74th Annual Conference – Junk Science

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Megan Gibson

 

What is “junk science”? 

Generally speaking, junk science refers to research lacking scientific rigor and findings that are often based on spurious correlations. Perhaps one of the more known examples of junk science is phrenology – or the practice of assessing personality from the contours of the skull. Certainly, very few people would now consider phrenology anything but an interesting “bump in the historical road of psychology”. (Pardon the pun.) However, junk science has a way of taking hold in our popular culture – including our systems of justice - and it can be difficult to identify and eliminate. To learn more about junk science and how it intersects with the justice system (e.g., implications related to the Daubert standard), please join us in New York for the NCFJCJ Annual Conference July 24-27, 2011. Dr. Mary Alice Conroy, Professor of Psychology and American Psychological Association representative will present a session on junk science within a legal context.

For more information, please visit The National Council Juvenile and Family Court Judges

Feds: Child pornography victims get younger, violence increases

January 31, 2011

Written by:  TRESA BALDA; Daily Record

DETROIT — Child pornography isn't just more pervasive, it's getting even uglier.

Federal prosecutors here say they have witnessed the disturbing trend with the kids getting younger — toddlers and infants as young as 6 months old — turning up in photos and videos.

And the assaults are getting worse. It's not just still images of children in the nude, they say.

"There's a misconception in the public arena that these are mainly still images of children without clothes on. Well, the truth is that the majority of the pictures that are traded among these guys almost inevitably involve a child being either raped, or being forced to perform some type of sexual act on an adult or child," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Mulcahy, chief of the general crimes unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit.

Child porn lovers live in your neighborhood

They aren't just creepy loners.

Seemingly normal people — doctors, coaches, authors, engineers, teens — are charged with possessing and making child porn, a $3-billion-a-year industry that the federal government has labeled the new silent child abuse.

Outed by their Internet activities, the accused stand before a judge, heads usually hung low, while their families sit in the back of the courtroom aghast at the accusations. And there typically is no criminal history to point to.
"There's this notion that it's the creepy neighbor who lives in the basement of his parent's house and downloads this stuff," Mulcahy said.

Far from it, he said.

There's another misconception about child porn, he added.

"It's not an eastern European problem, or southeast Asian problem. Half of the child porn traded in this country is made in this country," he said.

100,000 websites

 

Currently, there are an estimated 100,000 known child porn websites, according to Brigham Young University Women's Services. Child porn accounts for one-quarter of the $12-billion U.S. porn industry.

Fueled by the secret nature of the Internet, child porn has increased to the point where the federal government can't keep track of it all. The Justice Department conceded in a report issued in August that the growth of child porn is outpacing efforts to combat it.

"Tragically, the only place we've seen a decrease is in the age of victims," Attorney General Eric Holder said then following the release of the report, which promised to hire 38 prosecutors especially for child porn cases.
The Justice Department report says complaints of online enticement of children have more than tripled from 2004 to 2008, and complaints of child prostitution rose tenfold. Since 2006, more than 8,600 people have been prosecuted at the federal level on child porn charges.

Equally troubling, authorities said, is that not only are the kids getting younger, but the images are getting more graphic and violent. Children can be heard crying in some videos, they said.

Some legal and psychological experts think the trend is driven by the addictive nature of porn and its explosion on the Internet. The more users see, they say, the more they want.

"Normal sex acts don't excite them anymore," said Patrick Trueman, a former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. "Now you're seeing the really extreme stuff, because once you've been through the still shots, that's not good enough."

Using social networking

 

In Michigan, a cyber crimes unit with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the Department of Homeland Security has spotted another disturbing trend in recent months: Some people are using social networking to meet other child molesters. They're using peer-to-peer networks to molest kids in unison, with a remote audience participating.

For example, there's the case of Steven Demink, who a federal magistrate referred to as "a cyber predator of the worst kind."

Demink, 41, of Redford, Mich., is accused of manipulating women in three states into molesting their children and letting him view the sex acts via webcam or photographs, according to court records.

"This is the dark side of the Internet," said Brian Moskowitz, special agent in charge of ICE investigations in Michigan and Ohio. "There have always been people with a deviant sexual interest in children. It's now easier for them to do what they do."

And they're getting better at covering their tracks, said Moskowitz, who pointed out that today's child pornographer is computer savvy, some changing URLs every few days to throw the feds off track.

For more information, please visit The Daily Record

Child Fatalities Hearing Witness List and Testimony of Michael Petit, Every Child Matters Educational Fund

Child Fatalities Hearing, July 12, 10 am, Rayburn House Office Building

Attached is the Witness List and testimony from Michael Petit for the House Ways and Means  Hearing on Child Fatalities last Tuesday.

Every Child Matters Educational Fund:  http://www.everychildmatters.org/

URL for the National Center for Child Death Review is:  http://www.childdeathreview.org/

One can access NCCDR's information on what constitutes a thorough child fatality review.

The GAO Report is here:  http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-811T

Child Fatalities from Maltreatment: National Data Could Be Strengthened

GAO-11-811T July 12, 2011
Full Report (PDF, 9 pages) 

All the testimony can be accessed _and_ one can also make a submission for the record at:

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=249922

Domestic Violence by Proxy

Domestic Violence (DV) by Proxy:
Why Terrorist Tactics Employed by Batterers Are Not "PAS" 
 
September 16, 2009  
By: Leadership Council

As more and more abused women lose custody to batterers in family courts, they are wrongly embracing the very ideas that enabled their abusers to gain custody in the first place. False accusations of “parental alienation" are often used by batterers to gain custody and to defend against accusations of abuse. 

Some unfortunate women after years of enduring domestic violence have lost custody to the batterers who abused them. In these cases, batterers have made good on their threat to attack their ex-partner in the place she is the most vulnerable—by taking her children away from her. After separation, these batterers continue to wage their campaign of manipulation and abuse by attempting to convince involved children that their mothers never loved them. Looking for a way to describe their batterers' behavior, some mothers have called what their batterer is doing "parental alienation syndrome." 

In reality, what these women are describing from their ex-partners is better termed Domestic Violence by Proxy (DV by Proxy), a term first used by Alina Patterson, author of Health and Healing. DV by Proxy refers to a pattern of behavior which is a parent with a history of using domestic violence or intimidation, uses a child as a substitute when he no longer has access to his former partner. Calling this behavior “parental alienation” is not strong enough to convey the criminal pattern of terroristic behaviors employed by batterers. 

When his victim leaves him, batterers often recognize that the most expedient way to continue to hurt his partner is to assert his legal rights to control her access to their children. By gaining control of the children, an abusive male now has a powerful tool which allows him to continue to stalk, harass and batter an ex-partner even when he has no direct access to her. Moreover, by emotionally torturing the child and severing the bond between children and their mother, he is able to hurt his intended victim -- the mother -- in a way she cannot resist. 

DV by Proxy includes tactics such as: threats of harm to children if they display a positive bond to the mother, destroying favored possessions given by the mother, and emotional torture (for example, telling the child the mother hates them, wanted an abortion, and is not coming to get them because they are unloved). 

DV by Proxy may also include coaching the child to make false allegations regarding their mother's behavior and harming or punishing the child for not complying. DV by Proxy perpetrators may also create fraudulent documents to defraud the court in order to prevent the mother from gaining custody. Whether or not the child is biologically related to them is irrelevant to perpetrators of DV by Proxy. The perpetrator's main motivation is to hurt his ex; whether or not his own child is harmed in the process is irrelevant to him. 

This is very different from "parental alienation syndrome" as described by the late Richard A. Gardner. Dr. Gardner described PAS as an internal process by which a child aligns themselves with a preferred parent to protect themselves from the divorce conflict. “PAS” is conceptualized as a psychological process of identification with a parent who, according to the theory, encourages this identification at the expense of the other parent. 

PAS inducing parents, according to Gardner, are often unconscious of what they are doing to encourage the identification. In contrast, perpetrators of DV by Proxy are very conscious of what they are doing. 

Controlling, coercive, illegal acts often done by abusive and controlling people, usually men, are not subtle, and do not encourage an identification with a parent. Criminal, fraudulent, coercive acts are visible and obvious. These behaviors encourage compliance by threats and fear. Behaviors involved in DV by Proxy are deliberate and often illegal. These behaviors include: battery, destruction of property, locking children in rooms to prevent them from calling parents, falsifying documents, along with other similar overt behaviors. 

The most dangerous aspect of Gardner's PAS theory is that that the alienating parent's behavior is theorized to be so subtle as to be unobservable. In other words, the behaviors that are supposed to cause the alienation are assumed to be happening without any proof that they have actually occured. As many women have discovered this makes a charge of "alienation" almost impossible to defend against. 

While Gardner's theories regarding PAS have been shown to be overly general and have not been supported by careful research, behaviors seen in DV by Proxy can be readily observed. Behaviors involved in DV by Proxy are deliberate and planned; many are illegal, and if the child is given the freedom to talk, will be described in great detail by the child. 

If the child's formerly favorable view of the victimized parent changes when exposed to tactics like this over time then it is more likely a form of "Stockholm Syndrome" or traumatic attachment to the abuser, rather than the alignment with one parent and negative reaction to the other that Gardner described as "alienation".
A recent and comprehensive article on PAS and its use in the court system, by Jennifer Hoult can be downloaded here.

For further information:

• Are Protective Parents Losing Custody to Alleged Abusers? Evidence shows that women who raise concerns about family violence during custody litigation run the risk of losing their children.
• Stopfamilyviolence.org: The people's voice for family peace. Stop Family Violence is a national grassroots organization with a mission to organize and amplify our nation's collective voice against family violence.
• CA3 -Children Against Court Appointed Child Abuse
• High-conflict divorce or stalking by way of family court? Massachusetts Family Law Journal, 2004. http://www.mincava.umn.edu/reports/linda.asp
• Hoult, Jennifer. (Spring 2006). The Evidentiary Admissibility of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Science, Law, and Policy, Children's Legal Rights Journal, 26(1) pp. 1-61. (download PDF)

Case Watch: West Virginia

The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia filed an opinion in the Men & Women Against Discrimination v. the Family Protection Services Board case on May 26th, ruling that the plaintiffs, a fathers’ rights group who claimed that the state domestic abuse law discriminated against men, failed to show that they had been denied benefits or services themselves and, therefore, weren’t entitled to challenge the law. To read the full decision, please click here

For more information please visit Battered Women's Justice Project

The kind of story your best friend should tell you about

Even under the best of circumstances, divorce and issues of child custody can be a stressful time. And when there is a "high conflict" case involving charges of abuse, the stress level can elevated to the point where it really feels "crazy making." The twists and turns and the financial challenges piled on top of everything else can produce a mental state where you may feel like you are losing your mind. And sometimes, even your best friend hesitates tell you , "Um,you really sound a little crazy." It is one of the reasons that the mainstream media shies away from covering the issue. The people can sound a little crazy.

 

Documentary producer Garland Waller found that to be the case when she produced the documentary Small Justice: Little Justice in America's Family Courts. And she found it to be the case when she filmed at the Battered Mother's Custody Conference.

 

She laid out some of the important things that women need to know in a textbook chapter titled "The Yuck factor, the Oprah factor, and the "Stickiness" Factor: Why the Mainstream Media Has failed to Expose the Custody Court Scandal". It's the sort of stuff your best friend should tell you about how to tell your story. 

 

Garland is now producing No Way Out But One. It's the story of one protective mother who took desperate measures to keep her children safe. The subject of the film, Holly Collins, eventually succeeded in protecting her kids. Even though a lot of people called her "crazy" at the time, what was more important to her was what her kids called her. A hero. It's the kind of story your best friend should tell you about.

 

Justice For Children

Domestic violence is all about ownership

Redwood Times

Posted: 07/01/2011 12:50:29 AM PDT

MY WORD By Susan McGee 

The Times-Standard recently printed an AP article about a murder/suicide at San Jose State.
The story was confusing, called the murders “inexplicable,” and quoting one official saying “no one may ever know what happened.” Police said they had no idea of the motives for the killing. Other press articles labeled it “tragic,” “bizarre,” “random,” and “senseless,” and speculated about a motive for the killings. This type of typical media coverage is extremely frustrating for experts and those knowledgeable about domestic violence.
The story reported that a husband had shot his wife and a male friend of hers as they were getting into a car on the campus. Although the initial reports stated there was “no history of domestic violence,” subsequent coverage revealed that neighbors had called security the week before because of loud noises and sounds of destruction in the couple’s apartment. 

In fact, this murder/suicide, another that occurred in Dexter, Maine, and one that occurred in Essex, England, last week, all follow a very similar and common pattern. The motive is control. Batterers usually murder their partners, and sometimes their children, when they have lost access to them, oftentimes when their partner has left them or is about to leave them. Domestic violence is all about ownership -- the batterer believes he is entitled to the services and obedience of his victim -- and that she has no right to leave him. (Although the vast majority of batterers are men and victims are women, battering does occur in lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans relationships, and there are a few cases of men being battered by women.) 

There is ample and substantial research that clearly shows that domestic violence homicides can be substantially reduced in a community, which institutes a stringent criminal and civil justice response to battering -- automatic arrest, high levels of prosecutions, and a judicial response that jails the batterer when he violates a restraining order, or stops attending a court mandated batterers’ program. Usually press coverage quotes criminal justice personnel/university officials who are scrambling to conceal their own errors or lack of action, hence the “senseless,” and “inexplicable” labels. 

At Humboldt State University, the Sexual Assault Prevention Committee is seeking funds to expand its coordinated community response to include domestic and dating violence, seeking to implement an approach that promotes survivor safety and assailant accountability. 

Because of problematic reporting about domestic violence homicides and suicides, the public is robbed of the opportunity for learning, understanding and opportunities for action. Here in Humboldt County, the Prevention Committee of the Domestic Violence Coordinating Council has developed the “Silent Witness” Project, which features life-sized silhouettes of people killed in domestic violence related events, each with a name, age, and story. Twenty-five women (one was pregnant), two men, one child, one dog and one cat are remembered, and show in a highly visceral way that it can and does happen here in our own community. 

It is crucial for survivors (and their families, friends and allies) to understand that violence does not end when a woman leaves a battering relationship -- it often escalates. Leaving is the most dangerous time, and carefully crafted safety plans should be put into effect. 
 
Those who are experiencing domestic violence can get help by calling: Humboldt Domestic Violence Services, 443-6042, the North Coast Rape Crisis Team, 445-2881 or WISH in Southern Humboldt at 923-4100. Community members who would like to get involved in preventing domestic violence can call the Domestic Violence Coordinating Council at 601-6042. 


Susan McGee is the coordinator of the Humboldt County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council.

Opinions expressed in My Word pieces do not necessarily reflect the editorial viewpoint of the Times- Standard or the Redwood Times.
http://www.redwoodtimes.com/letters/ci_18385917