@Miller,
I think it would be a group decision, as far as I'm aware they have different responsibilities . So for consistency everyone would have to be on the same page .
Quote:Emily Horowitz, a sociology professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, said the Duggars' decision to keep law enforcement out of it at first is understandable — even defensible.
"I don't condone this behavior, but I spoke to so many families that did the 'right thing' and the reaction was so excessive and Draconian that it destroyed the lives of their children," said Horowitz, author of the new book "Protecting Our Kids: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing."
Horowitz said that juvenile offenders are the most treatable group of sex abusers, but law enforcement is more focused on punishment, including criminal prosecution with possible jail terms and lifetime listing on a sex-offender registry.
She said Justice Department data shows that one-third of sex offenses involving children also involve underage perpetrators. The most common age, she said, is 14 — the age Josh Duggar was.
"I'm pro-punishment," Horowitz said. "I'm just not pro-Draconian, permanent punishment."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ddid-duggars-do-right-thing-about-sex-abuse-n369836
Yep, smart people dont turn their family into the state for punishment lightly, the state is more likely to create more problems than to be part of the solution.
Quote:Teresa Huizar, executive director of National Children's Alliance, noted that in 18 states, parents and any other citizens are legally required to report abuse to authorities, even if the perpetrator is their child. Arkansas, where the "19 Kids and Counting" family lived, is not one of those states.
I am not a fan of claims of gross offense to the collective when those being thus charged followed the collectives laws. We dont have the right to demand that others do more of what we want than the law demands.
I despise pedophiles and believe they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Adults who prey on children, sexually or otherwise have no place in a healthy society.
Having said this, the Dugger kid is not a pedophile. What he did was without question wrong, but not, in my opinion, the deeds of a sexual predator. While those deeds entailed the molestation of children, he was a child himself. I suspect he is one of a great many young males who dealt with powerful sexual urges in this way. I don't know it to be the case, but I would guess that more conventional sexual experimentation was denied to him, if only in the sense that his parents likely instructed him and all their children that masturbation is a wicked and filthy sin.
This is not to excuse his behavior, and if I were the father of one of the girls he molested, I would want to wring his neck, but I've read and heard comments that he is a sick pervert who should have been thrown in jail, and this, I think, is over the top.
Whether or not his parents were required by law to report his actions to the police, I don't think they were wrong to not do so. I think they should of advised the parents of the girls he molested (who were not his sisters), and allow them to decide if involving the police was necessary. Maybe this happened, maybe not. I don't know the facts well enough to say either way.
The parents, in my opinion, are strange. Having so many children that the youngest are contemporaries of their aunts and uncles is a bit much, and it certainly appears that they are literally engaged in a baby making industry. Their TV show is very lucrative. However, I have no reason to believe they don't very much love their outsized brood, and that includes the daughters who were molested.
I've only watched the show once but that episode didn't contain any preaching about the sins of gays or liberals. Some of the outrage being voiced over this matter is driven by personal animosity for their very public faith, and there is a great deal of pleasure being taken, in certain quarters, over the plight of this family. In that the parents didn't commit the acts, I'm not sure where charges of hypocrisy come from, but I wouldn't be shocked to learn they are, in some ways, hypocritical because the same can be said of most of us. If they do constantly throw stones at gays and others then they need to be reminded of the admonition of Jesus concerning such a practice.
What would be hypocritical would be arguing for leniency in other cases but calling for the book to be thrown at this kid and his parents.
What is also very troubling is that the court sealed records concerning this matter were turned over to "journalists." A judge made this decision after being presented with all the facts. The FOIA law of Arkansas exempts sealed court records. The police chief and state attorney who released the records were either ignorant or ideologically or politically motivated. I strongly suspect the latter. In any case they didn't properly apply the law and the Family Court judge who sealed the records in the first place has said as much.
Such records are sealed, in part, because of the difficulty young people have in forming intent and making decisions. It is felt that they have a very good chance of turning their lives around, if they are not stained by a childhood transgression. In the case of sexual misdeeds, recidivism of minor offenders is very low (While being very high for adult offenders) if you think about it, it makes sense.
More importantly though, the records were sealed to protect the privacy of the victims. It seems pretty clear that the police chief, state attorney, and the "journalists" didn't give much of a damn about these girls. Are the kid's sisters hypocrites too because of their fundamentalist beliefs as compared to their being victimized? Of course, his victims were not just two of his siblings. One of the non-family girls is still a minor. Was our "need to know" about this Dugger family scandal greater than her right to privacy?
@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:I despise pedophiles and believe they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Define pedophile because it means someone who loves and supports children, as in Francophile, Anglophile .
Pedo- or Paedo- is a prefix with these meanings: Primarily, "relating to children", from the Greek word pais (παῖς), meaning "child",
-phile, from Latin -phila, from Ancient Greek φίλος (phílos, “dear, beloved”).
What is the age of consent in your opinion ?
@Ionus,
To me Pedophile always means adult, it does not apply to the very young who are just trying to navigate their lives and hormones. This attack on Josh Duggar is downright barbaric. According to two sisters last night this was almost always light petting while they were asleep.....we know what this was about. Yes Josh would have had an easier time navigating this minefield if his life was not so regimented and cloistered, but the ways of his clan are not illegal, should not be, and very little harm was done, so let it go for fucks sake.
And and no I am not minimizing the wrongs of an abuser, I am telling truth. Those who minimize claim that something is smaller than it is, with full awareness of the truth by the minimizer, usually with the intent to manipulate people. Speaking truth is an iron clad proof of the falsehood of the clam of minimizing.
@hawkeye10,
reporting familial incest, even where it is the mother who does it, is almost always detrimental to the child . Family counseling and giving the child back their power over their own bodies, usually by being allowed to tell the molester what a creep they are, and by yelling back if they feel their rights are taken away from them, is the work carried out by most religious groups . This is a reasonably well kept secret but there have been many court orders for such cases of incest to attend these church run sessions .
@Ionus,
The criminal system is absolutely not the right tool for the job. Dad sending son to do a program is a much better one. It was 4 months, was it outpatient or residential?
@hawkeye10,
Quote:Dad sending son to do a program is a much better one.
No, both the perpetrator and the victim attend . Both will atend, even if independent of each other till such time as they have reformed/recovered .
??? What was ? It is done through the Church that runs the program, usually in a comfortable family home .
A case that I know most about was a women in her twenties who molested her 6 yr old step daughter .
In family cases sending the perpetrator to gaol and ignoring the victim is very destructive, but it makes emotional ratbags who want revenge feel better .
@Ionus,
according to this it was a three month residential program
http://starcasm.net/archives/316680
But I read someplace else that it was a 4 month program. In any case it was a major effort to deal with Josh liking to pet females without permission, usually as they slept.
@hawkeye10,
Ahha ! I am talking generically whilst you are referring to the family in this thread . Got it !
@Ionus,
Dont you figure for the Duggar kids being banished from the family is about the worst pain they can imagine? Maybe dad knew that being sent away for 3-4 months was a heavy penalty, and warning.
Quote: The teen spent four months doing manual labor at the Institute in Basic Life Principles Training Center in Arkansas
http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/television/television_news/2015/05/inside_the_josh_duggar_cover_up
4 months of being away and heavy labor would have gotten a 15 year old Duggar boy's attention I think. Well Done.
@Finn dAbuzz,
Finn dAbuzz wrote:The police chief and state attorney who released the records were either ignorant or ideologically or politically motivated. I strongly suspect the latter. In any case they didn't properly apply the law and the Family Court judge who sealed the records in the first place has said as much.
gotta stop watching Fox eh
Quote: Jim Bob and sympathetic host Megyn Kelly repeatedly referred to the records as being “illegally released.” Not so, say legal experts. That claim is “disputed by the law enforcement agencies involved, the Arkansas Press Association and attorneys with expertise in public-document cases involving the state's Freedom of Information Act,” according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
The news outlet reports:
“’I don't think [the agencies] had a choice,’ said John Tull, a Little Rock attorney who specializes in public-record cases. ‘They had to release the reports. Those records are not closed under FOI. The alleged perpetrator had attained his majority at the time it was released, and once his name and all the victims' names were blacked out, it was subject to FOI.’
“The Washington County sheriff's office contacted Zimmerman's office on May 22, the day after the court ordered the destruction of the Springdale investigation report, the sheriff's office said in a statement, ‘to advise her the Sheriff's Office also had records about this case and wondered if her order stated for us to destroy our records. It was at that time she advised us she believes even our records are covered under 9-27-309(j) and we shouldn't release them on this case.’ That section of the law exempts juvenile records from the Freedom of Information Act.
“’However, that exemption does not cover records of concluded investigations when the names of the perpetrator and the victims are redacted and when the offender has reached adulthood, and in regard to which there are no court orders forbidding the release,’ said Tom Larimer, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association.
“That understanding was echoed by Tull and Brandon Cate of Springdale, who have advised newspapers on public-record cases.
“The Washington County sheriff's office also cited five state attorney general's opinions going back to 1992, all stating that such records are not exempt.
@ehBeth,
The way I read the analysis is that the release of the information was only legal because the crime was not reported till after the perp reached age of majority. THis seems like a technicality.
@hawkeye10,
Quote:4 months of being away and heavy labor would have gotten a 15 year old Duggar boy's attention I think.
It has to be combined with therapy to change the perpetrator and especially therapy for the victim . What happened to the victims ?
@Ionus,
If I touch you in your sleep and you bave no knowledge of this till someone tells you do you get to call yourself a victim? What damage can you claim?
The most amazing thing about this family either has to be that they close ranks in adversity or the sense of obligation/communication they seem to have with each other. Josh knew that he had done wrong so he went to talk to pops about it, who put him in a four month program. I dont want to punish these people, I want to give them a medal.
The girls were told way back then about what Josh had done, which is another amazing part of this story. There was no attempt to negate the wrong or to sweep the problem under the rug, this family dealt with it head on.
@hawkeye10,
This Duggar thing drives homes several points:
1) what intolerant shitty people we have become
2) that social media is one of the drivers of this
3) that we dont believe in families anymore
4) that we dont believe in privacy anymore
5) that we dont believe in redemption anymore
6) that we love zero tolerance idiocy
7) that hate for Christians is expanding rapidly
8) That we dont understand that humans are going to make mistakes, especially when very young.
9) that we are very fine with depowering alleged victims, we take control from them and do what we want to do rather than what is good for victims.
10) That the thought police will never stop abusing us, this will not stop till we decapitate the thought police, which we should do immediately.
@hawkeye10,
I really hope that there is a silent majority out there in the land who have no lost their marbles, who are not shallow intolerant pricks, but I am becoming pessimistic.
And I started saying this over 30 years ago but I will say it again: those who know better need to start speaking up when wrongs are being done, because if we dont the ignorant assholes are going to win. We need to have some courage, we need to at least occasionally stake a piece of ground and defend it.
@Frank Apisa,
Frank Apisa wrote:
Do you mean like wearing lipstick...or dancing? Or females showing their hair?
I see that a lot where people assume that we have gotten better, that we dont have vast periods of time were the quantity of humanity degrades. THis is both illogical and not supported by the evidence. We might be in a period of decline, so we must evaluate the evidence and see.
