Child abuse

[Lola]

http://www.psycport.com/showArticle.cfm?xmlFile=comtex%5Fxml%5F2009...


That case came a month after 6-month-old Jeremiah Shaneyfelt was found dying at his mother's Osceola County home. Investigators said he had been shaken, head-butted and dropped. His mother's boyfriend, Michael Reid Jr., 27, is now charged with first degree murder in the infant's death. As it turns out, he was awaiting trial on similar child-abuse charges in a case where a 6-month-old was severely injured.

The crimes join a litany of baffling, bizarre abuses in which Florida infants and toddlers have been starved, shot and thrown out of a moving car onto a highway.

"When you think about what you're hearing now in the news, I think unfortunately we will see another increase [in child-abuse deaths] next year," said Major Connie Shingledecker, chairwoman of the state's Child Abuse Death Review Team, which examines cases reported through the Florida child-abuse hot line and verified by investigators. Though the team is only now looking at deaths for last year, Shingledecker notes there already has been a documented increase in familial murder-suicides, which used to be virtually unheard of. ""

[Administrator]

Creepy. Unfortunately, I think too that child abuse ending in death of the kids has increased in our times. It's awful and authorities don't seem to do much about it (child protective services agencies, I mean.)

There are too many stories like this (Sirita Sotello, being one of them).

[Lola]

This refers to the Ryan Report (prepared by Judge Ryan) in the ongoing and scandalous matter of child abuse in religious institutions in Ireland (in the mid-20th Century!!)

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/irel-m26.shtml

"All the staff carried leather straps which were freely used on children. A Brother Oliver repeatedly beat children with particular violence. One victim reported, “I was running trying to get away from him. He hit me, it didn’t matter where, legs, back, head, anywhere...”


Oliver forced one 12-year-old child to lick excrement from his shoes.


Instruments of punishment included rubber from a pram wheel, hurley sticks, hurley balls, fists, finger nails and fan belts. One child’s hand was held in boiling water. Boys were repeated pulled around by the hair, punched, strapped for crimes such as being left handed, being slow, tearing a blanket, having worn out shoes."

[Mariana]

Man, that's sick!

Reminds me of James Joyce book (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I think) it was kind of his own bio and described what was like living at a Catholic Irish school full time, Yikes!

Lola said:

This refers to the Ryan Report (prepared by Judge Ryan) in the ongoing and scandalous matter of child abuse in religious institutions in Ireland (in the mid-20th Century!!)

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/irel-m26.shtml

"All the staff carried leather straps which were freely used on children. A Brother Oliver repeatedly beat children with particular violence. One victim reported, “I was running trying to get away from him. He hit me, it didn’t matter where, legs, back, head, anywhere...”


Oliver forced one 12-year-old child to lick excrement from his shoes.


Instruments of punishment included rubber from a pram wheel, hurley sticks, hurley balls, fists, finger nails and fan belts. One child’s hand was held in boiling water. Boys were repeated pulled around by the hair, punched, strapped for crimes such as being left handed, being slow, tearing a blanket, having worn out shoes."

[Mariana]

I was just reading the whole article, and this drew my attention... Another inmate commented, “You don’t seem to understand, the place was built on terror, regular beatings were just accepted. What you’re hearing about is the bad ones, but we accepted as normal run of the mill from the minute you got up, that some time in that day you would get beaten.”

This is something that (sadly) happens often in emotional abuse, people "get used to" being abused and put up with it because the alternative is even worse. I remember an email I got from Dr. Carver where he told me about a woman who asked (via the counsellingresource website) if it was considered domestic violence even tough she "didn't bleed"...

Unfortunately, people get used to be mistreated and the emotional abuse seems to be not as important as the physical abuse, or less important (secondary to) the physical abuse.

All those "Brothers" or priests, etc. should be locked up in jail and never let out, I doubt they will change, they are pretty sick people.

[Lola]

The children put in those places could not leave and had no one to turn to (so far 14.000 who are now adults have come forward, and but the number of cases far exceeds that figure). It makes harrowing listening, and every day on the media here a great deal of attention is given to this disastrous chapter in the history of this country. The sense of outrage throughout the country is considerable.

The Church will have to cough up even more money than they wanted (they tried to backslide out of paying compensation). Many of the perpetrators are now long dead. We are talking sometime between 1930 and 1960.
No compensation will, of course, palliate the terrible damage done to these children. I was listening to the man who heads the organization "One in Four" which represents the victims of what is being called the "Irish holocaust", and he said that sadly many of them, on becoming adults, were unable to make it in this life, ended up on the streets, or committed suicide, or were too ashamed to want to come forward to be vindicated. Imagine! They were the abused, and yet they were made to feel ashamed. You see, that is what abuse does to people.

Lola

[Lola]

I think we must differentiate between the kind of school J. Joyce went to (the Jesuit boarding school Clongowes Wood, which would have been a very "upper class" school) and the type of institutions in which the unfortunate children I mentioned were incarcerated (industrial schools, orphanages, etc. run by religious).
Having said that (I also was sent to an Irish convent boarding school), even the best schools (the Jesuit schools, boys' schools, being an example), where one's parents paid high fees were very severe, cold, unfriendly places, and corporal punishment would not have been unusual.

I do not have good memories of my time in a Catholic Irish boarding schook, and after finishing my education there, I never went back to visit even. The attitude of the religious was demeaning and belittling.

Lola

[Lola]

http://www.paddydoyle.com/a-history-of-neglect/

Excerpts:

"1946- Community pressure in Limerick, led by Councillor Martin McGuire, on the Dept. of Ed forces the release of Gerard Fogarty, 14, from Glin Industrial School after he was flogged naked with a cat of nine tails and immersed in salt water for trying to escape to his mother. A call for public inquiry into industrial schools was rejected by Minister of Education. Thomas Derrig because “it would serve no useful purpose”.

"1947- Three-year-old Michael McQualter scalded to death in a hot bath in Kyran’s Industrial School. Inquiry found school to be “criminally negligent,” but the case was not pursued by the Dept. of Education.""
"1978- A child care worker at Madonna House kidnapped a boy in his care, took him to Edinburgh and drowned him in a bath in a hotel. The Minister for Health, Charles Haughey, rejected a call for a public enquiry into the matter, stating that it “would serve no useful purpose.”

[Lola]

Saw this on today's news:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/02/us-daughter-pray-death

What is the world coming to, I ask? The words "criminally insane" come to mind.

Lola