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Up to 690 years for man in ‘horrific’ child sex abuse case, Philly.com

June 24, 2015/in Pennsylvania /by SOL Reform

A suburban Philadelphia man has been sentenced to 339 to 690 years in prison on child sex abuse charges.

A Chester County prosecutor Wednesday said Warren Earl Yerger Sr. “perpetrated one of the most egregious and horrific cases” of abuse the county had seen.

The 52-year-old was convicted in December on more than 100 counts stemming from the physical and sexual abuse of four children who were in his care from 1989 to 2012.

Officials say the two boys and two girls were as young as 3 and the abuse occurred at residences in Chester, Berks, McKean and Montgomery counties.

State law prevented Judge William Mahon from simply sentencing Yerger to life in prison. He says his sentence will have the same effect and underscores the gravity of Yerger’s crimes.

Up to 690 years for man in ‘horrific’ child sex abuse case

Todd Heywood, Snyder Signs RFRA-Style Adoption Bills, Pride Source

June 21, 2015/in Uncategorized /by SOL Reform

Editor’s Note: The anti-adoption bills were not the only regressive legislation signed and introduced. The Republican majority government was busy at work on a number of issues you can read here

Gov. Rick Snyder has signed controversial legislation that would allow state funded adoption agencies to refuse services to potential adoptive families based on the agencies’ “sincerely held religious or moral beliefs.” But the self-described data driven executive has been unable to provide any evidence — except two letters from religious adoption agencies — to show the legislation was necessary.

Senate and House Democrats generally opposed the legislation citing constitutional issues. Also of concern was the replacement of what has been a standard in making child-in-care related decisions — the best interest of the child — with the agencies’ own religious values. The new laws specifically allow agencies to refuse adoption services based on religious beliefs, even if an adoption would be in the best interest of the potential adoptive child.

On Monday, Between The Lines reported that Snyder may have signed the bills as part of a broader deal to fund roads.

“What we’re being told by our corporate allies is there was never any serious doubt the governor was going to sign this bill,” said a source from a large LGBT organization. “We’re told that he traded this for a road construction bill he wanted.”

A spokesperson for the governor denies this.

Despite repeated requests for data to support the governor’s decision to sign the bills, which the ACLU and other opponents have labeled a “religious freedom restoration act”-style adoption bill, Snyder’s communications team would only provide two letters. One letter was penned by Bill Blacquiere, president of Bethany Christian Services; the other was authored by Paul Long, president of Michigan Catholic Conference.

“Yet the religious manner by which faith-based child placement agencies operate has become objectionable to those that do not value the diversity that comes with a statewide network of public and private placement providers,” Long wrote in his letter, after praising his agency’s Catholic based faith operations. “Regrettably, administrative or judicial rulings, encouraged by efforts of adversarial organizations, have led to shuttering of numerous Catholic child placement agencies in other states and cities.”

And while it is true Catholic agencies have shuttered in other locations, it has been because they refused to follow the law. For instance, in Illinois, after courts there ruled the agencies were required to follow the law and provide domestic partner benefits, the agencies simply shut down operations rather than comply. There are no reports that shifting the adoption cases from those agencies to other agencies resulted in any difficulties impacting the children.

Not unsurprisingly, the Michigan Catholic Conference hailed the passage of the bills into law.

“The state of Michigan has sought the participation and support of faith-based child placement agencies for decades, so we welcome this legislation that will solidify the relationship for the sake of vulnerable children,” said Tom Hickson, MCC Vice President for Public Policy and Advocacy, in a press release on the agency’s website. “Michigan thrives on diversity — these bills will ensure faith-based agencies are able to operate according to their conscience in order to continue serving others in our state.”

“The state has made significant progress in finding more forever homes for Michigan
kids in recent years and that wouldn’t be possible without the public-private partnerships that facilitate the adoption process,” Snyder said in a press release. “We are focused on ensuring that as many children are adopted to as many loving families as possible regardless of their makeup.”

That however flies in the face of the findings of the Williams Institute. The report found that 250 Michigan foster kids are currently residing in LGB headed households, and another 3,460 children had been adopted by LGB households.

In a May brief on the three bills, the California based organization reported that in the U.S. 54 percent of lesbians report wanting to adopt children, while only 37 percent of heterosexual women reported such a desire. The organization said there was no comparable data on gay men versus straight men. But making an assumption that a similar number of bisexual or gay men wanted to adopt, the organization estimated there were 35,000 LGB homes available to adopt in Michigan.

The ACLU, however, condemned the legislation and is preparing a lawsuit.

“We’re deeply disappointed that Gov. Snyder signed this dangerous legislation,” Rana Elmir, deputy director of ACLU of Michigan, said in a press release. “We are developing a legal challenge with our Muslim, Jewish, Christian and LGBTQ partners. We encourage any family looking to adopt or foster children who believe they will be adversely affected by this law to contact us immediately. The agencies that are subject to HB 4188-4190 are receiving state money to perform a public function and are therefore state actors. Agencies have a legal obligation to ensure the best interests of the child are considered during placement. There is nothing about this shameful legislation that helps vulnerable kids find homes.”

“This horrific law is an affront to thousands of households led by same-sex couples,” Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the Michigan ACLU LGBT Project, wrote on his Facebook page. “It ignores the tens of thousands of Michiganders who spoke out against it. And most of all: it harms the 13,000-plus children in the adoption and foster care system whose chances of finding a nurturing home just got a little more bleak. What’s more, now that this harmful bill has been signed into law, we know it will only embolden proponents of the dangerous RFRA bill that would give any individual or business a ‘license to discriminate’

Full article: http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=71988

Peter Cluskey, Dutch Catholic Church agrees to expand compensation of victims, The Hague

June 21, 2015/in Uncategorized /by SOL Reform

In an unexpected U-turn, the beleaguered Catholic Church in the Netherlands has agreed to pay compensation to more than 250 victims of clerical sex abuse whom it had previously ruled had not fully substantiated their complaints.

The controversy over compensation follows the 2012 publication of the 1,100-pag Deetman Report, which revealed that 800 Catholic clergy routinely abused as many as 20,000 children in schools, children’s homes and orphanages between 1945 and 1985.

A second report the following year, looking specifically at allegations of sexual abuse of girls between 1945 and 2010, came to the conclusion that the number of female victims was probably in the “tens of thousands” – so large that it will never likely be established more accurately.

€30 million bill
The church is expected to face a total bill of some €30 million as a result of the scandal, comprising compensation put at €19.2 million and €10.5 million to cover the cost of the investigation that produced the report and the resulting compensation commission.

The process of verifying complaints, however, has been a slow and painful one, particularly because so much time has passed, because many of the victims have been psychologically scarred, and because some of the clergy allegedly culpable have died.

Just over 1,900 complaints have so far been received. About 1,100 of those have been “processed” and 800 have been verified to the commission’s satisfaction. Compensation totalling €17.5 million has already been paid to some 600 of those 800.

The issue of people whose claims had been rejected came to the forefront when the chairman of the commission, Wiel Stevens, acknowledged that just because complaints could not be substantiated did not mean the complainants had not been abused.

In the vast majority of those cases, the allegations were true, Stevens said – although the rules did not provide for compensation.

“In the Netherlands, the rules of eligibility for compensation are rather strict – unlike countries such as Ireland, where compensation is paid sooner and in larger amounts.”

This acknowledgment increased the moral pressure on the church and paved the way for yesterday’s decision. The compensation is still likely to be relatively little, perhaps in the region of €5,000 or even less per person.

Full article: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/dutch-catholic-church-agrees-to-expand-compensation-of-victims-1.2253532

Ross Douthat, The End of the Sex Abuse Crisis, The NY Times

June 18, 2015/in Uncategorized /by SOL Reform

The conversation about Catholicism and Pope Francis is about to be dominated by the topics of the environment and climate change, thanks to tomorrow’s (official; there have been leaks) release of the pontiff’s ecological encyclical, Laudato Si. But let me sneak in a belated comment on last week’s news that the Vatican is setting up a tribunal to handle accusations of negligence by bishops in sex abuse cases, with coincided, probably not coincidentally, with the resignations of the archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul and his auxiliary over their handling of a now-defrocked predator priest.

When the Francis era began, I wrote a column and then a blog post arguing that nothing in his pontificate would matter nearly as much as the restoration of moral credibility, the lifting of scandal’s shadow, and that Bergoglio/Francis would be judged above all on whether he took concrete steps to bring accountability not only to abusive priests (where the church had taken most of the necessary steps under Benedict) but to those bishops and cardinals who protected them (where it conspicuously had not). I’m not sure if the sweep of my judgment quite holds up given all the other issues that this very active pontiff has stirred up or may stir up soon. But the basic point still holds: The reason the sex abuse issue was a crisis for the church rather than just a scandal was that it exposed systemic failures of governance within the Catholic hierarchy, systemic culpability on the part of the episcopate, and neither Rome nor the bishops themselves seemed to have any kind of response that wasn’t ad hoc, situational, and self-protective.

So for the sex abuse crisis to actually end, as opposed to just sort of gradually petering out as offending bishops aged and died and disappeared, something needed to be done to insure that nothing so systematic could happen again. And the mechanisms established under the last pope, while appropriate and admirable, were not sufficient to this task, because they only applied to abusive priests rather than encompassing the blindness and arrogance and fecklessness that kept those priests in the ministry.

Now, though, it seems like the church will finally have a mechanism fitted to those sins. Francis had already moved personally to remove a handful of bishops, but those moves probably personalized the process unduly, turning the pontiff into a kind of one-man supreme court, and inspiring talk of enemies’ lists among (mostly traditionalist) Catholics skeptical of his choice of targets. Such talk will accompany the operations of the tribunal, too, no doubt, but a formal process will at least minimize it, and hopefully lend some transparency to the path from complaints to resignations.

Of course how the path will work is still uncertain; whether it will be confined (or should be confined) to problems related to sex abuse is also a good and weighty question. As with every Vatican response to the sex abuse scandal, the new tribunal promises to centralize power further within the church, which to some extent an ironic result given this pontiff’s (at least rhetorical) bias toward decentralization and the importance of ecclesiastical “peripheries.” And such centralization will no doubt have unforeseeable consequences: There may come a time, in this pontificate or another, where this move turns out to have implications for other forms of policing from Rome, other reasons for disciplining and removing bishops, at which point the list of people championing a strong hand in the Vatican may grow somewhat shorter than today.

But whatever consequences await the church in the future, after the long Lent Catholics (especially American Catholics) endured in the last decade this is a necessary, important, and I think morally-essential step. It will not end sexual scandals in the church (those will never end), but it might write, at last, the last chapter in the story of this particular era of scandal-driven crisis. Depending on how you feel about Benedict XVI you can see it either as Francis finishing his predecessor’s impressive (if belated) work on sex abuse or taking the crucial step that Benedict wasn’t bold enough to take; both readings contain elements of the truth. But either way this pontiff deserves great credit, and the promise, finally, of systematic accountability for bishops will loom large in Francis’s legacy whatever else comes next.

The End of the Sex Abuse Crisis – NYTimes

Governor Cuomo, Majority Leader Flanagan and Speaker Heastie Announce Agreement on “Enough Is Enough” Legislation to Combat Sexual Violence on College Campuses, Safe Campus NY

June 18, 2015/in New York /by SOL Reform

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan and Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie today announced that a three-way agreement has been reached on the “Enough is Enough” legislation to combat sexual assault on college campuses in New York State.

“Today is a victory for students across New York State,” Governor Cuomo said. “As the Governor, and as a father, I am proud that with this legislation New York will become a national leader in the fight against sexual assault on college campuses. This action is a major step forward to protect students from an issue that has been plaguing schools nationwide for far too long. Once again, New York is setting the standard for other states to follow, and I look forward to signing this legislation into law as soon as possible.”

Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan said, “I am pleased and proud that working together we have reached a consensus on a bill to combat and root out sexual assault so our college campuses are safe learning environments for all students. I thank Senator Ken LaValle for his hard work on this issue, as well as Governor Cuomo and Speaker Heastie, and I commend my colleagues and the advocates for helping us achieve a positive result on this extraordinarily important piece of legislation.”

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said, “Every student deserves the opportunity to obtain a higher education in a safe and supportive environment. Campus sexual assault disrupts victims’ lives and shifts their focus away from their studies. This plan encourages victims to speak up and provides a uniform policy for handling accusations throughout all New York State colleges, as well as bolsters support services for victims of this heinous act. New York must continue to lead the way in the fight against campus sexual assault.”

Senator Ken LaValle, Chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee said, “We have approached this sensitive topic in a comprehensive, thoughtful manner. This legislation provides critically important protections for victims and details the processes necessary to achieve fair and just results for those involved. The measure provides a clear path to combat and eradicate campus sexual assault and a course of action for the victims of these devastating incidents. It provides for education of all college students; recommends methods of prevention, and provides assurance of due process in the adjudication of these incidents. This legislation addresses the complex issues and will better protect our college students across the state.”

Assemblymember Glick, Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee said, “Campus sexual assault greatly diminishes a positive college experience and can have lasting effects on victims. I commend my colleagues for recognizing the importance of this issue and taking steps to protect all students, including those of the LGBT community, from the horrors of rape, sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking.”

This on-campus sexual assault prevention and response legislation was first proposed by Governor Cuomo in January. The package includes:

A statewide definition of affirmative consent, defining consent as a knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity;
A statewide amnesty policy, to ensure that students reporting incidents of sexual assault or other sexual violence are granted immunity for certain campus policy violations, such as drug and alcohol use;
A Students’ Bill of Rights, which campuses will be required to distribute to all students in order to specifically inform sexual violence victims of their legal rights and how they may access appropriate resources. The Bill of Rights clearly states that students are given the right to know they can report sexual assaults to outside law enforcement, including the State Police;
Comprehensive training requirements for administrators, staff, and students, including at new student orientations.;
Reporting requirements for campuses to annually submit aggregate data on reported incidents of sexual violence and their adjudication and handling to the State Education Department;
A new unit within the State Police called the “sexual assault victims unit” specialized in advanced training in responding to sexual assaults and related crimes that shall also provide assistance to campus police or local law enforcement, as well as training to college campus communities;
A commitment of $10 million to help combat campus sexual assault through various partners, split in the following manner: $4.5 million to rape crisis centers to provide services and resources to students, $4.5 million to the State Police to create sexual assault victims unit, and $1 million to colleges and universities; and
A requirement for first responders to notify survivors of their right to contact outside law enforcement.

Throughout the last several months, Governor Cuomo led the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign to gather support for his proposal. Since January, it gained a broad range of support from public officials, organizations and community groups, including:

Lady Gaga, who also co-authored an op-ed with the Governor;
17 of 18 county executives statewide;
Whoopi Goldberg, who also filmed a video for the campaign;
More than 40 city mayors from across the state;
More than 100 elected officials from across the state;
Nearly 20 members of New York’s Congressional Delegation;
More than 50 statewide and local organizations, in addition to 30 advocacy groups, community organizations and unions and 14 labor groups;
28 public safety officials from across the state;
Student advocates from Barnard College and Syracuse, Columbia, Fordham and New York Universities; and
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi

Governor Cuomo, Majority Leader Flanagan and Speaker Heastie Announce Agreement on _Enough Is Enough_ Legislation to Combat Sexual Violence on College Campuses _ Governor Andrew M

Michael J. Salamon, Mikvahs, Saunas And The Role of Leadership, The Jewish Week

June 18, 2015/in Uncategorized /by SOL Reform

Daniel Kahneman, in his book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” pointed out that self-control requires attentiveness and determination. Most individuals, however, react promptly, even impulsively without taking the time to perform a clear analysis. Decisions made in haste are often made according to cognitive delusions we all have, two of them are among the most prominent: The Halo Effect and Cognitive Dissonance.

In the 1920’s psychologist, Edward Thorndike found that certain individuals were rated as more effective than others simply based on one of their characteristics. If a person was rated as more handsome than his peers he would also likely be seen as smarter. This type of bias in ratings served to create a halo for the individual. Thorndike’s findings have been reproduced over the decades and remain an enduring piece of the puzzle that explains how we perceive and behave. If you are tall, or well dressed or more articulate than another person is, you are likely to be rated as nicer, smarter, calmer, more considerate, even less likely to commit a crime.

Leon Festinger, another psychologist, found that there is another notion that often misguides our ability to make a correct evaluation. If an individual holds a principle, value, or religious conviction and is confronted by a differing perspective, the discord caused by the new information creates a dissonance in the individual. This cognitive dissonance, as Festinger phrased it, may cause us to flatly reject the new information despite its relevance. If we believe that our neighbor is an upstanding member of society we will have a very difficult time accepting the fact that he may have committed a felony.

A good example of how both the Halo Effect and Cognitive Dissonance impact our daily lives can be best described by a situation in which I was recently involved. I was asked to take part in a meeting of a synagogue’s board regarding the possible expulsion of a member about whom there were rumors of inappropriate behaviors. This sort of consultation is not uncommon for me, and incidents like the one I am about to describe are far too common in general.

At this particular meeting the discussion focused on an individual who was seen making overtures to young children in the synagogue; overtures that were viewed by other adults as “strange,” “weird” and “unacceptable.” The consensus of the board was that the member was not acting in a way that allowed the executives to feel comfortable with him in their synagogue. One of the board members even said that he would not allow the person into his home because there are always young children playing there. Yet, the same board member said that he would vouch for this individual because he is so well spoken, a good attendee at lectures and, “as a neighbor he is a nice person.”

The board of this synagogue decided not to act, thus allowing this person of questionable integrity unfettered access to the temple, including areas that children were most likely to frequent. The Halo Effect, portraying him as a person who is a good neighbor and so forth, combined with the difficult notion that he might be a potential abuser, created cognitive dissonance that prevented this board from taking action.

It seems that we are in the midst of a series of terribly difficult situations with rabbis, memberships of their synagogues and synagogue boards. Some of the rabbinic behavioral lapses seem more evident than others. The problem with all of these transgressions, however, remains. They are dealt with in what amounts to as an impulsive fashion. In virtually all situations there are supporters of those who have transgressed the bounds of acceptable behaviors. Based on the Halo Effect and Cognitive Dissonance, that is to be expected. But the decisions made as to how to deal with possible offenders should be handled in a more judicious manner. Attempts by the Rabbinical Council of America and Yeshiva University fall short of this and are, in part, also based on Halo and Dissonance. For the sake of proper decision-making, and the most reasonable outcome, situations should be evaluated not just by an immediate board who think they know the alleged offender but also by well-trained objective outsiders who are not distracted by a halo or feelings of dissonance. Until this becomes protocol, messy situations will remain muddled.

Mikvahs, Saunas And The Role of Leadership _ The Jewish Week