Texas town reels from horrific abuse in its midst

Your a little strange Darro

Question for you;

But the child molester was probably a victim of abuse himself when he was young

Who molested first child molester?

Just kill em all.

Your a little quick to define a person by two paragraphs, Jerry.

If I seemed to be defending child molestation, your ability to read for content would seem rather poor. My statement was about the specific individual I was referring to when writing the piece. Clearly in my Solution I reached a verdict.

I would assume a demon or alien molested the FIRST child molester, as something otherworldly had to originate concept. (At least in my clinging hope for the goodness of mankind).

All this said, had I realized this article was going to the Front Page, I'd have refrained from posting any comment whatsoever. I assumed it was channeling through lost non-campaign trivia and I randomly inserted a few thoughts I had in another life. I apologize to you, specifically, Jerry, if this whole process rendered you more involved in my personal being than that of an entire outfit abusing small children.

I never intended to distract from their criminality or plain waste of oxygen.

Darro,

For record I understood where you were going/ coming from. I could feel your dilemma.

Thank you for that Tom. I probably could've put it in fewer words. Matter of fact, you nailed it.

Just kill em all.

Either "guilty" or "witch hunt."

Yeeeah...that's the thing. We actually have no evidence put in front of us in this brief report. What we do have is a highly emotive article about a clearly emotionally charged situation. And the five minute verdict doesn't actually make me feel better. Quite possibly something very wrong happened. Even more likely, the people of this community want it "dealt with" as quickly as possible, so they can go back to their normal lives. That formula doesn't always add up to the right person being convicted for the right crime.

I'd feel much better if the article was detailed, with specifics about how the convicted (or soon to be) were involved, and in what way. They might truly be evil, child-abusing bastards, but I would appreciate some kind of evidence.

Evidence? Isn't that what "convicted" these individuals? Or am I missing something?

Extremist Moderate
perhap you don't recall the "little rascals" trials. Where "emotions" destroyed the lives of a family. and yeah they were convicted as well on "evidence". that is why it is important to get the details.

or even better let them suffer even MORE by doing the torture of the 1000 cuts.....gruesome stuff

well all are my friend

what do you mean ?

Mormons do not believe in, practice, or condone polygamy. I believe you mean the FLDS

got cha. i agree 100%!

I seriously doubt the accusations are accurate

I tend to agree with you.

I doubt whether you can get 50 to 100 people to participate in something like and not have someone leak it out. Something probably happened their, but it obviously has been exaggerated.

8 to a car? Why not....this is Texas ... they have BIG cars.

5 minute deliberations? ........ again .........this isTexas!

I not pickin' on Texas, mind you.

(Yeah, I'm pickin' on Texas)

Does it really matter to you how many people were in the audience during these "shows"? Does it make it any less awful if there were 24 adults, 2 per car? Jesus Christ.

Not rating this on a scale of awfulness, no. The few but contradictory details included in the article make it seem more likely that the whole thing is either 1) pure unchecked hysteria or 2) a story with a tiny core of truth wrapped in a big fat dripping ball of hysteria.

People are not good at thinking rationally about things that are very very horrible to contemplate. Look no further than many of the comments right here on this page!

It's possible that someone was abusing children here, and if so I hope that they are being appropriately punished. But it's also possible that some adults in a small, conservative town had some sort of sex club and that something sparked a witch hunt that led to innocent people being accused of sex crimes against children.

The reason the hysteria explanation seems possible to many commenters is because it has happened before, more than once. During the 1980s there was a widespread belief that Satan worshippers had infiltrated daycares and schools across the country and were abusing children, drinking blood, performing human sacrifice, etc. There was no proof, naturally, but there were some seriously horrible stories and that was enough.

Nonetheless there were law enforcement organizations spreading these lies, support groups, books written on the subject, and there were some arrests and trials. All based on hysteria.

This seems bizarre and hard to believe after the fact, but so do the Salem witch trials. "What were they thinking?", we wonder. Well, they were thinking of how horrible the charges were, rather than how likely they were or how much evidence there was to prove them.

Jackjack: Right you are, and there was something else, as well: a flourishing new profession of self-proclaimed "experts" on child molestation who would "interview" the children in suspected cases of abuse, sometimes for 14 hours at a time, and would pressure them, coach them, punish them if the kids didn't tell them what they wanted to hear, reward them if they did, and would finally come up with testimony from the kids some of which was plausible, most of which was ridiculous. Of course, the jury never heard the claims from the children that the teachers at Little Rascals dressed up like elephants and sprayed water all over the classroom from their trunks. Nor did they hear the exchange in which an "expert" badgered a child for about an hour to say that "the bad teacher touched your body in a nasty way," only to finally get the child to agree that the teacher once touched her -- hands.

The jury at the McMartin school did hear testimony that the children were led through an underground tunnel into town, where they were forced to engage in prostitution, and that on one occasion they were taken to an airport, flown to another city where they engaged in sex for paying customers, flew back, and were back at school in time for their 10:00 a.m. milk and cookies snack. Aside from the chronological problems of this account, however, there was also the minor detail that the most thorough examination of the school building found no trace of a tunnel. That was one of many reasons why the prosecution couldn't get a single conviction in the McMartin case.

so we should just what, say it's ok we know it looked bad, but you know these kids are just messed up for no reason at all. how could you say such a thing! what does it matter how many people were there? isn't one bad enough? so trex, you are a child psychiatrist? how do you know what is going on behind closed doors? you say the number of people is way blown up, well i think some of your numbers are as well. we need to listen to these children and take them seriously, this kind of sick @!$%# happens all the time, and only SOME of the cases are heard of, think of all the ones that aren't.

Antrajove, if there are wild discrepancies in the testimony (100 or more spectators, only 12 cars in the parking lot) doesn't that send up a red flag that the testimony might not be too reliable? Look, there are volumes and volumes of evidence that in many cases of alleged child abuse, public hysteria led to false charges and miscarriages of justice that wrecked innocent people's lives. This story shows a disturbing similarity to some of those witch hunts, and the wildly emotional reactions that I see on this thread (sentence first, trial afterwards, as the Queen of Hearts said) is entirely consistent with those events.

How do I know what's going on behind closed doors? Well, how do YOU know? How do those "psychologists" who grill kids relentlessly for incriminating information know that abuse has really occurred?

first of all please site these cases that you speak of that this had happened. please rest assured that i am not saying that what you are saying is not true, i am simply saying that children do NOT lie about these things. any intro to child psych class will teach you that. second of all just because those are the cars in parking lot does not determine how many people are actually in there. there is this very strange concept that people who break the law buy into, it's called paranoia, and because of this these people tend to take precautions to not get caught. isn't it possible that some one could have walked there? or here is another novel concept, the Internet. they could have done a web cast, and those people would have been counted in that number over 100 or more. please stop trying to make the victims the culprits.

Cases in which it happened?

McMartin School.

Kelly Michaels.

Little Rascals Day Care.

The Wenatchee abuse case

And if you don't have time to click on those links, let me provide you with a couple of choice examples from the videotaped interrogations of children in the Kelly Michaels case:

Investigator: You Wee Care kids seem so scared of her.

Child: I don't know. Why don't you ask her?

Another excerpt:

Child: I hate you.

Investigator (2): Let's get done with this real quick so we could go to Kings to get popsicles...Did Kelly ever tell you she could get out of jail?

And how's this for coercive questioning?

"If you don't help me, I'm going to tell your friends that you not only don't want to help me, but you won't help them."

i am not saying that it has never happened i am just saying that we can't just assume that every child is not being untruthful and every case worker is not pushing for a conviction. in this country we are innocent instill proven guilty, right. same goes for these kids. i do thank you for these cases, i would very much like to look into them, and i will. thank you for giving them to me. from what i have read that you wrote, it sounds like in the latter interview the child was tired and was done. it sounds like they already had some evidence but needed more. the problem is that so many of these monsters get off because of loop holes, or the children are so scared that they recant. these horrible people have a power over these kids that is unimaginable. if these people are innocent then the truth will prevail, however in this case i don't believe these people are innocent. and you never answered my question from before, you simply deflected, do you have any children that you bore?

Personal questions are off limits, sorry. Nothing against you personally, but I've found that there are sickos out there who can use just about any kind of personal information to attack a fellow poster.

typical, avoiding. well that tells me all i need to know about your character.

And the fact that you insist on making this an argument about individuals as opposed to principles and facts tells me all I need to know about yours.

oh honey trust me you know nothing of mine. i'm not making it an argument, i am just trying to make a point. i am not trying to pry. i understand how you feel crazy people, i wasn't asking their names or ages or anything else i just wanted to know if you are a mother or not.

Grandma had a vivid imagination!

I think me and your grandma would get along great.
=)

and from a farmer's point of view

so much else comes up besides what you planted

also from the holey bible, leave the weeds alone and harvest together

you don't have kids do you?

That's an absolutely typical reaction to skepticism about a possible witch-hunt. Not a response to my argument, but a suggestion that I either lack sympathy for the children or actively support the alleged abusers. When the journalist Debbie Nathan first began raising doubts about some of the "day care abuse" cases during the '80s, she was visited by the police the day after one of her columns appeared because someone had phoned in a maliciously false report that she was abusing her children. Witch hunts go on unabated as long as tactics like those scare people into silence.

i am not saying there is no such things as a witch hunt, i know them to be true, however you eluded my question, and that is typical for an assumed answer. all i am saying is you would not react this way if you had children. you would not be so quick to make these child out to be the bad guys. our jobs as parents is to protect our children, not throw them to the wolves because people like you want to make sure that every word they say is cast in doubt.

Make the CHILD out to be the bad guys? I did nothing of the sort! The children are just as much victims in these cases as the falsely accused adults. Just read transcripts of the coercive, abusive interrogations if you don't believe that. The children don't LIE about abuse, but they will tell authority figures what the authority figures want to hear if they're pressured long enough, punished for not saying what the interrogators want and rewarded when they give the testimony that the investigators are coaching them to give. A lot of the children end up with vivid false memories of abuse, which is for all practical purposes as bad as if it happened.

Young children don't lie in the sense of making up malicious stories (although older children sometimes do. I heard of a case when a store owner caught a ten-year-old boy shoplifting, and the kid immediately began to scream "get your hands off me, you pervert!") But young children certainly can be coached to say things that are not true, and even to believe them.

yes you are right kids will do that, however i feel as though you are making these kids out to be liars. their is no evidence to prove these adults have been, as you say, "falsely accused". that must not be true, because let's face it they were convicted. so there must have been enough evidence to do so. a child's testimony isn't enough, you know it and i know it. we were not in that court room. their is more to the story. i can understand your saying that there is more to the story, and that is what i am saying as well. you at lest need to stay neutral instead of calling the kids liars and the condemned innocent.

Antrajove, I am NOT calling the kids liars. And I don't know whether the charges are true or not. But convictions, especially very hasty ones, don't necessarily prove guilt, because I know of many cases in which people were convicted for similar crimes and later vindicated. Juries can make some wild calls when the case is one that appeals to visceral emotions, and most people react very emotionally to the idea of abuse of a child. Check my link to the Wanatchee case, in particular, in which some of the kids recanted their testimony, and later testified that they'd been threatened by the police with juvenile prison if they didn't cooperate. What I AM saying is that this case bears a disturbing similarity to a number of others that turned out to be witch-hunts.

"falsely accused adults " i do believe you wrote that yourself......did you not? so yes you are calling them liars. you said that they are "falsely accused adults"

Stop willfully misinterpreting me. I didn't say that the false accusations originated with the children. As I've explained repeatedly, children in these cases are usually coerced or threatened by adult authority figures into giving the testimony that they want.

And by the way, if you don't believe that young children can say and genuinely believe things that are not true, I doubt you've raised any of your own. I once remarked to a four year old that I'd seen a deer in the yard earlier that morning. By noon, she was convinced that she also had seen the deer, and that she'd seen it playing on the backyard swing set. She wasn't lying, she just didn't know the difference between her own lively imagination and what she really saw. Now, how hard do you think it is to plant false memories in a child that age? Not very!

that my dear is called an imagination. ever heard of it. and just so you know i have a child of my own and helped to raise a few others, so you can get off your high horse right now. i doubt you have any knowledge about children other than what you find in a book. live life, while books are good, life is better.

EXACTLY MY POINT!!! Children have a lot of imagination, and they are also suggestible, and they can be pressured by authority figures. Combine those three factors, and add an authority figure with a definite agenda, who wants the kids to say what the authority figure wants to hear, and you have a formula for disaster. This is NOT the same thing as calling the children liars. They are not. They are honestly trying to do what an authority figure has told them is right.

who cares about Big Oil right now. we are talking about kids here!!!!!!

read around Newsvine Miser....your sure to find plenty of articles about those economy rapists

you are very right JimboBillyBob, who cares about that right now. how dare you compare the suffering of innocent child to the suffering of over indulgent winner babies who refuse to get off their shoulders, sell their SUV and buy a more fuel efficient car. or, heaven forbid, walk somewhere, or car pool. look i have issue with oil and all the bull@!$%# that comes with it, just as much as the next guy, trust me i do. however lets show some compassion and common sense. these are children we are talking about. we will run out of oil someday soon, but life will go on, these children are messed up forever. grow up.

Jackie: The single mother of two? Then ask yourself this: if your former husband wanted custody of the kids, and he put around stories that you had involved them in child porn and child abuse in a "swingers' club" (and don't kid yourself, in custody battles it happens all the time) what would you do? Wouldn't you want people to give you the presumption of innocence until you could confront those claims in court?

There is always the presumption of innocence but the point is the 4 that are being punished are not the only ones invovled. All those that took part in watching these children should be punished as well because they are just as guilty as those that actually put the operation in motion. That is my point. I always take percautions with my children in where they go, who they hang with, and the things they are exposed too if I can help it but as far as the fathers slandering me if they wanted custody would not be an issue for me because when you know a person, what he or she is capable of, what he or she is like, and or the type of parent that person is then one does not have to worry about being slandered and people believing lies. The key is to let lies die without even adding lighter fluid to the fire to keep it alive because in most cases lies will eventually die.
In this case the town has already persecuted these people without even considering there innocence. That bothers me because how can this town just turn their heads to those other adults that participated in such a cruel and unusual act towards minors? I mean the truth is the truth that society wants to hold someone responsible for others mistakes no matter who its is just as long as its not the one making the mistakes. I mean even in the article it states the parent of the 3 children were involved in this mess----that is just NUTS but in REALITY it happens more than we want to admit.
So I'm not condemning this person but at the same time I have to keep an open mind to the fact that he could or could not have done this act. The only way to find out is to ask openly what transpired and why would anyone say such things about you as an individual?

i agree with you all, but the god part. we need to put stiffer laws on child abuse, as well as offer the children better protection and support system

You are right the death penalty is not enuf but if you read the article through to the end it states that the parent(s) of the 3 children were involved with this mess and has already been sentenced to life in prison. That is the harsh thing about it is that these children will forever know that their parent(s) allowed such a terrible thing to happen to them and never once tried to protect them.
I don't particulary agree with the death penalty because a person gets the pleasure of living years before actually being put to death but then again that person also has to live years reliving what he or she has done with the end result knowing that one day they will soon be put to death.
All I wonder is when society is going to begin to pull together to try an better this world and stop beating up on each other? It's time that we take a stand and protect our children and sometimes even those children that we know don't have protection. One day we will get back to the saying "it's takes a whole village to raise one child."