Family First Tortures Kids for Profit

The video tape is very disturbing. It angers me to no end, and I promise you, had I witnessed adults doing this to a child I would lose it emotionally, grab the first heavy object I could find, and start bashing in some skulls—and I would not feel guilty about it.

Family First claims to be a "bootcamp" for kids. This means it treats children the way drill sergeants treat adults. That, in my opinion, means abuse. And the video clearly shows four adults abusing a young boy. The adults who run this "tough love" camp go by military titles, playing adult dress-up to try and intimidate kids. Watch this video to see what I mean.

Another video shows screaming thugs, pretending to be adults, forcing teens to drink vast amounts of water until they vomit.

I admit that I get suspicious the moment I see someone extolling "family" as their agenda. Almost without exception the people hiding behind the "family" label are bigots, authoritarians or worse. You have openly bigoted hate groups like the American Family Association, Family Research Council, Family Research Institute, Illinois Family Institute, and now Family First Growth Center.

Conservatives believe in man's innate sinfulness and believe that individuals must regularly be punished to avoid "sin." This is behind their high levels of child abuse, their obsession with executing people, their support for the use of torture, their unending demands for "stiffer" penalties, even for victimless crimes, and their belief in a hateful, vengeful deity intent on torturing people for eternity. As much as they claim to be "pro-life" these attitudes are, in every sense of the word, anti-life to the core.

In my opinion what we see in this one video is sufficient to charge all four of these adults with a crime, and it is serious enough to warrant jail time for each of them. No child deserves to be treated this way, no matter how "at risk" moronic adults believe him or her to be.

I note that the "sponsors" of this "bootcamp" include several local businesses and three churches. All of the churches involved are fundamentalist churches. At least one of the churches appears heavily connected to "Family First" bootcamp.

The "camp" is in Pasadena, California. There is a lot of outrage over the videos that people have seen.

Fundamentalist website, No Greater Joy, tells parents "As the military drills their soldiers, you must drill your children." Do you still wonder why I think of fundamentalist Christians as monsters?

The kind of mother that infuriates me.

The stupidity and cruelty of some people astounds me. Torry Hansen is one such person. Torry Hansen adopted a young boy from an orphanage in Russia six months ago. She named the boy Justin Hansen and brought him back to Tennessee. Just recently she changed her mind. Her mother flew with the boy to Washington and then put him on plane for Moscow by himself. Hansen paid a man $200 she found online to pick the boy up in Moscow and hand him over to the Russian government along with a note saying she didn’t want him anymore.

Her excuse for this action was that the seven-year-old child was “the violent tendencies and he had to be watched all the time.” Hansen says “I love children,” in spite of her actions to the contrary. Hansen claims the child threatened to kill them and had started a fire. So he sought legal advice by going online—talk about due diligence. And the on-line attorney told her to send the kids back and claimed the boy “had never been happier” than when she put on him the plane by himself.

This stupid woman set off an international incident that has led to the threat that all Americans may be stopped from adopting in Russia. Hansen had adopted the boy using an agency, but when she changed her mind she never bothered to tell the agency about the matter. They only found out when their office in Moscow was notified of the incident.

Hansen claimed that the boy had psychotic tendencies, no doubt diagnosed by an online therapist or by reading a website. Passengers on the flight with the boy say that while he was active, like most children his age, that he was obedient and sat down when instructed to do so. He was described as an average boy.


The Russian government says that the boy was disoriented when he arrived in Moscow saying that Hansen’s mother, his adopted grandmother, had told him he was going on a vacation and he didn’t realize what was happening to him until he arrived in Moscow.

According to the Russian government the boy had some signs of physical abuse. And the U.S. government is now investigating the matter because the boy became a U.S. citizen after his adoption and arrival in the United States. In addition there is some concern that the boy was not being educated, either at home or in a school. He was not listed as being home-schooled and was not enrolled in any school. And the boy told authorities that Hansen had repeatedly told him that she didn’t love him, unlike her feelings for her birth son Logan.

Let us assume, for one minute, that the assertions made by Hansen are correct. Let us assume the boy was troubled and violent. Why is that surprising? He was adopted from an orphanage and may well have had a troubled past.

My view is simple: an adopted child, once the adoption is finalized, should be considered and treated precisely as a naturally born child of the parent or parents in question. Torry Hansen had the moral obligation to deal with this boy precisely as if she had given birth to him—and that doesn’t mean returning a defective product to the franchise.

This boy was not a commodity and shouldn’t have been treated like one. Let us assume that the orphanage lied—tough, kids don’t come with guarantees. Children are living, breathing, thinking human beings with their own wills. And no one can guarantee that they will act any particular way. No such guarantee comes with children when they are born, nor should one be expected when they are adopted.

Assume Hansen’s birth son, Logan, acted this way—could she return him? Obviously not. When she took on the responsibility of adopting this boy she took on the responsibility of treating him precisely the same way a natural child would be treated under similar circumstances and that doesn’t allow for returning the child because she was unhappy. He wasn’t a defective television taken in for repairs. He was a kid.

The adoption agency that helped with the adoption says Hansen never informed them of problems. They say the first they knew of a problem was when their Moscow office was told the boy was in Russia. They say they work with parents who have trouble adjusting to the situation but that Hansen never contacted them. Hansen claimed she got “psychiatric” advice but doesn’t say from where, or how—perhaps it amounted to more on-line research. And she admits she never took the boy in for counseling. Russian authorities say there is no sign of emotional problems on the part of the boy.

Consider the circumstance: Torry Hansen made no real effort in this matter. She got legal advice online. She sticks the boy on a flight to Russia and hires a drive online to meet him at the other end. The driver had “references” online so she was satisfied. She says she sought psychological advice, but not for the boy. She didn’t contact local counseling agencies, child welfare, or any other service, public or private, that could have helped her deal with the situation—if one existed. She did not contact the adoption agency about problems. She simply packed the boy up and put him on a plane to Russia with a note saying she didn’t want him any longer. And the only person in Russia who knew of the boy’s impeding arrival was a driver she hired online.

Because the immature way she handled the situation she has put Russian authorities into a bind as well. She is still the legal mother of the boy and has not given up parental rights. They can’t find another home for the boy until she gets off her butt and cooperates but so far she is refusing to return phone calls to them in order to start the process.

Given the publicity there are now lots of people who want to talk to Hansen. The local sheriff says he called the family but they didn’t want to talk for a few more days and the sheriff appears happy to ignore the matter. The Department of Child Services says, “We have tried to visit the Hansen family” and “are working alongside law enforcement on trying to interview them.” That sounds as if Hansen and her relatives are ignoring these attempts. Perhaps DCS should contact her online? And now the FBI is involved as well, sending agents to investigate the facts.

If facts were misrepresented to Hansen then she might have a legal case against the adoption agency and the orphanage. But that wouldn’t give her the right to abandon the child. Consider a woman who is told that tests show her unborn child is normal, but the child isn’t. She chooses to give birth and finds a infant with birth defects. She might have a legal case against the physician who misinformed her but that wouldn’t give her the right to simply abandon the child. She would have the right to give custody to others who could and would help the boy. Simply abandoning him to the care of strangers is not acceptable.

Hansen had the same rights. She could have sought help, but she didn’t. She could have found other caregivers for the boy, but she didn’t. She could have sought out many people able and willing to intervene and help the boy, instead she turned him over to a stranger that she found online. Hansen is going to be put under a great deal of scrutiny and I can’t say I feel sorry for her.

The fact is that children are individuals and no guarantee is possible. We sometimes hear of a mother who sticks by her adult son, even after he has committed the worst of crimes. That attitude I can understand, but parents who abandon a child puzzle me. Each child is like a hand in poker, you never know what you are going to be dealt. But you don’t get to abandon a “bad hand.” You are stuck with the cards you get and make the most of it. Given the recent case of a boy thrown out of his home because he is gay, and now this one, I have to wonder what rights these alleged grown-ups think they have in the matter?

If your child is too aggressive, too loud or just too gay, tough shit. Work with it. Seek help, get counseling. But simply throwing a child out is incomprehensible. It is inhuman. And it deserves our greatest condemnations. As bad as it was when Derreck Martin’s parents chucked him out of home, he at least was a high school student. But Justin Hansen was just seven-years-old. My fear is that is mother was even more immature than he was. And Hansen’s actions to date, especially her refusal to speak to anyone about what she did, indicates that she deserves the scrutiny that she will receive. And I suspect we will find some things that Torry prefers remain hidden.

Who will protect the kids from them?

Fundamentalist Christians like to pretend that marriage equality will lead to child abuse. They want to protect the children. But who will protect the children from them?

I attended a fundamentalist seminary for two years and a Christian high school for two years before that. I know what these people believe and how they act. Typically they teach that children should be beaten to discipline them and that the Bible commands this.

Consider this story out of Oroville, California as an example. According to the Chico Enterprise Record, "a fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to 'train' children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister."

The born-again parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz are being held on chargers of murder and torture. Reports indicate the parents used a rubber hose or tube to beat their kids. They had three adopted children and six of their own. Their own children have told investigators that the religious beliefs were behind the beatings. But remember, we must never question deeply-held religious beliefs!

The newspaper reports:

Prosecutors allege the two victims were subjected to "hours" of corporal punishment by their parents on successive days last Thursday and Friday with a quarter-inch-wide length of rubber or plastic tubing, which police reportedly recovered from the parents' bedroom. Police allege that the younger girl was being disciplined for mis-pronouncing a word during a home-school reading lesson the day before she died. The two young girls reportedly sustained deep bruising and multiple "whip-like" marks on their back, buttocks and legs, which authorities believe resulted in significant muscle tissue breakdown that impaired their kidneys and possibly other vital organs, said Ramsey.

Of course, the same parents, being fundamentalists would argue that gays shouldn't be allowed to adopt like they did because those nasty homosexuals might abuse the kids. Investigators say that a Christian website recommends the use of the rubber hose "as an appropriate tool for biblical chastisement... to train a child from infancy to make them a happier child and more obedient to God because they are obedient to the will of their parents."

The attorney for these parents says they are shocked and "are grieving the loss of their daughter and (ask) that people of faith pray for everybody involved." To refer to this as the "loss" of their daughter is a misnomer. A car accident would be a loss, a deadly disease would be a loss, beating a child until their organs shut down is murder.

The seminary I had the misfortune of attending taught that beating children was demanded by God. The pastor who ran the sect produced books on Biblical child rearing advocating such methods. Let us consider the case of a preacher and his wife, who had taught at the same seminary. Rev. Joseph Combs, and his obedient wife Evangeline, had adopted (unofficially) a girl named Esther. Esther was also home schooled and was kept isolated from everyone but the church, making her abuse harder to detect. The Baptist Children's Home, where she had been placed by her mother, gave the girl to Combs without any formal proceedings. The girl had no birth certificate, school records, or documentation that she existed. No actual legal adoption took place either.

She was tortured by these people for 19 years, in the name of Christ of course. Esther was admitted to a hospital and told the authorities there that the Pastor Combs and his wife tortured, abused and raped her. A medical report said the girl had "numerous scars involving scalp, face, neck, trunk, and extremities.. some of which show an appearance suggestive of burns... the girl suffered from several broken bones—hands, leg and arm—some of which did not heal properly." Doctors said they found "layered scar tissue over much of the girl's body."

Esther was hospitalized because she tried to kill herself and it was during that hospitalization that doctors saw the results of two decades of child abuse. They said Esther was emaciated and had more scars than anyone they had ever seen. Pastor Combs said the girl "fell" a lot.

Esther, who later changed her name and moved out of state, said she "was beaten, cut, burned and chocked" as a form of discipline. Mrs. Combs once took pliers and pinched the girl's arm and twisted the skin until she ripped off a patch of skin, calling this the "mark of the beast." When Esther forgot to throw out a can lid she was disciplined by having the lid used to cut her. She was beaten with a metal baseball bat and burned with a woodworking tool. Doctors counted 410 scars on the girl's body.

She had tried to escape the torture on several occasions and ran away from home. She ended up in a children's home only to have the Baptist parents retrieve her and beat her with a rubber hose. She says she drank anti-freeze in order to die and escape the torture. Church members testified that the Pastor had told them that God had revealed the girl was brought into their life to serve them as a full time servant. The two were convicted, Joe Combs was sentenced to 114 years in prison, his wife to 65.

Amazingly, after the suicide attempt, Esther was returned to the care of the couple while police investigated. Because the pastor and his wife feared the investigation they had Esther moved out of state to hide her away. She was first sent to South Carolina and then Georgia, I would suspect this was done with the cooperation of other fundamentalist pastors.

I am racking my memory, with no luck so far, to remember some details but there was a situation that happened when I was attending the school. A Baptist evangelist from Texas ran a " home" for children where beatings were typically used, as the church taught should be the case, to teach children obedience. The home was exposed for abusing these children and the authorities began an investigation. Baptist churches and pastors throughout the country rallied behind the evangelist claiming that investigating child abuse violated their religious freedom and their rights. The Bible says, "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell." Elsewhere it says, " The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil" and "He that spareth the rod hateth his son."

James Alexander, a former fundamentalist pastor, explains that Christian fundamentalism is directly tied to abusive action toward children. He says he when he married and had children, he and his wife "followed the teachings of the fundamentalist Christian 'gurus' and were quite strict with our children. I saw much of the same in our church associations—all young adults with kids, all towing the line in regards to child discipline. I have no doubt that what I saw and was rapidly accepting bordered on abuse—which was one of the reasons I repudiated fundamentalism when my sons were quite small." Alexander goes further. He contends "fundamentalism naturally places children at danger and naturally tends to abusiveness." This corresponds with what I saw within fundamentalist circles, especially among the Baptists.

Lynn Harris reported on a fundamentalist book on child rearing, written by a fundamentalist minister and his wife, To Train Up a Child. According to Harris, the book recommended using corporal punishment on infants only months old. It says if an infant tries to touch forbidden objects to use a switch and slap their hands. "They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain. It may take several times, but if you are consistent, they will learn to consistently obey, even in your absence."

In Raleigh, North Carolina four-year-old Sean Paddock, adopted by his fundamentalist mother, died when he was suffocated. Police found signs of abuse on two of the children; the result of beatings with the type of "rod" that these church leaders recommended,: a piece of quarter-inch hosing.

The Christian website, No Greater Joy, has a piece by this minister, Michael Pearl, which tells parents:

You must also condition their bodies to obedience by seizing many opportunities throughout the day to walk them through acts of obedience. As the military drills their soldiers, you must drill your children. We have discussed this many times, and since our subject is the rod, we will not go into the training aspect here, but we want you to see training and discipline in perspective.

These Christians say: "The ultimate child motivator is the rod." They say that the smallest infraction should result in a beating with the rod:

On the other hand, if you seize the smallest disturbances as opportunities to train, you will use the rod more frequently but with no stress or significant pain for either you or the child. For example, one mother is out in the yard having war with her four-year-old, trying to make him sit in the car seat. She has taken him in the house and spanked him until his legs are striped, but he still resists. She is mad. He is angry. They are fighting. Her neighbor sees it and calls the authorities. She was practicing “corporal punishment.

Rev. Pearl says:

The most painful nerves are just under the surface of the skin. A swift swat with a light, flexible instrument will sting without bruising or causing internal damage. Many people are using a section of ¼ inch plumber’s supply line as a spanking instrument. It will fit in your purse or hang around you neck. You can buy them for under $1.00 at Home Depot or any hardware store. They come cheaper by the dozen and can be widely distributed in every room and vehicle. Just the high profile of their accessibility keeps the kids in line.

The one restraint Pastor Pearl advises:

Don’t be so indiscreet as to spank your children in public—including the church restroom. I get letters regularly telling of trouble with in-laws who threaten to report them to the authorities. Parents have called the Gestapo on their married children. Church friends who have noses longer than the pews on which they perch can cause a world of trouble.

Who will protect the children from these people?

I should also note that this indoctrination of "obedience" is a recipe for authoritarianism. If a free society requires us to question authority, what happens if entire generations are taught to never question authority but to obey instead. The wide ramifications of this world-view are frightening.

A particularly loathsome creature

I am not fond of politicians in general. I have a natural aversion to anyone who feels they ought to be in a position of power over others. Anyone who wants power can't be trusted with it. Now and then a new life form emerges from the political cesspool, one so low and loathsome that it deserves special mention. One such entity is Martha Coakley who wants to be a Senator from Massachusetts, replacing Ted Kennedy.

Like Kennedy, Coakley is a Democrat. But don't assume she's soft on crime. No sir! Not Martha. She so hard on crime she doesn't mind incarcerating innocent people. No wonder the police chiefs in Massachusetts have endorsed her.

Coakley is one of those left-wing authoritarian types who "protects children" even if it means incarcerating innocent people for imaginary crimes. For purposes of this article let us ignore her odious role in fighting the abolition of the victimless crime of smoking pot and instead concentrate on her role in pushing the day care center scare of the 1980s. You may remember that large numbers of panicky parents were convinced by law enforcement that their little darlings were being attacked by Satanists in day care centers across the country. It was all bullshit, but bullshit makes good fertilizer and many a political career has been nurtured by scaremongering and lies. Coakley's career was one of them.

Coakley was involved in the bogus Fells Acre Day Care case where prosecutors "interrogated" children until they made absurd and impossible accusations. Then the prosecutors used those claims to convict the owners of the day care center of these impossible accusations. For instance, one accusation was that a wide butcher knife was plunged into a 4-year-old's anus, where it got stuck. But, call the Vatican on this because its a miracle, there were no cuts, no blood, no damage of any kind. Don't try that at home, the results won't be as miraculous.

Three innocent people were convicted in this panic-driven case and Coakley was up to her reptilian neck in it. She slithered about the case like a cobra seeking out a terrified rabbit for dinner. She hissed, struck and sank her fangs into the case with relish. It was great for her career—after all look at her now, running for the U.S. Senate. Two of the women who were convicted eventually got out of prison with "time served" when the evidence mounted that they were innocent. One woman had her conviction overturned while the other died waiting for justice.

But Gerald Amirault was not so lucky because he was man. Coakley argued that the women could be let out because women only "molest" (not that any such thing happened here) because of the presence of a male predator—imagine if someone said that about blacks and whites: "White criminals are only criminals because of the presence of black predators." The public would scream if such a claim was made on racial grounds, and rightfully so. But in Coakley's world of left-wing feminism such claims about men are perfectly acceptable.

The Massachusetts state's parole board was convinced that Amirault shouldn't be in prison. They unanimously voted for him to be released from prison. But that would put a question mark over Coakley's political career and hamper her ambitions. Like most real predators she is quite happy to advance herself over the bones of those she has destroyed along the way. So Coakley then lobbied acting Governor Jane Swift to deny the commutation of sentence. Coakley didn't want an innocent man walking the streets telling the world how she had destroyed his life.

Eventually Gerald Amirault finished his sentence for the imaginary crimes. Coakley had the option of trying to declare him "sexually dangerous" which would mean he remains incarcerated for the rest of his life, even though his sentence had been filled. (The state uses paid witnesses who declare anyone the state wants incarcerated as "sexually dangerous" allowing a life sentence to be imposed on the basis that the paid witness pretends to know that the convict is likely to reoffend.)

Coakley didn't do that, but not because she was getting soft. She was trying to avoid having the bogus evidence she used brought up in court again. She had ambitions and she didn't want that to happen. As the Wall Street Journal noted, if such a ruling were sought, "there would have to a virtual re-trial of the entire Amirault case. The DA had to have been deterred by the prospect of parading into a courtroom with the incredible fantasies extracted from Mr. Amirault's alleged victims--about secret rooms, magic drinks, animal butchery, assaults by a bad clown." The excuse used by Coakley and Swift, for denying release for Amirault was that he refused to admit his guilt.

It should be noted that these cases were prosecuted by left-wing ideologues not by right-wing Christians, like the case in Bakersfield. Coakley is a left-wing Democrat. She came into the Amirault case as prosecutor toward the end of the trial. The original prosecutor was Scott Harshbarger who now runs the left-wing lobby Common Cause. In the infamous McMartin Day Care Center case the prosecutor was Lael Rubin, Rubin is a left-wing Democrat as well and a supporter of Obama. Her husband, David Rosenzweig, another lefty, helped whipped up the hysteria over the case through his reporting for the LA Times. As Edgar Butler, in Anatomy of the McMartin Child Molestation Case wrote that Rosenzweig, was having a relationship with Rubin, that began before the McMartin trial so he published articles favorable to Rubin's case, while ignoring all the red flags.

Similarly another journalist from the left, Edward Lempinen, of the San Francisco Chronicle, published a series of breathless claims about Satanists attacking children in some concerted conspiracy. Lempinen basically acted as a hack for two obsessed police officers in that case. He has now gone on to promote global warming hysteria instead, not that this is a big improvement. At the time, the uncritical, very unscientific Lempinen, claimed that Satanists were involved in "scores" of child abuse cases—cases which fell apart due to lack of evidence. Apparently he hasn't changed his standards for his crisis d'jour.

While it is true that politically-driven conservatives may push hysteria as well, and have. We can't ignore that in the prosecution of innocent people as "child abusers" that many committed leftists were involved, aided by the uncritical journalism of biased journalists like Rosenzweig and Lempinen.

A modern day witch hunt.

This blog has covered how American sex laws have expanded to such a degree that hundreds of teens per year are incarcerated for what was once considered fairly normal behavior. The great irony of all this is that the laws in question found their genesis in a hysteria from a couple of decades ago, which used the mantra “its for the children” as its slogan.

The mid-to-late 1980s saw a hysteria literally sweep America. The claims were that thousands of children were being attacked sexually by secret satanic cells scattered across the United States. The news media actually bought into this B.S. and reported it with suitably horrified looks on their faces and a tinge of panic in their voice. Certain politicians flocked to the hysteria, as politicians are prone to do, demanding immediate action.

The most famous case was that of the McMartin Preschool. A woman with mental, as well as alcohol, problems claimed that her young son had been sodomized by her ex husband and by Ray Buckey, an employee of the school, run by his grandmother and mother. The woman also made claims that her dog was being sodomized, was diagnosed and hospitalized for acute paranoid schizophrenia and died from her drinking problems, all before the actual trial. None of this stopped the police who sent out a panicky letter to all McMartin parents telling them that molestation took place at the school. Horrified parents began questioning children, spreading the claims of the woman far and wide.

Hundreds of children were sent to an organization run by Kee McFarlane. Using techniques that have been criticized by professions, McFarlane was able to diagnose hundreds of children as victims. Therapeutic techniques were used that didn’t treat children for abuse, as much as convince them of it. Children, who had shown no symptoms of abuse prior to therapy, showed symptoms only after McFarlane and her team got their hands on them and subjected them to her form of therapy. The stories of the children were as bizarre as they were coerced. Kids told of sex orgies at a public car wash, Satanists running the local Episcopal Church, and secret tunnels beneath the school. Prosecutors even dug up the property to substantiate the stories but no such tunnels were ever found. In one incident, children claimed that actor Chuck Norris was a Satanist involved in abusing them.

ABC news local reporter Wayne Satz started the media hysteria on the case and continued reporting the “facts” even after he was sleeping with McFarlane. For seven years the trial dragged out costing taxpayers $15 million. In this case there were no convictions. Meanwhile agencies created to discover abuse saw their budgets increase ten-fold almost instantly.

But in other parts of the country the accused were not a lucky as the defendants in the McMartin case—if you can call what happened to them lucky. Not far from the McMartin case another hysteria was created in Bakersfield, California. A power-hungry, moralistic politician named Ed Jagels was the local prosecutor who got it in his thick skull that dozens of parents were involved in covens molesting children.

And that brings me to a new documentary that was recently released on DVD, entitled Witch Hunt. Dana Nachman and Don Hardy, Jr produced this documentary that looked at the Bakersfield cases. Under interrogation by the police and social workers various children began pointing their fingers at adults in court, often against their own parents. Many of those adults were then convicted and given sentences for hundreds of years.

But almost immediately the children were trying to convince authority figures that they didn’t tell the truth. This documentary doesn’t just tell the story of the convicted, but of their accusers as well. These children, now adults, say they spent their entire life tormented by the guilt of having sent innocent people to prison; even though they were just children, coerced into lying in court by a zealous team of prosecutors and police. Those convictions ruined their lives as well. Yes, there was abuse. But, it wasn’t sexual; it wasn’t committed by the defendants. It was an abuse of children conducted by the U.S. justice system at the behest of one politician wanting to make a name for himself as “tough on crime” in order to win over conservative voters.

Nachman and Hardy got a call from the Innocence Project, an important private effort to exonerate individuals falsely convicted of crimes by our legal systems. The Project was working on the case of John Stoll. Stoll remembers the night of his arrest. He awoke to find police officers standing in his room. From that moment, for the next couple of decades, Stoll was a prisoner of the justice system. When Stoll was eventually exonerated he told Hardy and Nachman of dozens of other people who had been convicted in the same witch hunt.

The story told in this documentary is a frightening one. Innocent people are caught up in a politically induced hysteria, fed by an immoral new media. They are convicted and have their lives ripped apart. Over the next few decades the facts, swept under the rug because of the panic, come to light. More and more of the children demand to be heard and the way the authorities coerced false testimony from them comes to light. But the justice system is reluctant to admit error and some of the falsely convicted languished in prison long after it was known they were innocent.

Witch Hunt is a chilling look at the dangers of big government. Individuals like Ed Jagels are given immense power and power corrupts in every sense of the word. When it does it is the innocent who suffer the most. Witch Hunt exposes the suffering of the innocent. In this case the innocent are not just the men and women sentences to inhumane prison terms for crimes that didn’t even happen, it is also the children who were subjected to legal manipulation and coercion to falsely testify, and then left to live with the guilt of their actions.

I highly recommend Witch Hunt. It is 91 minutes and the best price for it, that I have found, is here. Below are excerpts. I suggest you get the full film yourself. It is one of the best new films for libertarians that I have found.

The sledgehammer solution. It works but at what cost?

Some years ago the Christian author Mary Pride wrote a book, The Child Abuse Industry. It documented the rise of a special interest group ostensibly about child abuse but also about perks, politics and privilege. This book discussed how various ideologically driven groups promoted new laws to deal with an old problem -- child abuse.

The 1980s, in particular, were a period when one abuse panic over another dominated the news. Now an abuse panic is either an overreaction to a real case of abuse or a response to an entirely fictional event. And during this panic it mostly the latter not the former. The lives of hundreds of innocent people, and thousands of children, were turned upside-down. Families were destroyed because of bogus theories.

Worse yet, and ignored by many, is that the plethora of bogus abuse stories swamped the resources of social workers and police diverting their attention to the fake cases. The number of incidents reported to the police dramatically increased but the conviction rate dropped just as dramatically. The problem was that bad cases were reported -- cases without substance.

And other problems were created. The panic was so widespread that it became a useful tool in child custody battles. And on numerous occasions malevolent children or teens could use the panic to threaten or blackmail adults or just to seek revenge for some discipline they didn’t appreciate.

I remember one case in particular. A young mother was arrested along with her mother. Her small son and daughter had claimed to authorities that the mother prostituted them and the grandmother was supposedly in on this as well. The girl gave a description of dozens of men paying the mother to abuse her. And the son gave the same description saying that dozens of women paid his mother to have sex with him. I think he was something like ten years old. And the number of women who are sexually interested in a ten year old boy is rather low. At this point I suspected the case was bogus.

The mother and grandmother were arrested and incarcerated on horrific charges. The kids finally came forward and said they invented the story. Mother and grandmother had laid down some rules that the kids didn’t like so they retaliated. At school they had learned all about abuse and the consequences to adults who are accused of it. They knew that they could seek retribution for discipline they didn’t like by making false accusations. So they did.

The McMartin case was slightly different. It doesn’t appear the kids were trying to hurt anyone. The case started when one mentally disturbed mother started inventing accusations. She accused a large number of people ranging from actors to nuns to Raymond Buckey who worked for his grandmother’s day care center. Her bizarre accusations were ignored except for the one against Buckey. But the case exploded after police sent a letter to 200 parents claiming abuse had taken place based purely on the testimony of this disturbed woman.

A horrific woman by the name of Kee McFarland was brought into the case and she started interrogation sessions with the children. The sessions were thinly disguised brainwashing sessions. She was not there to discover what did or did not happen. She was there to convince the children. And her techniques worked. Children who had no memories of abuse whatsoever suddenly started having nightmares as, one by one, they became convinced that they had been abused in the most horrific ways imaginable.

All the trauma that is expected to accompany real, violent abuse materialized after the therapy sessions. None of the children exhibited such symptoms before the sessions only after them. Virtually every staff member at the day care center was arrested including the elderly, wheelchair bound, Virginia McMartin. Several hundred small children were subjected to McFarland’s therapy and emerged traumatized as a result.

Seven women, along with Buckey, were arrested and charged with over 200 counts of abuse. Eventually the case unravelled but not before thousands of people, in one community, were traumatized by the events.

Dozens of other cases emerged at the same time across the country and thousands of children and thousands of innocent adults were subjected to trials. Many innocent people ended up in prison, some were eventually released while others sit there to this day.

Abuse is a real problem. But in heavily politicized America people have a tendency to respond to real problems with sledgehammers. By that I mean that instead of swatting a fly with fly swatter we use a sledgehammer on the problem. It works. The fly is killed. But in the process we inflict a lot of collateral damage.

The danger with some “solutions” is that they are worse than the problem or that they make the problem actually worse not better. Many of the legacies of that panic live with us to this day. Jeff Zaslow, of the Wall Street Journal, recently looked at one of the legacies of the moral panic about abuse.

Zaslow told the stories of different men and how they avoid the mere whiff of abuse charges. Ted Wallis, a physician, recently came upon a small child at a shopping mall who was in tears. The child had become lost. There was a time when this happen someone would comfort the child and take them to a security guard or somewhere where an announcement could be made. Wallis wanted to help but if he, a man, was seen comforting a crying child who wasn’t his own, the risk was too high. He walked away.

Zaslow mentioned how the Boy Scouts now require four adults to go on all camp outs so that two adults are always together. Why four not two? That’s in case one child has to be taken home for some reason. That way two adults can accompany the child home and two adults remain with the rest of the troop. Don’t mention the idea that two children might have to go home or three. They’d end up with more adults on the trip than children.

One man, Ray Simpson, told Zaslow, a sad story. Every Halloween he’d have around 30 children stop by his house for the Trick or Treat routine. But that was before his marriage broke up. The last year he was living alone and because he was a single male not one child was permitted to knock on his door for treats. He said: “I felt like crying at the end of the evening.”

In a previous article Zaslow noted that the number of male teachers has been cut in half. It was 18% in 1981 and dropped to just 9%. It is no coincidence that this decline came following the abuse panics engineered in the 1980s. Zaslow thinks men are being stereotyped in a way that is unacceptable for any other group of people. He’s right.
The obsessed John Walsh tells parents to never hire a male baby-sitter. The Virginia Depart of Health ran a billboard campaign showing a man and small girl walking while holding hands. It was captioned “It doesn’t feel right when I see them together.” The head of one father’s group said this amounted to a saying, “if you see a father out with his daughter, call the police.” Walsh tried to justified his prejudice saying that if a teenage boy wants to experiment with sex that one wouldn’t want them doing it with one’s children. What about teenage girls who want to experiment? I’m sorry that Walsh’s son was killed years ago by an unknown assailant but the man has gone bonkers. He’s a destructive influence on the legal system lashing out indiscrimninately to revenge his son yet he doesn't know who killed his son or why. So every possible "monster" and theory is open to his obsessive attacks.

Police departments tell children that if they get lost to look for “safe” adults who can help them. These are women but particularly certain kinds of women. A woman who is pregnant, an older woman, or a woman with a stroller are suggested. The message is to stay away from men.

And men get the message to stay away from children.

Of course to discuss such problems in the “solution” to abuse gives the vicious and unethical the excuse to accuse one of justifying abuse, of enabling it. This lame leap in logic is the same sort used by the moron in the White House. If you don’t support his vile war in Iraq you are enabling the terrorists. Rational people know such accusations are bullshit. But then the demagogues don’t appeal to reason. They appeal to fear.

I have no doubt that all these measures have prevented some children from being abused. In exchange they created broken homes, emotionally scared children, and distant fathers. Conditions which, I should note, increase the likelihood that those scared children will grow up with problems that they may ultimately take out on children. No child should be abused. No adult should ever be falsely accused of child abuse. Swinging from one extreme to the other is not a solution.

The alternative to a communist dictatorship wasn’t Hitler. There are all sorts of problems that we face in this world. But sledgehammers aren’t the solution. This is what worries me about the United States. This Red/Blue division has turned both camps into sledgehammer wielding fanatics. Everyone wants drastic solutions to any social problem they face and no one seems to consider that their solutions might be worse than the actual problems we face.

If you don’t think federalizing health care is a good idea is because you are uncaring and want the sick to die in the streets. If you don’t think federalizing marriage is a good idea it is because you are uncaring and want “families” to be destroyed. If you don’t want a Wall on the border it’s because you don’t love you country. If you don’t want the war in Iraq it is because you love terrorists. To question sledgehammer solutions, from either side, opens you up to accusations that you love the problem for one nefarious reason or another.

It isn’t just the political rhetoric that has become extreme in the United States. It is the solutions to problems as well. And as the country lurches from Left to Right to Left again the net result is that extreme solutions accumulate creating a crisis that no one can solve.

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Young boy charged with child molestation.

Michelle Grosbeck left her 8 year old son with a female babysitter of 14. And the girl decided they should play Truth or Dare.

She dared the boy to touch her breast. He did.

Grosbeck says she felt something wasn’t right when she got home and asked her son what had happened. “He just came right out as if nothing was awry, and just starting talking about what happened.”

At this point Grosbeck made a mistake. She went to the police about this incident who then took the case to the district attorney who then filed charges against the boy for lewdness with a minor.

The District Attorney told Grosbeck that her son was a willing participant and an equal participant. And in Utah if two children engage in sexual exploration they are both considered child molesters and can be forced to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. This has already happened in Utah were two kids of the about the same age were charged with mutual child molestation for “molesting” each other.

Facing publicity the DA’s office dropped the charges against the boy and has since refused to comment on the situation.

The smart thing for parents who discover such a situation is to to talk to the children involved. Inform the other parents and deal with it privately. Unless the act is coercive or violent or involving an adult the intrusion of the police and local prosecutors is likely to harm the children far more than some fleeting experimentation. The reality is that the children will be victimized by the state for the rest of their lives once it has its nose into things.