Archive for the ‘Child Abuse’ Category
Good for you, New Zealand
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Media, Parenting on May 7, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
The Real Housewives of New Jersey: The Early Years
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Entertainment, Sexuality on March 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Makes sense
Posted in Cartoons, Child Abuse, Humor on March 19, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Love this bumper sticker!
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Signage on March 19, 2013 | 1 Comment »
It’s called “consent.” Look it up.
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Children, Language on March 5, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
“And then you grab the boy’s head thusly….”
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Entertainment on January 5, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Not sure why Louis C.K. is in this scene. Must investigate.
Addendum: OK, it’s all part of a comedy shtick that can be seen here.
Sorry, Catholic readers. You’ll find that video offensive. Extremely offensive.
Seriously, I used to worry about the feelings of some Catholics who are, in essence, good people saddled with a church hierarchy that is amoral and self-serving. Then I realized that the amoral self-serving people will never be replaced if the good people in the pews don’t demand change.
So, go ahead. Get offended. Now go give your money to a real charity until your Church’s leadership changes completely and starts serving people instead of the organization.
You can do it. You can do it because you say you want to be a good person and good people do not support bad people. It’s really that simple, is it not? It should be.
The NRA’s response to the Connecticut massacre
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Justice System, Law Enforcement, Parenting, Uncategorized, Wingnuts on December 21, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve not commented on the awful events in Newtown because what needs to be said is already being said, and it’s all just too awful for me to contemplate for very long before I start feeling overwhelmed. I tried watching some of the amazingly loving eulogies given by the parents of the little ones, but then I’m a wreck and have to stop watching altogether.
Just reading about Noah Pozner’s mother’s remembrances was so touching and awful at the same time:
“I will miss your forceful and purposeful little steps stomping through our house. I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room,” his mother, Veronique Pozner, told mourners.
“Most of all, I will miss your visions of your future. You wanted to be a doctor, a soldier, a taco factory manager. It was your favorite food, and no doubt you wanted to ensure that the world kept producing tacos,” she said, evoking laughter from the crowd.
She closed by saying: “Momma loves you, little man.”
I couldn’t think about anything else for a long while after reading that. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be so eloquent in the moments of your greatest heartache. I can’t envision being able to even speak.
A protester at the NRA’s Dec. 21 press conference.
So I’ve not written anything because what can you add of importance to the words of people who’ve experienced that kind of loss first-hand?
It’s so needless. It’s so sad. It’s so preventable.
Then came today’s unbelievably tone deaf news conference by Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
I’m from Nebraska. I get it. I come from a family of people who think of shooting guns at animals and inanimate objects as a form of sport. And some of these people, most rational beings, believe that liberals want to take away all of their guns, so they go along with the NRA’s give-no-territory approach to gun control because if liberals can ban assault weapons, they will try to ban all guns eventually.
There is no evidence for that conclusion, but that is how some of these people sincerely feel.
But I think (I hope) the NRA lost some support even among rabid gun owners when they basically suggested today one remedy for Newtown:
How have our nation’s priorities gotten so far out of order? Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums — are all protected by armed security.
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
And there you have it: the way to protect children is to put armed guards in elementary schools. Guns, every day, around kids, in every school in America.
The best response I heard regarding this today was from someone who more or less said, “How is it that the right-wing nuts who control the GOP are the first ones to scream about Obama creating a police state, and yet they are the first ones to suggest that creating a police state is the way to solve our problems?”
In the NRA’s defense, at least they had the decency to mention that we need to do something about dismal state of mental health services in this country.
Well, at least they’re being honest now
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Children on November 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Great kid prank
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Humor on November 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Oh, the people to whom I could give this as a gift
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Parenting, Writing on November 21, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Indeed
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, Religion on October 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I love little kids’ Halloween costumes
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Holidays, tagged Halloween, ketchup costume on October 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
One of the best things about having little kids has to be the ability to dress them up in tiny Halloween costumes. I would go nuts. My kids would love me when they were little and then despise me at some point in their adolescence for being way too into Halloween.
Take the costume below. I love it. You can get it here.
Awwww…poor little sex offending dog
Posted in Animals, Child Abuse on October 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Man changes name to Michael Jackson, then sexually assaults children
Posted in Child Abuse, International, Law Enforcement on October 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Wouldn’t it make law enforcement life easier if every perp just changed his name to the name of the person whose misdeeds he most identifies with personally?
A 50-year-old man has been warned he faces an indefinite jail sentence for kidnapping a boy and girl, aged 10 and 11, in separate attacks.
Michael Jackson pleaded guilty in May to charges including sexual assault, false imprisonment and kidnap relating to the boy’s disappearance in November.
Reporting restrictions were lifted at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday.
Jackson, of Bristnall Hall Road, Oldbury, West Midlands, is due to be sentenced on 29 October.
Originally called Albert England, Jackson could face an indeterminate imprisonment for public protection (IPP), his counsel said.
I’m not sure why, but I think it’s just a big bag of bonus that he’s white.
But not as white as Michael Jackson was when he died.
You can read the rest of the story here.
Pictures say it much better than mere words
Posted in Child Abuse, Entertainment, tagged Honey Boo Boo, Neal Patrick Harris, NPH on October 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Nobody is saying that same-sex families are automatically better than heterosexual families, of course.
But I’ll bet NPH’s kids are better off than Honey Boo Boo, whose life has future tragedy written all over it. I don’t think Honey Boo Boo’s family fully understands how quickly the folks who produce her television program are going to dump her mama’s gigantic ass once Honey Boo Boo reaches breeding age and those fat cheeks and double negatives become liabilities to everyone but other trailer park residents.
I believe no age is appropriate
Posted in Child Abuse, Humor, Parenting on September 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
What do you do with a wet child and the new leather seats in your car?
Posted in Child Abuse, Children, Parenting on September 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Why you make him ride in the trunk on a hot day, of course.
An Edina woman has been charged with child endangerment after she allegedly had her 11-year-old nephew ride in the trunk of her Lexus so he wouldn’t drip water on its leather seats.
According to the criminal complaint, Susan Marie McCarty, 38, was charged after she admitted that she had her nephew get into the trunk because he was damp from going on a water ride at Valleyfair.
Not the child in question, but you get the idea.
On the afternoon of Aug. 23, witnesses in a parking lot at the Shakopee amusement park reported seeing a boy climb into the trunk while two women watched. Witnesses gave police the license number of the car, and after being stopped by officers, McCarty told them the back seat console had been folded down so the boy could get some air.
When he said he was getting hot, she said, air vents were aimed at the hole, which was about the size of a piece of paper. Temperatures that day were in the mid 80s.
McCarty said on Tuesday night that, halfway to her car in the Valleyfair parking lot, she realized that she didn’t have a towel for the boy. She said she would never purposely put her family in danger and was glad no one had been hurt. “I didn’t assess the situation,” McCarty said.
On the contrary, auntie. You DID assess the situation and decided your car was worth more than your nephew.
Read the rest of the story here.
This is a real thing
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse on September 18, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
This sounded so outrageous that I decided to do a little research to see if it was true.
Sadly, it is true.
My column this week: just how dangerous are conservative Catholics leaders to children and morality?
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse on September 6, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I usually always preface a column like this by noting that some of my personal heroes of adulthood have been Catholics — some lay Catholics, some actual nuns and priests. With lower-level Catholics I, generally speaking, have no issues. It’s the people who have run the Church and come into power since John Paul II was Pope who drive me to distraction.
And along comes Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel to say that kids who are abused by priests often bring it on themselves.
Well, anyone who knows me knows that couldn’t let this pass without some comment. And that is the subject of this week’s column, headlined “Yet more proof that it is conservative Catholic leaders who are a danger to children and morality.”
Groeschel created a firestorm during that NCR interview in which he said the victims of pedophiles were to blame for their own victimizations. “People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer,” Groeschel said in the NCR, going so far as to describe serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky of Penn State as that “poor guy.”
Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, pondering how he might justify child rape amongst his peers?
The NCR issued an apology that stated, in part, “Child sexual abuse is never excusable. The editors of the National Catholic Register apologize for publishing without clarification or challenge Father Benedict Groeschel’s comments that seem to suggest that the child is somehow responsible for abuse. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Which begs the questions: If “nothing” could be further from the truth, how did Groeschel’s comments make it into publication in the first place? If you’re printing something that is now rejected as being the polar opposite of reality, you’d think that someone in charge — the reporter who wrote the piece notwithstanding — would have noticed that a high-profile Catholic theologian and media figure was saying that boy fuckers were sympathetic figures, while the altar boys themselves were little harlots who were asking for it by having the audacity to tempt the priests with the boys’ slutty white robes and broken homes.
The NCR even scrubbed the interview from its web site, which I think might be covered in 1 Corinthians 2:13, “If thou cannot find proof of the offense, yay verily it did not happen in the eyes of the Lord or the Pope.” (It should also be noted here that the NCR has been most closely affiliated with the Legion of Christ and its discredited former leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, who was found to have been, among his many disgraces, sexually abusing young seminarians and fathering out-of-wedlock children with temptresses of color — who, no doubt, deserve some of the blame for leading Fr. Maciel astray.)
Fortunately for the rest of us the Internet is forever and Groeschel’s NCR interview will be with us always to remind us once again what horrible people populate the upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy.
You can read the rest of it here.
And, yes, I used the term “boy fuckers” quite purposefully. It’s a jarring term for many people to see in print, but it’s true and does not sugar coat what these guys have done to so many kids.
Seems legit
Posted in Child Abuse, Law Enforcement on September 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Famous Catholic TV priest says young boys are often the aggressors in abusive sexual relationships with adult men
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse on August 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
These priests keep doing this shit because they really have no idea what awful lecherous human beings they truly are. Full article shown in screen shot can be found here.
BTW, the National Catholic Register is thick with abuse apologists for the Catholic Church. They’re just awful people at that publication.
Don’t try to hit the Play button on image below. It’s just a screen shot. Instead go to the link above.
Yeah, they do seem to have a problem understanding that consent concept
Posted in Catholic Church, Child Abuse, tagged Catholic Church, Pope, sexual molestation on August 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’ll bet she puts up with some truly awkward pick-up lines
Posted in Child Abuse, Children on August 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Indeed. And every other lesser sport at Penn State
Posted in Academia, Child Abuse, Sports on July 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Would more women at the top at Penn State (and the Catholic Church) have lessened sex scandals?
Posted in Child Abuse, Law Enforcement, Sexuality on July 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve seen this question posed in different ways and different places and the question has always been answered (by male and female writers) in the affirmative. Women not only have maternal instincts, so conventional wisdom goes, but they also are more attuned to the possibility of sexual assault. I think this is bullshit, and that the real problem is society’s deference to power and (in the case of college and pro football scandals) its love of jocks and sporting events.
So I was prepared to dislike this piece in the Washington Post by Melinda Hellenberger because I assumed it would be so much received wisdom on the matter. Much to my surprise, she pretty much nails it:
It was Joe Pa’s wife, Sue Paterno, who reportedly pressured Triponey to go easy on one of the players in trouble. And it was Sandusky’s wife, Dottie Sandusky, who testified that she never heard or saw a thing while her husband’s victims were being assaulted — and screaming for help, one of them said — in her basement while she was home.
Some of the angriest e-mails I received after reporting on the Sandusky trial were from female Penn State fans, staunchly defending the school’s handling of the matter even after he was found guilty on 45 counts, in cases involving 10 boys over 15 years.
And I can’t say I was surprised. In reporting on the way my own alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, has handled reports of sexual assaults, I never detected any gender divide in the wagon-circling of administrators and trustees, which was definitely a coed event.
Then there was the football scandal at Colorado University a few years back. When players there were accused, and not for the first time, of setting recruits up to rape drunk women, the response of the school’s female president, Elizabeth Hoffman, was to support the athletic director and football coach in denying there was a problem.
Having attended football powerhouse University of Nebraska, I witnessed firsthand how much football players are coddled and pampered and allowed to be jerks, even when they break the law in numerous ways. And the women did it just as much as the men, if not more so when they were in the actual presence of a player or coach.
Hellenberger’s piece (“Would more women at the top at Penn State have stopped Sandusky sooner?”) can be found here.
Oh, and I think it’s crossed the line into pathological for the people who are still defending good old Joe PA. He deserves whatever notoriety has followed him to his grave. Not protecting children is just about the worst thing you can do to protect your job and high social status.
