion is that the American way of life has optimized the survival of psychopaths with the consequence that it is an adaptive “life strategy” that is extremely successful in American society, and thus has increased in the population in strictly genetic terms. What is more, as a consequence of a society that is adaptive for psychopathy, many individuals who are NOT genetic psychopaths have similarly adapted, becoming “effective” psychopaths, or “secondary sociopaths.”

A lot of this reminds me of children of abusive parents who grow up to accept abuse as normal, becoming abusive to both themselves and others.  Read more here.

Networking site from Netherlands featuring members from around the world.

BBC reports:

International police led by a UK team say they shut down the largest internet paedophile ring yet discovered.

The global forum had 70,000 followers at its height, leading to 4,000 intelligence reports being sent to police across 30 countries.

The operation has so far identified 670 suspects and 230 abused children.

Detectives say 184 people have been arrested – 121 of them were in the UK. Some 60 children have been protected in the UK.

The three-year investigation, Operation Rescue, was led by investigators from the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

[Continues at BBC]

Armchair Subversive posts a long list of Republicans who have been charged, arrested, or even pleaded guilty to molesting children or teenagers and related crimes:

• Republican aide, Alan David Berlin, was arrested on charges that he wanted to engage in sex acts with a 15 year old boy while dressed in a panda costume.

• Fox News producer Aaron Bruns pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years for possessing child pornography.

• Republican activist and former presidential campaign chairman Jeffrey Claude Bartleson was arrested on charges of sexually molesting a 5-year old boy.

• Republican activist and former chairman of the Christian County Republicans Royce Fessenden pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree child molestation and one count of second-degree statutory sodomy.

• Republican parole board officer and former legislator George Christian (Chris) Ortloff pleaded guilty to attempting to lure 11- and 12-year-old girls to have sex with him.

Read the rest of the list here. Meanwhile, TripMarz555 posts a much shorter list of Democrats charged with sex crimes at SodaHead:

Sen. Daniel Inouye. The 82-year-old Hawaii Democrat was accused in the 1990s by numerous women of sexual harassment.

Former Rep. Gus Savage. The Illinois Democrat was accused of fondling a Peace Corps volunteer in 1989 while on a trip to Africa.

Rep. Barney Frank. The outspoken Massachusetts Democrat hired a male prostitute who ran a prostitution service from Frank’s residence in the 1980s.

Former Sen. Brock Adams. The late Washington Democrat was forced to stop campaigning after numerous accusations of drugging, assault and rape, the first surfacing in 1988.

Former Rep. Fred Richmond. This New York Democrat was arrested in 1978 for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old. He remained in Congress and won re-election—before eventually resigning in 1982 after pleading guilty to tax evasion and drug possession.

Former Rep. John Young. The late Texas Democrat increased the salary of a staffer after she gave in to his sexual advances. The congressman won re-election in 1976 but lost two years later.

Former Rep. Wayne Hays. The late Ohio Democrat hired an unqualified secretary reportedly for sexual acts. Although he resigned from Congress.

Former Rep. Mel Reynolds. The Illinois Democrat was convicted of 12 counts of sexual assault with a 16-year-old.

Sen. Teddy Kennedy. The liberal Massachusetts senator testified in defense of nephew accused of rape, invoking his family history to win over the jury in 1991.

Read the rest of the list here. I’m sure there are more, but notice most of those crimes don’t involve underage people. (If there’s a longer list somewhere, I haven’t been able to find it.)

Armchair Subversive claims “Republican Values Create Child Molesters.” If Republicans are indeed more likely to molest children, that’s still a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy–for instance, child molesters may simply tend to be more attracted to the Republican party for some reason.

But if Republicans are indeed more likely to molest children, is there something about the idolization of money that mixes well with the desire to literally fuck the innocent and less powerful?

Lloyd deMause

From Chapter 9 of Lloyd deMause’s The Origins of War in Child Abuse:

After half a century of primary source research into the history of childrearing, I and over a hundred other childhood historians have been unable to find a single mother who did not badly beat and torture their children prior to modern times. I have long offered a prize to anyone who could find actual evidence of just one mother prior to the 18th century who would not today be thrown into jail for badly abusing their children.

The occasional reformers, like Saint Anselm, who sometimes questioned whether whipping children “day and night” was wise, did not raise any children themselves because they were ascetic. Despite the fact that Jesus nowhere says children should be beaten, Christians taught that He wanted them to beat the sins out of them continuously, from birth. Actually, the main reference Jesus makes to children was “suffer little children to come unto me … and he laid his hands on them — that is, he exorcised the bad spirits out of them.”

The central rule of Christians toward children is simply never to give the child anything it wants. “Willfulness” was the cardinal sin, and the words “I want” were “impermissible” for which children were punished severely. Even babies had to be taught the only thing that mattered was what the adults wanted; as John Wesley put it, “Never, on any account, give a child anything that it cries for … If you give a child what he cries for, you pay him for crying.” That beating and torturing “sinful” children usually “did not work” was acknowledged by all — as one mother wrote of her first battle with her four-month-old infant: “I whipped him until he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.” If the parents’ regular beating of their children still did not result in obedience, the child should be “put to death [if they] curse or smite their father or mother,” according for instance to a 1646 Massachusetts law. The only restriction sometimes mentioned by priests was that children should not be hit “about the face and head with fire shovels … hit him upon the sides with the rod, he shall not die thereof.”

If you want to believe deMause is making stuff up, don’t read the complete chapter because it has footnotes for almost everything (232, to be exact).

For comparison, here’s what deMause has to say about Islam.

When asked to define abuse in an 2005 interview with Borut Jesenovec, Alice Miller stated:  “Abuse means to me using a person for whatever I want from her, him, without asking for their agreement, without respecting their will and their interests.  With children, it is very easy to do so, because they are loving, they trust their parents and most adults, and they don’t realize that they were abused, that their love had been exploited.” [from www.alice-miller.com].

Although this definition most obviously applies to extreme cases of abuse – such as overt sexual and physical abuse – I hold that it also applies to Alice Miller’s relationship with her daughter.  How could it not, considering that she herself has explained that she had not even explored her childhood at all by the time she had her own children, and thus was not aware of what her own unresolved and unmet childhood needs even were?  And when you consider that the mentally retarded are not even allowed to give their consent for so many adult activities, because of their limited intelligence and inherent dependency, as children they are often the most ripe for being exploited by people with unmet needs.  Now I grant, I am not stating that Alice Miller was in fact a full-blown monster with her daughter – but I am stating that on the metaphorical level, she was.  And until each of us heals from our own repressed traumas and thus are able to find mature, adult ways to meet our own needs, we will all inevitably exploit those over whom we wield power.  We may try to rationalize it as being “for the child’s own good” – to use Alice Miller’s classic phrase – and perhaps sometimes it is MORE good (or less bad) for the child than a different form of abuse might be, but the fact is, when the primary need being met is the parent’s, which it always is wherever the parent retains repressed and unresolved traumas, the behavior remains abusive of the child’s basic essence and needs.  And if Alice Miller’s son gave his consent to her and did not blame her for the abuses she perpetrated on him (because, after all, she was still ‘anti-blame’ when she wrote about her son in For Your Own Good), certainly her mentally retarded daughter was in less of a position to blame her.

Miller goes on writing about her relationship with her daughter:

The spontaneity with which my daughter expressed her childlike, innocent, affectionate nature at whatever age she happened to be, and her sensitivity to insincerity and disingenuousness in whatever form, gave my life new dimensions and new objectives. [Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, 1996 revised edition, p. xiii]

This again begs the basic questions of whose need was being met here – mother’s or daughter’s?  Miller clearly states that it was her own – as if this were obviously acceptable – but all abusers rationalize their abusive behavior of children.  That is the standard line, and in the milder cases our society doesn’t bat an eye.  Even recidivistic pedophiles sometimes get away with defending their overt molestations of children as being positive for the child – and point out that the child enjoyed it, or wanted it, or was gaining a “valuable” sexual education from it, or that it was “natural.”  Regardless, all abuse of children, from the most extreme to the most mild, violates the basic principle of not meeting the child’s needs.  And I guarantee that Alice Miller’s daughter’s was not born with the inherent need to give her mother’s life “new dimensions and objectives” and bless her abused mother with a “new opportunity for communication.”…

Where does this leave Amy Chua and her Tiananmen Square style of parenting?  Read more (of Mackler’s analysis of Miller) here.

The arrest of an Army sergeant (and Iraq veteran) who allegedly waterboarded his 4-year-old daughter for failing to recite the alphabet is sickening. Yet it may be the kind of news we must come to expect if, as a society, the United States determines that torture is an acceptable method of securing information and inducing obedience. Physical abuse of children is nothing new, of course,  in certain right-wing quarters, as Max Blumenthal reminded us by exposing the pedagogical sadism of Focus on the Family in Republican Gomorrah.

For a sergeant who tortures his child, however, the relevant model probably comes from somewhere high in the chain of command. At the center of today’s propaganda promoting the torture state are former Vice President Dick Cheney, his family and many of his friends, working through an organization called Keeping America Safe that is run by his daughter Liz Cheney. The financier behind that outfit is one Melvin Sembler, a curious character whose résumé indicates that he is all too familiar with the “enhanced interrogation” of children.

Sembler is best known as a Florida shopping center magnate and Republican fundraiser whose success in amassing funds for the Bush family won him two ambassadorial appointments. Such patronage is a sordid aspect of national politics, but seems trivial when compared with the truly dark side of Sembler’s biography. Long before he achieved prominence in national politics, he was the driving force in the “boot camp” movement that popularized the use of psychological and physical abuse of “troubled” children and teenagers.

His own creation was a federally funded outfit known as Straight, Inc., which eventually fell apart amid multiple lawsuits and accusations of torture by teenagers abused in its secretive facilities.

Read more here.

A new geographical study on the ancient historical origins of human violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological evidence, has just been published presenting substantial proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and loving than are most humans today – moreover, the study points to a dramatic climate change in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara and Asian Deserts, with attending famine, starvation and forced migrations which pushed the earliest humans into violent social patterns, a trauma from which we have not yet recovered in over 6000 years.

The study and book, titled SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World, by retired professor James DeMeo, Ph.D., is the culmination of years of library and field research on the subject. Professor DeMeo undertook the original research as a 7-year dissertation project at the University of Kansas, which was concluded in 1986. He has since put an additional decade of research into the subject. His study is unusual in that it presents the first world maps of human behavior, as developed from large anthropological, historical and archaeological data bases. DeMeo’s findings were also recently presented at a regional meeting of the AAAS, in Grand Junction, Colorado.

“There is no clear or unambiguous evidence for warfare or social violence anywhere on planet Earth prior to around 4,000 BC and the earliest evidence appears in specific locations, from which it firstly arose, and diffused outward over time to infect nearly every corner of the globe.” says DeMeo, who today directs his own private institute in rural Oregon. “A massive climate change shook the ancient world, when approximately 6000 years ago vast areas of lush grassland and forest in the Old World began to quickly dry out and convert into harsh desert. The vast Sahara Desert, Arabian Desert, and the giant deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia simply did not exist prior to c.4000 BC” DeMeo asserts, pointing to numerous studies in paleoclimatology – the study of ancient climates. “Something happened around 4000 BC which forced the drying-out of this vast desert region, which I call Saharasia, and the drier conditions created social and emotional havoc among developing human agricultural societies in these same regions.”

DeMeo’s maps show spreading centers for the origins of patriarchal authoritarian cultures within this same Saharasian global region – male-dominated, child-abusive, sex-repressive cultures with a great emphasis upon war-making and empire-building. DeMeo points to the work of the controversial natural scientist Wilhelm Reich to explain the patterns.

The Trauma of starvation

“Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which survivors rarely escape unscathed. A lot of people die, families are split apart, and babies and children are often abandoned, and suffer enormously. Starvation affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner. They shrink from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from the painful world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire brain and nervous system due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such starved children later get all the food and water they want, they are deeply scarred in an emotional-neurological manner which forever changes their behavior – specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of any impulse of a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions. Additionally, the child’s view of the mother, who could not protect or feed the child during the famine period, is thereafter colored with suspicion and anger. These attitudes and behaviors are deeply protoplasmic in nature, and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter what the climate, by social institutions which reflect the character structure of the average individual at any given period of time.”

As part of his project, DeMeo undertook a cross-cultural evaluation of Wilhelm Reich’s original ideas on human behavior. “Reich claimed humans became violent from two major causes: firstly from abusive and neglectful treatment of infants and children, and secondly from the repression of adolescent heterosexual feelings.” This latter consideration, DeMeo asserts, has gotten nearly no attention from specialists on child-abuse, given that our society still considers adolescent romance and pre-marital sex to be a bad thing. “Pre-marital, adolescent sexual romance is normal among the most peaceful cultures, but is always repressed in violent warlike cultures. It is an even more precise predictor of social and individual violence than is child-abuse.” Ideas such as these got Reich into hot water in the 1950s, DeMeo says, and his own work has similarly stirred up controversy.

Read more here.

See also:

• Did Societies Evolve To Be Corrupt?
• Pathocracy: Is Civilization the Creation of Psychopaths?
• Is Civilization Psychologically Damaging, or Just American Culture?

Stephanie Bigbee Fleming, left, and her mother, Patty Bigbee, right.

Hot on the heels of the mother who shook her baby to death so that she could play Farmville, a Florida woman wanted a car more than she wanted her baby, selling it for $9,000, according to Reuters:

A Florida woman was charged with trying to sell her infant son in order to pay for a new car, police said Tuesday.

The baby’s grandmother brokered the deal and initially demanded $75,000 but agreed to cut the price to $30,000 when told the prospective buyer could not get a bank loan, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said.

The mother of the eight-week-old boy, Stephanie Bigbee Fleming, 22, of Bradenton, Florida, was to receive $9,000 of the proceeds, the FDLE said.

“Fleming planned to purchase a new vehicle from the money received,” an FDLE spokeswoman said.

Fleming also needed money to pay court costs for an unrelated probation violation, the arrest documents said.

Fleming was arrested Tuesday. The grandmother, Patty Bigbee, 45, was arrested last week with her boyfriend Lawrence Works, 42, both of Holly Hill, Florida. All three were charged with the illegal sale of a child, and Bigbee was also charged with communications fraud, the department said…

[continues at Reuters]

A sixth grade primary school teacher is in hot water with parents and the local school board after complaints that he was using kisses and snot to punish his students.

The 59-year-old teacher at Ogi Elementary School in Iruma, Saitama Prefecture, apparently had three dice, one with sides marked with the words “hug” and ” forgiven,” another marked with “kiss,” “snot” and “forgiven” among others, and the third marked with “snot” and “forgiven.” Students who forgot to bring something to class were forced to roll one of the dice. The teacher has apparently admitted to kissing one boy and acting as if he would put snot on one girl. He nicknamed the dice the “sexual harassment dice.”

“I made the dice while playing with the children. The first two dice were for boys, and the third was for girls,” the teacher has told the Iruma Municipal Board of Education. “I apologize deeply for my complacent teaching method.”

The incident was discovered when parents complained to the school on Oct. 14. The school invited parents for a meeting on Oct. 25 and made a formal apology. The board of education has also issued an apology, stating, “We sincerely apologize to the children and parents for causing such an unpleasant experience.”

Many states across the country are taking laudable steps to enact measures that bolster administrators’ ability to protect students who face such harassment. However, despite the evidence supporting the need, right-wing lawmakers and activists insist that anti-bullying measures are nothing more than insidious tools of the “homosexual agenda”:

• The American Family Association of Michigan has spent years decrying a proposed anti-bullying measure as “a Trojan Horse to sneak [homosexual activists'] special rights agenda into law” and to “legitimize homosexual behavior” which is “a practice scientifically proven to result in a dramatically higher incidence of domestic violence, mental illness, illegal drug use, promiscuity, life-threatening disease, and premature death.” The bill “died in 2008 in the state Senate because senators could not agree” on whether to address bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the measure.
• In Minnesota, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer said he would not sign the anti-bullying Safe Schools For All bill because “I don’t want the government” instead of parents to be on “the front line of defense of our children.” Indeed, Emmer voted against and Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) vetoed the same bill in 2009 after the right-wing Minnesota Family Council pushed legislators to reject the bill in 2009 because it would “promote acceptance of homosexuality.”
• The right-wing Christian media ministry Focus on the Family is attacking an anti-bullying standard on the federal level. Insisting that bullying prevention is being “hijacked by activists” who are “politicizing or sexualizing the issue,” Focus on the Family’s Candi Cushman claims that the anti-bullying bill currently before Congress “cater[s] to a narrow political agenda” that “becomes a gateway for homosexuality promotion in school.” In their current back-to-school guide “equipping” parents with tools against the “sneaky” gay agenda, Cushman told parents to look out for bullying seminars, diversity lessons, and “cute little pictures of furry animals” as “red flags” signaling the “gay agenda.”

So does that make Republicans the equivalent of D student schoolyard bullies?  Read more here.

Loners and antisocial kids who reject other children are often bullied at school — an accepted form of punishment from peers as they establish social order. Such peer victimization may be an extreme group response to control renegades, according to a new study from Concordia University published in the Journal of Early Adolescence.

“For groups to survive, they need to keep their members under control,” says author William M. Bukowski, a professor at the Concordia Department of Psychology and director of its Centre for Research in Human Development. “Withdrawn individuals threaten the strong social fabric of a group, so kids are victimized when they are too strong or too antisocial. Victimization is a reaction to anyone who threatens group harmony.”

Bukowski notes that the word victimization is related to the word for sacrifice and speculates the term remains relevant in establishing modern dynamics among kids. “Peers who are victimized are sacrificed for the survival of the group.”

The study, which focused on 367 English-speaking kids enrolled in grades five and six at public schools in Montreal, was undertaken to gain better insight into what makes some kids popular while others are perceived as victims or bullies.

The research team focused on social versus physical aggression among kids. “Using aggression in ways that are acceptable by peers is critical in children keeping their social status and, in turn, their social dominance,” says Bukowski, noting physical attractiveness and personality traits could also influence peer standing. “We found dominant children used organized, instrumental types of relational aggression to position themselves.”

To ascertain whether kids were leaders, victims or bullies, Bukowski and his team asked participants — 176 boys and 191 girls — to rate same gender peers on 17 characteristics. Bullies, for instance, were characterized as kids “who says bad things behind other people’s backs; who purposely keep others out of their group; who tell friends they’ll stop liking them unless they do what they want.”

Alpha-kids were described as “someone who others kids usually follow; someone who is often a leader; someone who always get their own way.”

Victims, for their part, were described as “someone who gets hit or kicked by other kids; someone who gets beaten up by other kids; someone who gets ignored; someone who other kids say mean things about behind their back.”

Read more here.

We’ve been told school’s purpose is to prepare us for the workplace, right?  Apparently it’s true.  From Marge Mueller’s interview with family therapist Chauncey Hare:

Like child and spousal abuse 30 years ago, work abuse is still ignored by society.

“It’s everywhere and it’s highly denied,” Hare says. “Right now, there’s no way for a person to make the distinction between something that’s not work abuse and something that is—-until he or she goes through an enormous, highly traumatic situation.”

“In any organization that is authoritarian work abuse is prevalent. But because of denial people aren’t acknowledging it.”

Hare and co-author and wife Judith Wyatt, both licensed psychotherapists in San Francisco, coined the term work abuse in a 1988 report to the California legislature’s task force team on self-esteem. According to The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research’s statistics, 95 percent of all work organizations are authoritarian.

“That’s where work abuse happens” says Hare “In those 95% of organizations that are authoritarian.”

Four Types of Work Abuse

According to Hare, four types of work abuse exist. Neglectful or ongoing abuse occurs when employees’ basic needs are not met or they are blamed for expressing these needs. Ongoing abuse often happens in the midst of the other three types of work abuse.

In chronic scapegoating one person is chosen for abuse by the group. Everyone joins in as a way to vent negative feelings that can’t otherwise be addressed in the work system. If the scapegoat leaves the company, another employee usually assumes the scapegoat role.

With acute scapegoating one person receives the negative treatment–usually because the person’s behaviors don’t match group norms. The scapegoating stops when this employee leaves the organization.

Denial of due process, the fourth type of work abuse, occurs secondary to the other forms of abuse. With denial of due process the employer prevents or undermines appropriate means to resolve conflicts. Most work “horror stories” are cases of scapegoating resulting from unresolved conflicts.

Read more here.

Filmmaker, musician, and former psychotherapist Daniel Mackler sees an even bigger picture:

A traumatized child is safe to broken parents because he does not threaten their dishonest authority. Thus he earns his crumb of love. A traumatized student is safe to broken teachers because he does not question their unearned authority. Thus he earns his right to gain a false education.

A traumatized worker is safe to broken bosses because he follows their numbing orders. Thus he keeps his dead job and perpetuates a dead system.

A traumatized soldier is safe to a bloodthirsty military because he will mindlessly kill anyone when ordered. Thus he perpetuates grand horrors and retaliation in the world, which proves to the world hell-bent on violent revenge that his criminal presence is required.

A traumatized spouse is safe to broken partners because he never really looks them in the eye and utters those dangerous and honest truths that destroy false relationships. Thus he stays married, never has to be alone with himself, and earns society’s approval.

Mackler references traumatized soldiers.  The military’s suicides rate has been rising recently.  And that brings us back to the bullied kids I mentioned at the outset.  Read the other side of his equation here.

DURHAM, North Carolina — A grandmother who authorities say committed sexual acts with her grandson because she believed she needed to get a demon off him insisted she understood rejecting a plea offer could mean more than a decade in prison.

The woman made it clear she’d allow jurors to give thumbs up or down on what she did and didn’t do with her own child’s child. Toni Stowers-Moore wants a trial.

Addressing concern about the defendant’s sanity, Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens on Thursday ruled Stowers-Moore is competent to stand trial based on the findings of a certified forensic examiner. That trial is expected to start Monday.

Stowers-Moore, 52, is charged with statutory rape/sex offense in which the defendant is six years older than the victim, incest with a child and sexual battery. The crimes allegedly occurred between July 28, 2008 and Aug. 1, 2008, Durham Police Department spokeswoman Kammie Michael said. Stowers-Moore was arrested Aug. 28, 2008 for allegedly committing sexual acts on her grandson, who at the time was 15.

But the defendant, a former Durham Public Schools teacher assistant, said she was carrying out her religious duty by both having sex with and masturbating her grandson, Durham County District Attorney Tracey Cline said. According to Stowers-Moore, her grandson had a sexual demon on him, so, by having sexual relations with him, she sacrificed her own body in order to save innocent people from his potential advances, the prosecutor told the judge.

Read More in the Herald-Sun

Father Lawrence C. Murphy

Why did he wait 50 years though? From CNN:

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin – Terry Kohut has kept a dark secret for nearly 50 years. Now he is breaking his silence, becoming a key figure in the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and the growing controversy over what Pope Benedict XVI did about it.

When Kohut was barely a teen, and for years afterward, he says, he was sexually molested and assaulted by the headmaster and priest of the school where he lived, St. John’s School for the Deaf, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What occurred there is one of the most notorious cases of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Kohut was not alone. From 1950 to 1974 the headmaster of St. Johns, Father Lawrence C. Murphy, raped and molested as many as 200 deaf boys, according to court and church documents.

Kohut has now filed the first sex-abuse lawsuit against the Vatican actually naming Pope Benedict, previously known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as a defendant.

Ratzinger was once head of the Vatican’s powerful CDF, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, charged in certain circumstances with investigating the sexual abuse of minors by priests. And though church records show the abuse by Father Murphy was brought to the attention of Ratzinger and the CDF years ago, a church trial against the headmaster was stopped and he was allowed to remain a priest.

The Vatican’s “policy of secrecy” in abuse cases, and its “directives to conceal the sexual abuse of children” by priests, the lawsuit says, helped bring about the abuse of Kohut and others by Father Murphy.

Kohut has never before gone public or spoken about what Father Murphy did to him. He has remained anonymous in the suit, listed only as “John Doe 16,” one of dozens of men alleging abuse.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Kohut, 60, spoke with his hands and through a deaf interpreter, describing how the abuse by Father Murphy started.

“I went into his office, the door was closed,” he said. “And Father Murphy said, ‘Take your pants down. And so I did… you know, he was always in his black attire with a white collar, and you know … I was questioning why he would ask me to do that. Here he is, a priest, and – I have to obey him. And he proceeded to touch me.”…

[continues at CNN]

Alice Miller compares the rules of an abusive family with those of Nazi Germany and comes to some interesting, though not really surprising, conclusions:

The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty-two blows he received.

In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair- in other words, by denying the truth – Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings. The result was a very primitive person, incapable of any empathy for other people. He was mercilessly and constantly driven to new destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge. After millions had been forced to die for this reason, those feelings still haunted him in his sleep. Hermann Rauschning reports nocturnal paroxysms of screaming on the Führer’s part, along with “inexplicable counting”, which I trace back to the counting he did during the beatings of his childhood. Hitler did not invent fascism; he found it, like so many of his contemporaries) prefigured in the totalitarian regime of his family. The National Socialist version of fascism, however, does bear unmistakable traces of Hitler’s childhood. But his early experience was by no means an exception. Thus, neither Gerhart Hauptmann nor Martin Heidegger nor many other celebrated intellects of the day were able to see through Hitler’s madness. To do so, they would have had to be able to see through the madness of their own upbringing.

Hitler could make Europe and the world into the battlefield of his childhood because in the Germany of that time there were millions of people who had experienced the same kind of upbringing he had. Although not necessarily conscious of the fact, they took the following principles to be self-evident:

1. Not life but order and obedience are the highest values.
2. Only by means of violence can order be created and preserved.
3. Creativity (embodied in the child) represents a danger for the adult and must be destroyed.
4. Obeying one’s father absolutely is the highest law.
5. Disobedience and criticism are unthinkable because they are punished with beatings or the threat of death.
6. The living, vital child must be turned as early as possible into an obedient robot, a slave.
7. Undesirable feelings and real needs must therefore be suppressed as vigorously as possible.
8. Mothers must never protect their children from punishment by the father but after each incidence of torture must preach to them to honor and love their parents.

Fortunately, there were persons now and again with whom a child could find refuge from this totalitarian regime, and perhaps even experience love, respect, and protection. On the basis of these good experiences, even simply on the basis of the comparison they provided, a child could at least pass inward judgment on the cruelty endured and not want to inflict it in turn later on. But when there were no witnesses to come to the rescue, the child had no choice in this bizarre scenario but to stifle every natural reflex such as anger or even laughter, and to practice absolute obedience daily in order to keep the father’s menacing behavior within bearable limits. It was this kind of early character training that Hitler was later able to exploit. In strict accordance with this system of child-rearing he then developed his Nazi ideology, which had the following practical consequences:

1. The will of the Führer is the highest law.
2. The Führer will forcibly create order and make Germany into the paradise of the Aryans, the master race.
3. Those who submit like robots to his orders will be rewarded.
4. Whoever dares to offer criticism will be sent to a concentration camp.
5. Jews and gypsies must be annihilated – men, women and children.
6. The disabled and mentally ill are likewise to be put to death.
7. Poles and Russians are fit to become useful slaves.
8. Free art is dangerous and “degenerate”; like every other form of free creativity, It must be persecuted.

Without the numerous documentary films that attest to the frenzied acclaim Hitler received, no one today would believe that a madman with this ideology of contempt for human beings could generate so much enthusiasm. How was it at all possible that Hitler found such an immense number of followers? By promising his people a solution to all their problems and by offering them a scapegoat? Certainly. But that alone would not have been enough. In order to use untold numbers of people as marionettes, he had to make his promises in the style of the domineering, violent father most of his followers knew, feared, and admired.

Read more here.

If there’s one thing Texans love besides barbecue, it’s paddling their kids. From the Washington Post:

“There are times when maybe a good crack might not be a bad idea,” said Robert Pippin, a custom home builder who sports a goatee and cowboy boots. His son graduated from Temple schools several years ago.

Corporal punishment remains legal in 20 states, mostly in the South, but its use is diminishing. Ohio ended it last year, and a movement for a federal ban is afoot. Most school districts across the country banned paddling of students long ago. Texas sat that trend out.

But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically.

LOS ANGELES — Four years after a California priest and convicted child molester asked to be defrocked, his bishop pleaded with the future Pope Benedict XVI to remove the man from the priesthood. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger replied, urging caution.”

Consider the good of the Universal Church,” Ratzinger wrote in a 1985 letter to Oakland Bishop John Cummins. “It is necessary for this Congregation to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.”

Two more years would pass before the Vatican acted on the Rev. Stephen Kiesle’s request to leave.

A copy of the letter, typewritten in Latin and signed by Ratzinger, was obtained by The Associated Press. It constitutes the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican’s insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office.

Read More on the AP

Well may the pope defy “the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. But the Holy See can no longer ignore international law, which now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity. The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state — and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action — cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The truly shocking finding of Judge Murphy’s commission in Ireland was not merely that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and, despite knowledge of their propensity to reoffend, allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their victims had been sworn to secrecy.

This conduct, of course, amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors. In legal actions against Catholic archdioceses in the US it has been alleged that the same conduct reflected Vatican policy as approved by Cardinal Ratzinger (as the pope then was) as late as November 2002. Sexual assaults were regarded as sins that were subject to church tribunals, and guilty priests were sent on a “pious pilgrimage” while oaths of confidentiality were extracted from their victims.

Read More in the Guardian

Father Lawrence Murphy was a man with charm and social skills. Small of stature, he was a lively, sociable, charismatic Irishman, who also had the rare ability to communicate fluently in sign language. Watching him conduct a service with his hands is said to have been more moving than if words had been spoken.

He was the mentor and spiritual guide to hundreds of vulnerable boys — and one thing they learnt from him is that there are some disgusting individuals in the adult world who gratify their sleazy appetites without a thought for others. Father Murphy was a predatory paedophile whose crimes were all the more revolting for the helplessness of his victims. The pupils at St John’s School, St Francis city, Wisconsin, were deaf. This was a boarding school, so there was no escape at nights from the vile priest who had power over them.

Anyway, he was the only adult many of them could communicate with. They were given no sex education, so they had no way of understanding what he was doing. Some may have thought they deserved this treatment.

Read More on the Independent

A longtime critic of how the Catholic Church has handled abuse allegations, Hitchens believes the current Pope was actually involved in the cover-up before he took the top job.

Hitchens also contends that the Pope is subject to criminal prosecution due to his involvement in the latest sex scandal.

Pope Benedict XVI was drawn deeper yesterday into the clerical sex abuse scandal that has begun to overwhelm the Roman Catholic Church, when he was accused of personally failing to take action against a serial paedophile.

The Pope was blamed directly for ignoring repeated pleas by senior American churchmen to take action against a priest who had molested up to 200 deaf boys.

Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at the St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, from 1950 to 1974, starting as a teacher and rising to director, allegedly molested scores of pupils, preying on his victims in their dormitories and on class trips.

But instead of being defrocked and the police called in, it is alleged that Father Murphy avoided justice and remained a member of the Church after a key intervention by the Pope — then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Murphy was quietly moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974 and spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools. He died in 1998 at the age of 72, still a priest.

Read More in the Times

VATICAN CITY — Germany’s sex abuse scandal has now reached Pope Benedict XVI: His former archdiocese acknowledged it transferred a suspected pedophile priest while Benedict was in charge and criticism is mounting over a 2001 Vatican directive he penned instructing bishops to keep abuse cases secret.

The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict’s handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977–1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes — a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.

Benedict got a firsthand readout of the scope of the scandal Friday in his native land from the head of the German Bishop’s Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who reported that the pontiff had expressed “great dismay and deep shock” over the scandal, but encouraged bishops to continue searching for the truth.

Hours later, the Munich archdiocese admitted that it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. It stressed that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger didn’t know about the transfer and that it had been decided by a lower-ranking official.

Read More: AP via Yahoo News

The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling.

This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages, with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. A “norma interna,” or confidential set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The guidelines, issued in the year of our Lord 1962, address a sensitive subject: sex in the confessional. The Vatican doesn’t put it quite that directly, preferring to use more guarded terminology to describe what happens when a priest leads a member of his flock astray before, during or after the confession — in other words, when he provokes a penitent “toward impure and obscene matters” through “words or signs or nods of the head (or) by touch.”

Read More: SPIEGEL ONLINE

Clergy were able to molest hundreds of vulnerable children because of a “systemic, calculated perversion of power” that put their abusers above the law, the Irish government said.

The damning verdict on the conduct of church and secular authorities followed a three-year investigation into allegations of child abuse by priests in Dublin going back to the 1960s.

Investigators who were given access to 60,000 previous secret church files accused four Archbishops of Dublin of deliberately suppressing evidence of “widespread” abuse.

Archbishops John Charles McQuaid, Dermot Ryan and Kevin McNamara, who have all since died, and Cardinal Desmond Connell, who is retired, all refused to pass information to local police, the report said.

Evidence was kept inside a secret vault in the archbishop’s Dublin residence, with suspect clerics moved between parishes to prevent the allegations being made public.

Image: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh. Seat of the Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland (via Wikimedia Commons).

Read More: Telegraph

At the Cannes International Film Festival in May, in the loud, chaotic bar at the Martinez Hotel, Lee Daniels seemed, as he often does, both ecstatic and nervous. He jumped, he slumped, his mood changing from giddy to anxious. He was the only black man in the crowded bar, a fact that he mentioned and then brushed away. He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice. Although Daniels will be 50 this year, he has the bouncy, mercurial energy of a child. The previous night, at the gala screening of his movie “Precious,” which he directed and helped produce, he greeted the audience by saying, “I’m a little homo, I’m a little Euro and I’m a little ghetto.” The crowd cheered.

Daniels knows what he’s selling: his films combine street-smart bravado with an art-house sensibility. “Precious,” the harrowing story of a 350-pound illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother, is shot in an almost-documentary style interspersed with fantasy sequences. (It opens Nov. 6.) Like most independent films, it is character-driven, and at its heart is a spirit of understanding. When Precious’s plight lands her in a special school, she blossoms: the audience’s initial rejection of Precious, even repulsion at the sight of her, slowly gives way to a kind of identification.

At Cannes, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation. “They wouldn’t stop clapping,” Daniels told me as he gulped a vodka. “I’m a director — after six minutes, I’m saying, please sit down. But I’m also a producer, so I’m thinking, what’s the record? Can we break the record for the longest standing ovation at the festival?”…