Tag: abuse

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

At first, Craig Stillwell and Carla Andrews only vaguely registered the change at the hospital; how the expressions of warm, calm concern in the doctors and nurses who had been helping them look after their sick baby had iced over. It was 15 August 2016, in the early hours of the morning, and their three-month-old daughter, Effie, was fighting for life.

Two hours earlier, Effie had woken up screaming. Her parents, both 23, had no permanent home and were staying at Craig’s father’s place in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. They had all been asleep on the floor in the lounge: Effie in the travel cot that detached from her pram, Craig still in the uniform he wore as a grass cutter. Carla thought the problem was acid reflux. She passed the baby to Craig and went to prepare a bottle of formula in the kitchen. As she worked, Effie screamed and screamed in the other room. Suddenly she fell silent. Carla heard Craig panic: “Effie! Effie!” She rushed in. Craig, terrified, was holding the child. Effie was white-faced, limbs floppy, eyes fixed, gasping weakly for air.

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Paramedics arrived at 3.19am, by which time Effie appeared dead. They reached Stoke Mandeville hospital at 3.50am. She roused a little and was taken for a brain scan. Afterwards, in the resuscitation unit, a doctor told them what they had found. Effie had suffered a bleed on the brain, and it didn’t look like it had been the first. Carla and Craig both started crying.

“But how could this happen?” asked Craig.

“We’re going to look into it,” the doctor replied.

At that moment, Craig realised everyone had started treating them with a cold, professional distance. Apart from one nurse, who remained kindly, all the reassuring faces were now hard.

Later that morning, Effie was moved to the high-dependency unit. As the hours passed, the young parents noticed lots of nurses and doctors peering in through the window, staring at them, before hurrying along. At about 3pm, two officers from Thames Valley Police appeared. Craig and Carla were taken to a small room that was empty but for two sofas.

“We believe you’ve harmed your child,” said a detective sergeant.

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity – The New Yorker

Henry Soto worked for Microsoft’s online-safety team, in Seattle, for eight years. He reviewed objectionable material on Microsoft’s products—Bing, the cloud-storage service OneDrive, and Xbox Live among them—and decided whether to delete it or report it to the police. Each day, Soto looked at thousands of disturbing images and videos, which included depictions of killings and child abuse. Particularly traumatic was a video of a girl being sexually abused and then murdered. The work took a heavy toll. He developed symptoms of P.T.S.D., including insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and auditory hallucinations. He began to have trouble spending time around his son, because it triggered traumatic memories. In February, 2015, he went on medical leave.

This story is laid out in a lawsuit filed against Microsoft, late last year, by Soto and a colleague named Greg Blauert, and first reported by Courthouse News Service. Soto and Blauert claim that the company did not prepare them for the stress of the job, nor did it offer adequate counselling and other measures to mitigate the psychological harm. Microsoft disputes Soto’s story, telling the Guardian in a statement that it “takes seriously its responsibility to remove and report imagery of child sexual exploitation and abuse being shared on its services, as well as the health and resiliency of the employees who do this important work.”

The lawsuit offers a rare look into a little-known field of digital work known as content moderation.

<a href=”http://www.newyorker.com/?p=3307932>The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity – The New Yorker

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

Beginning in 1997, and then for the next 13 years, Ama Dwimoh ran the Crimes Against Children Bureau in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, observing a theater of atrocities. Early in her tenure, Ms. Dwimoh told me recently, she handled a case involving a young man who had been sexually molested by his family’s landlord for a decade, starting when he was 5.

The abuse had come to her attention through a photo developer, who had contacted the police when he noticed unseemly images in a roll of film brought in for processing. With a picture of someone who appeared to be the victim of various predations in hand, law enforcers went in search of the boy. When they found him and knocked on his door, Ms. Dwimoh recalled, he appeared to feel he was being outed; he got sick and vomited. He knew that what had happened to him was wrong, but he had also experienced his abuser in less monstrous moments. How was the child, or even the young adult he would become, to make sense of all this, of such horrors entwined with the semblance of affection?

A search of the perpetrator’s home revealed a trove of old photographs of many other children, indicating he had been a pedophile for years. Ms. Dwimoh, who is running to become the Brooklyn district attorney, realized that if the police had never knocked, it was unclear whether the boy would have come forward soon, or ever, and if he hadn’t, how many more children would have been imperiled?

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

My Life Inside ‘The Family’ Cult

“Do you remember me?” she asks, as a hopeful smile spreads on her face, like she’s trying to tease the right answer out of me. We’re not children anymore. We’ve left. Some of us left with our families, some with our friends, and some alone. Now we’re living in this other world where we keep having to explain—why we lived in so many countries, why our accents change when we talk to strangers, why we didn’t go to school, why we can’t sleep. But to one another, to those of us who grew up like me in the Family, we don’t have to explain.

Yet on message boards, on Facebook, and now, outside a coffee shop on South Congress in Austin, this same question—“Do you remember me?”—comes up over and over. It’s usually followed by the volley of questions we’ve tested to figure out who we were then. “What was your name? Who were your parents? Were you in Osaka? Switzerland?”

Part of the problem with growing up in something so secluded as a cult is that our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory. And so we seek out those who remember.

Daily Beast

One Simple Idea That Could Reduce Domestic Violence

A report released Tuesday is proposing a simple way to reduce domestic violence: Give victims free lawyers.

Lawyers are expensive, and women who need them often can’t afford them. Without legal counsel, it can be harder for women to get protective orders, leave their abusive partners and escape the cycle of violence. And women stuck in violent relationships tend to miss work because of injury or rack up hospital bills they can never pay off, according to the report by The Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank.

With one in four women in the U.S. estimated to become victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, this dynamic has major economic repercussions. As the report notes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that domestic violence costs the U.S. at least $9.05 billion each year.

Providing free or subsidized legal representation to victims, the report concludes, may reduce domestic violence and would be cost-effective as it would likely result in lower associated health care and legal costs.

HuffPost