Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories

Excerpts of Key Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories in Major Media

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Fiona Woolf, who has been appointed to chair the government inquiry into historic child abuse, was subjected to an interrogation on Tuesday. Mrs Woolf appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons. The essential charge against her was that she was a member of the “Establishment” and therefore ... unsuitable for the task. She is the current Lord Mayor of London. As Mrs Woolf explained, she had, on five occasions, given or received dinner parties to or from her London neighbours, Lord and Lady Brittan. She felt it necessary to mention this because Lord Brittan, who was Home Secretary from 1983-5, is accused by some of having failed to deal adequately with allegations about child abuse by the late Geoffrey Dickens MP. Despite its outrageous bullying, the committee ... exposed the fact that Mrs Woolf was frightened. Instead of justifying her wholly reasonable links with the Brittans, she ran scared of them. No doubt she sincerely wants to perform a public service, but she gave every impression of not understanding ... why its subject is so problematic. This inquiry involves, to use Mrs Woolf’s own phrase, “hundreds of institutions and thousands of failures”. The whole thing is driven by the main emotion that nowadays dominates our enfeebled Establishment – fear: in this case, the fear of being accused of ignoring or covering up child abuse.

Note: Read an article in the UK's Guardian to understand more why the victims don't trust the Lord Mayor of London. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sex abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources..

TLC cancelled ”Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on Friday after photos surfaced of star Mama June hanging out with a convicted child molester. In August, “Sons of Guns” star Will Hayden was arrested on multiple rape charges against minors. Discovery, which owns TLC, swiftly cancelled that show, too. In 2013, reality TV producer Donald Luciano – who worked on some episodes of “Beverly’s Full House” about the life of former supermodel Beverly Johnson – pled guilty to possession of images of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. So does reality TV have a pedophile problem? “The issue is not just about reality TV. Hollywood bears a lot of responsibility normalizing this behavior by sexualizing young girls,” said Dan Gainor, Vice President of Culture at the Media Research Center. “Too bad director Roman Polanski doesn’t get the (quick cancellation) treatment. He got an Oscar and a standing ovation and he raped a 13-year-old girl. ”Alec Shankman, Head of Alternative Programming & Digital Media at Abrams Artists Agency, noted that reality TV background checks are extremely thorough. “In the ‘Honey Boo Boo’ scenario, the guy wasn’t even on the show,” he said. "I wouldn’t say it is a problem in the genre, certainly no bigger than throughout the rest of Hollywood.” California-based criminal defense attorney Leo Terrell of CleartheCourt.com, noted that “The abuse is magnified when one of these predators appeared on a reality television show and/or is a public figure.”

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Fears of a “deliberate cover-up” by public officials of the sexual abuse of children in Rotherham have been fueled by the large number of documents ... which have vanished, an investigation by MPs has concluded. They urged the Home Office to examine claims that files were stolen from a locked council office in the South Yorkshire town. At least 1,400 girls as young as 11 were groomed and abused by gangs in the town over a 16 year period. The committee raised suspicions that officials colluded to conceal evidence. The MPs heard from a former researcher who was hired by Rotherham Council. She referred in a report, which was about to be sent to the Home Office, to the “alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers”, the committee said. An unknown individual subsequently gained access to her office and removed all of the data relating to the Home Office work. There were no signs of a forced entry and the action involved moving through key-coded and locked security doors. "She was also subjected to personal hostility at the hands of Council officials and police officers,” the committee said. The MPs said: “This is not the first case in which it has been alleged that files of information relating to child sexual exploitation have disappeared. Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, said: “A number of individuals attempted to bring these crimes to light, only to face obstacles from the council and police."

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First there was abuse at the hands of a popular BBC host. There were scandals at private schools and in the church and talk of a pedophile ring in Parliament. Then there was Rotherham. Over the past two years, high-profile revelations of sexual abuse of children have painted a picture of Britain as a place where such abuse is not just endemic but systematically covered up — either because the perpetrators are of the very highest status or because the victims are of the very lowest. The main driver of abuse is impunity: “Abuse happens in a context of permissibility,” said Helen Beckett, an expert on the subject at the University of Bedfordshire. In 2012, it emerged that Jimmy Savile had raped scores of children as colleagues and the police turned a blind eye. Mr. Savile, who was a friend of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, used his charity work to gain access to his victims in schools and hospitals. In July, Britons learned of allegations that Cyril Smith, a former member of Parliament who died in 2010, abused boys in a care home in his constituency. The allegations against him and others were detailed in a file prepared three decades ago by a crusading lawmaker who described a pedophile ring of “big, big names.” But the file mysteriously disappeared.

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Long-sealed records of 14 Catholic priests who worked in four high schools and 45 parishes across southern Minnesota were opened to public scrutiny Tuesday, revealing hundreds of documents indicating that the Diocese of Winona did not report claims of child sex abuse to law enforcement, did not remove offenders from ministry, and continued to financially support the priests even as the patterns of abuse became clear. The Winona Diocese “anticipates eventual bankruptcy” as a result of that lawsuit and others being filed under the new Minnesota Child Victims Act. The 14 priests worked in all four high schools in the diocese. The files, including mental health reports on the priests and detailed complaints of sexual abuse, were made public as part of a groundbreaking lawsuit making its way through Ramsey District Court. “The files being released on each of these credibly accused offenders reflects not only their history of offenses, but how they have been handled by top officials over the years,” said Jeff Anderson, the attorney for the lawsuit. “Every time we disclose the past, we make it less likely to be repeated in the future.” The sexual abuse ranged from oral sex to fondling to rape, the documents showed. Emotional abuse often accompanied the physical abuse. For example, the Rev. Richard Hatch would force one of his boy victims to have oral sex and then make him go to confession and confess it as if he were the cause of it, documents showed. Like other dioceses, Winona kept the priests on the move, even after serious allegation of abuse.

Note: How many more terrible abuses like this are not being exposed because the Catholic Church and many other groups refuse to release their secret files showing just how bad it was. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sex abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

The ability of the courts to secure justice for child sexual abuse victims may be diminishing, despite decades of law reform, the head of a royal commission says. Justice Peter McClellan gave the warning as data covering almost 20 years showed a massive fall in the number of child sexual abuse cases that make it to court. An analysis of police and court data from NSW suggests a steady increase in the number of incidents of child sexual assault offences reported between 1995 and 2013. But for the same period, the proportion of child sexual assaults reported to police where charges were laid declined dramatically, from around 60 per cent in 1995, to around 15 per cent in 2013. The figures have raised concerns the trend is being replicated across other jurisdictions. "In spite of the issues being well known, and in spite of decades of reform, the preliminary results from some of our research suggest that the opportunity to secure justice for victims of child sexual abuse through the criminal justice system may in fact be decreasing, rather than increasing," he said. Justice McClellan said further reform must be considered, including introducing special child sex abuse courts, and even eliminating juries. The decline in prosecutions also raised the prospect that complainants find the criminal justice system too traumatic or damaging, he said. "If the system is too damaging or traumatic for complainants, then we must consider how the system could be improved for the complainant, while still delivering a fair trial for the accused."

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Just when it looked as though the inquiry into child sex abuse could finally get under way, it once again has to face whitewash accusations. After the absurd appointment of Lady Butler-Sloss, which ensured the inquiry got off to a farcical start, Theresa May has made the equally dubious appointment of a replacement chair in Fiona Woolf. This time it emerges the chair has close links with Lord Brittan. Yes, Leon Brittan, the former home secretary who has been accused of covering up a massive child abuse scandal. Even the most basic of checks would have revealed glaring problems with Woolf that were always going to cause difficulties and ensure victims had no confidence in the process. Events of the past few weeks suggest that, where tackling sex abuse is concerned, victims remain an afterthought for the government. Rather than send the message that this investigation is ready to take on the establishment, everything about this appointment conveys careful political management, a strategy of containment. The days when the public would tolerate Lord Hutton-type inquiries are long gone. On such a sensitive and raw issue as child abuse, the faintest whiff of whitewash will do untold damage. Westminster still lags a long way behind the public view. That’s why the home secretary has to demonstrate that the government finally gets it. There are only two options before her. She either deals with child abuse or covers it up.

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Key reports detailing child sexual exploitation have disappeared from the archives, the outgoing chief executive of Rotherham Council has told MPs. Martin Kimber said he had not seen a full copy of a 2002 report, had never seen a 2003 report and only saw a 2006 report on [last] Sunday. A report published earlier this month found at least 1,400 children were abused in the town from 1997 to 2013. The council was heavily criticised by Professor Alexis Jay. In her report, Professor Jay said: "Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the police and the council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham." Addressing MPs, Mr Kimber said he did not know whether the archives had been destroyed, but he told the Local Government Committee: "They are not within the council's archives." Director of children's services Joyce Thacker told MPs the first two reports did not appear to have been referred to in any existing council minutes. Asked whether there had been a "deliberate attempt to suppress information", she said she could not answer. Meanwhile, Rotherham council announced plans to dissolve the cabinet and invest Ł120,000 in counselling services for victims of child sexual exploitation. Deputy leader Paul Lakin said the money would come from cutting two cabinet posts and banning overseas travel by members. The council has also approved an emergency motion calling for the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire Shaun Wright to resign. Mr Wright ... was cabinet member for children's services in Rotherham between 2005 and 2010.

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A Home Office official who investigated the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham accused the council of being involved in the unauthorised removal of information from her office. Her report in 2002 suggested there were then more than 270 victims of the scandal, which was finally exposed last week with revelations that at least 1,400 children were abused from 1997 to 2013. She [said] that she had sent her report to both the council and the Home Office on a Friday, but when she returned on Monday she found her office had been raided. "They'd gained access to the office and taken my data, so out of the number of filing cabinets, there was one drawer emptied and it was emptied of my data. It had to be an employee of the council," she said. The Home Office researcher, [whose name was not released], also said she had been accused of being insensitive when she told one official that most of the perpetrators were from Rotherham's Pakistani community. A female colleague talked to her about the incident. "She said you must never refer to that again – you must never refer to Asian men. And her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues." The Home Office researcher said that at one point the council tried to get her sacked and the report was never published. A draft of the report severely criticised agencies working to tackle the child exploitation in the area, including "alleged indifference towards, and ignorance of, child sexual exploitation on the part of senior managers". It said: "Responsibility was continuously placed on young people's shoulders rather than with the suspected abusers."

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A report released on [August 26] on accusations of widespread sexual abuse in the northern England city of Rotherham found that about 1,400 minors — some as young as 11 years old — were beaten, raped and trafficked from 1997 to 2013 as the local authorities ignored a series of red flags. Some children were doused in gasoline and threatened with being set on fire if they reported their abusers. Others were forced to watch rapes and threatened with the same fate. In more than a third of the cases, the victims appear to have been known to child protection agencies, but the police and local government officials failed to act. Within hours of the report’s publication, [Roger Stone, the leader of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council since 2003,] resigned. It was not until 2010 that the first case of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, a South Yorkshire city of about 250,000 people, made it to court. Five men received long prison sentences for grooming three teenage girls for sex. It was one of several high-profile prosecutions over the past four years that revealed sexual exploitation in cities including Oxford, Rochdale and Derby. Alexis Jay, the author of the report and a former chief inspector of social work, said that vulnerable girls as young as 11 and largely from disadvantaged backgrounds had been brutalized by groups of men. “They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated,” she wrote. The report described the failures of the political and police leadership as blatant.

Note: Further information is available in this story in the UK's Guardian. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

A former federal cyber security chief was convicted [on August 26] on several charges related to accessing and distributing child pornography. Timothy DeFoggi, 56, was acting director of cyber security at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services when he was detained in May 2013 as part of an investigation targeting three child pornography websites. The former Germantown, Md. resident registered as a member of one of the sites on March 2, 2012, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release. He used the site to access and solicit child pornography, "and exchanged private messages with other members where he expressed an interest in the violent rape and murder of children," according to the DOJ. DeFoggi also suggested to one member of a message board that they meet in person to fulfill fantasies of violently raping and murdering children. He is the sixth person convicted in connection with the investigation. Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 7.

Note: For powerful evidence from a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals reach to the highest levels of government, click here. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

The handsome Edwardian house that was formerly Elm Guest House, near Barnes, in south-west London, was long ago converted into flats. Some 30 years ago, the convenient location was similarly appealing. Today ... this suburban house is at the heart of a simmering scandal threatening to boil over and take with it the reputations of a swath of the political class of the 1970s and 1980s. In 2012 Tom Watson, the Labour MP who played a key role in exposing the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, stood up in parliament to ask the prime minister to ensure that a dossier of information used in 1992 to convict a notorious paedophile called Peter Righton was examined thoroughly. Watson said he believed the file, if it still existed, would provide some evidence of a "powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10". Claims have since materialised about boys from Grafton Close Children's Home in Hounslow, west London, being taken to Elm Guest House, plied with alcohol and abused. Cyril Smith, the late Liberal MP, accused since his death in 2010 of being an inveterate child abuser, is said to have regularly visited the property. Back in 1983, Geoffrey Dickens, a Tory MP, had got wind of something of this. He compiled a dossier, telling his family it was "explosive" and would "blow the lid" on powerful and famous child abusers. The dossier was handed over to the then home secretary, Leon Brittan, who acknowledged receipt in a letter and suggested the police had been informed. [But] nothing was heard of the Dickens dossier again.

Note: Watch powerful evidence in a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals reach to the highest levels of government. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

From politicians’ fraudulent expenses to phone hacking, Britain has become surprisingly scandal-strewn in recent years, but the latest reputational cyclone to sweep across its shores is casting an especially dark light: pedophilia in high places. Newspapers and TV bulletins have been dominated for the past week by allegations that politicians with links to Margaret Thatcher’s government sexually abused vulnerable children in the 1980s and hid the truth for decades through their “chumocracy.” Suspicions of an establishment cover-up involving government departments, Scotland Yard and other elements of the establishment intensified in recent days when the law-and-order ministry, the Home Office, confirmed [that] dozens of potentially-relevant files alleging sexual misconduct had gone missing from its archives. The allegations—which center around the suggestion that politicians of all parties and other VIPs preyed on children at a guest house in the London suburb of Barnes—have been given greater credence because in the past two years a string of national figures have been exposed as predatory pedophiles. Into this febrile atmosphere, Tom Watson, a Labour Party lawmaker, told the House of Commons in October 2012 that police should “investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful pedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10.” As a result of Watson and online news agency Exaro’s investigations, Scotland Yard launched Operation Fernbridge, an inquiry into the now-notorious Elm Guest House.

Note: Watch powerful evidence in a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals reach to the highest levels of government. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Peace Corps’ inspector general says she can’t oversee the agency properly without access to sex-assault records it refuses to hand over. Since 2008, Peace Corps Inspector General Kathy Buller has led internal investigations that have led to 21 criminal convictions for crimes such as rape, attempted rape, abuse of minors, embezzlement, theft and possession of narcotics. Buller charged the Peace Corps with [hindering] her office’s oversight efforts, and said the agency was not fully disclosing its sexual assault reports. In 2011, [ABC News] reported that more than 1,000 female Peace Corps volunteers have been raped or sexually assaulted in the past decade, and that some victims felt the agency either sought to cover up incidents or treated victims with insensitivity. The murder of Peace Corps volunteer Kate Puzey in Benin seized public attention in 2011. The volunteer was found dead after she reported her suspicions that a Peace Corps contractor was sexually harassing students at the school where she taught. Less than a year after her death, Congress passed reforms to protect whistleblowers like Puzey and to improve the agency’s sexual assault practices. But even after Puzey’s murder, sexual assault still remains a problem for the Peace Corps and the thousands of volunteers they send abroad.

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When victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests first organized into a small band of volunteer activists in the late 1980s, reports of clergy molesting children were still new and relatively few. Today, as the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, marks its 25th anniversary at a conference in Chicago (Aug. 1-3), its members can take satisfaction in seeing that its claims have been validated, and a few (though hardly all) of its recommendations have been implemented by the church hierarchy. SNAP’s advocacy on the Catholic scandal also helped push the reality of sexual abuse into the public consciousness to the point that victims can regularly win in courts and get a hearing in the media, and they are much more likely to come forward to tell their stories, whether they were abused by clergy or by athletic coaches or Boy Scout leaders. Yet that success is also presenting SNAP with a daunting new challenge as it looks to the future: how to respond to a flood of new inquiries from victims from other faiths and institutions, and how to push for changes beyond the familiar precincts of the Catholic Church. “We are continuing to grow, and more of the growth is coming overseas and in non-Catholic institutional abuse, mostly religious institutions but a surprising number of secular ones as well,” said David Clohessy, SNAP’s national director. The appeals for help from SNAP have increased so much — from students abused by teachers to victims of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky — that SNAP has set up chapters specifically for victims from non-Catholic churches and for those who were abused in the Boy Scouts.

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The [UK] government [has] announced an inquiry into historical allegations of child sex abuse by leading political figures. The Westminster inquiry will investigate not just the rape and assault of children at group homes going back decades but also accusations that child abuse by politicians and other public figures was deliberately covered up or even facilitated by members of the elite. [The] Parliament has ... spent 30 years failing to catch the pedophiles in its own house. Before the inquiry was even announced, it emerged that 114 files concerning allegations of abuse against children involving senior political figures had mysteriously disappeared. What links all these convicted or alleged predators of children is not background or upbringing. What united them was power and access — and a sense of entitlement, acquired from Britain’s traditional elite, that came from the knowledge that their reputations were too great for them to be held accountable. In many cases, investigation by the authorities was deliberately deflected. Nowhere is this truer than at Britain’s top “public schools,” as the private secondary, usually boarding, schools are known. In these, a culture of bullying and sexualized violence has been understood for more than a century as part of the process of training young men to be leaders. Teachers at 130 of these schools have been implicated; several schools are under criminal investigation by the police. That victims of child abuse often grow up to replicate that abuse, to become bullies or tyrants or covert sexual predators, has long been understood as a human tragedy. Only in Britain does it seem to have been the intrinsic psychology at the dark heart of the governing elite.

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A group of Catholic and Anglican church leaders have accused the ... government of ''state-sanctioned child abuse'' in the immigration detention system, and called for Immigration Minister Scott Morrison to step down from his position as guardian for all unaccompanied minors. Leaders from nine Christian denominations, which form the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce, [have released] a report [with] recommendations to the ... government to improve the wellbeing and treatment of children in onshore and offshore immigration detention centres. The church leaders ... say the church has learnt a painful lesson from decades of child abuse within their congregations. Reverend Peter Catt, the Anglican Dean of Brisbane said: ''We have the absolute duty to make sure the events that came out from the Royal Commission aren't repeated in any setting. Institutional child abuse occurs in many different settings and it's illegal, it's horrific and it's unacceptable.'' The recommendations in the report include ending closed detention for all unaccompanied children; providing institutional child welfare and protection; and replacing the Immigration Minister as the guardian of about 135 unaccompanied asylum seeker children who are being held in onshore and offshore centres. There are about 4330 children in immigration detention - most of them living in the community. ''The Minister forsakes his guardianship duties when he sends unaccompanied children to the detention camp in Nauru,'' says the report, titled Protecting the Lonely Children. The report said there was clear evidence that children are experiencing ''terrible physical and mental suffering''.

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A six-year-old schoolgirl has allegedly been raped by two staff members at a prominent school in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, police say. Hundreds of parents have protested outside the school, pulling down its gates and shouting slogans. Police have registered a case, but they are yet to make any arrests. India's sluggish judicial system means it can take years for victims to get justice. New Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised a zero tolerance approach on crimes against women, but violence and discrimination against women remain deeply entrenched in society. The girl was allegedly raped by a security guard and a gym teacher, but as there are multiple guards and gym instructors in the school, police say they are trying to identify the guilty. As news of the incident became public, hundreds of parents gathered outside the school, protesting against the alleged insensitivity of the school management. Scrutiny of sexual violence in India has grown since the 2012 gang rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus. The brutal crime led to massive outrage in the country and forced the government to introduce tougher anti-rape laws, including the death penalty in rare cases. But the law appears to have failed to act as a deterrent. Statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau for 2013 show one rape was reported every 21 minutes.

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It's a mythical number that skeptics never question. And it's come up again and again in the national press for decades. It's purportedly the number of victims from the infamous child sexual abuse cases of the 1980s and 1990s. Not child victims, though. The victims are said to be adults who were falsely charged and often convicted of sexual abuse, victims of a witch-hunt. Christina Hoff Sommers used the number just a few weeks ago in a Time column, referring to those cases and writing that "hundreds of innocent adults faced charges of ritual child abuse." The number of accused or jailed is always impressive. The abuse is always dismissed as imaginary. The cases are always cast as witch-hunts, with a narrative typically full of lurid details. The alarming words ritual or satanic -- sometimes both -- are often added for good measure. The witch-hunt narrative has been bolstered by scores of articles and books. But the numbers don't add up. There's no evidence of hundreds of cases of false convictions of child sexual abuse in this era. In my new book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, I examine dozens of specific cases from the 1980s and early 90s. In many of the cases proclaimed to be witch hunts, looking closely at the record revealed substantial evidence of abuse and compelling reasons that jurors voted to convict. It's true that I also found cases where people were charged who shouldn't have been. Yet even in some of those cases, there was strong evidence of abuse. A crime was committed and a child was assaulted by someone who was never apprehended, but only the false accusation story lives on.

Note: The author of this essay, Ross E. Cheit, is professor of political science and public policy at Brown University. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandals news articles from reliable major media sources.

Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that "about 2%" of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles. The Pope said that abuse of children was like "leprosy" infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper. He vowed to "confront it with the severity it demands". Until now, the Vatican has declined to quantify the extent of clerical sexual abuse scandals in the worldwide Church. Statistics are usually available only for countries in the developed world. In the developing world, information is usually only sketchy. In the interview, Pope Francis was quoted as saying that the 2% estimate came from advisers. It would represent around 8,000 priests out of a global number of about 414,000. While the incidence of paedophilia as a psychiatric disorder in the general population is not accurately known, some estimates have put it at less than five percent. "Among the 2% who are paedophiles are priests, bishops and cardinals. Others, more numerous, know but keep quiet. They punish without giving the reason," Pope Francis was quoted as saying. "I find this state of affairs intolerable," he went on. Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi denied that Pope Francis had said that there were cardinals who were paedophiles. Asked in the same La Repubblica interview about the celibacy rule for priests, Pope Francis recalled that it was adopted 900 years after the death of Jesus Christ and pointed out that the Eastern Catholic Church allows its priests to marry.

Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.