Tag Archives: rape

Freud’s Seduction “Theory” And His Grandson’s Rape Practice

Posted on by

From Independent.ie:

One hundred and thirty years ago Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, presented his “seduction theory” at a major forum in Vienna. His idea was that most neuroses – female neuroses particularly – could be traced back to repressed memories of sexual interference on the part of fathers. The proposition was met with widespread outrage – the idea that fathers would sexually molest their daughters was shocking at the time – and Freud later shifted away from it, instead claiming that most of the memories of abuse, which he heard from patients, were false, with their subconscious unable to discern between fantasy and reality. Freud believed that Victorian men should be allowed indulge in forbidden sex (indeed he thought that incest was important to civilisation) with one caveat: that it must be “discreet”.

It was a word, with all of its dark undertones, that seemed to echo down the ages this week with the revelation that Clement Freud, grandson of Sigmund, had sexually abused girls, including one whom he brought up as a daughter. Sylvia Woosley said Freud befriended her family in 1948, when he was working at a hotel in the South of France, and started abusing her when she was 10. Another woman told ITV that Freud started abusing her in the 1970s, when she was 11, and eventually raped her when she was 18, by which time he was a Liberal MP.

The rape was so violent and brutal she said, that she bled for a week afterward. It has been suggested that there may be more revelations and more victims still to tell their stories. The allegations are being investigated by British police and in the meantime have caused enormous embarrassment to one of the most storied families in Britain. Whether art, media, politics, fashion or high finance, the Freuds have their fingers in every pie.

British Charity “Rape Crisis” Is A UK Govt Front

Posted on by

From LibertarianAlliance.wordpress.com:

“One of the points I made was that RC [Rape Crisis] can hardly be regarded as an independent voice.

Bearing in mind that it gets the majority of its funding from the Home Office and the Equalities Unit, it should be regarded as a front for the British State – ie, it’s another fake charity.

I didn’t actually accuse RC of corrupt motives, but did draw attention to the scale of funding and the fact that HMG would dearly love to put Julian Assange on the first plane to Stockholm.”

Sean points to the accounts, the most recent set available, which is not very recent by company-or-private-sector-standards and would get them heavily finded for lateness if they were a simple plumber or small retailer…which says in the small print at the back that:-

(1) “Rape Crisis” received in 2008, £6,285 from charitable and fundraising activities, and £103,750 from the Home Office, “Lankelly Chase” (which must be some place or other), “UNISON” and the Government Equalities Office”.

(2) In 2009, it received £11,214 from charitable and fundraising activities, and  £196.685 from the various collectivist sources stated just now above.

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends80/0001119680_ac_20090331_e_c.pdf
I think that makes it a “fake charity, don’t you? It seems to exist to do PR to lobby the government into bring in laws that the government wants brought in.

False rape reports in US army up by 35% in 3 years

Posted on by

The Washington Times,  May 12, 2013 reports that a Pentagon study has shown false rape reports increasing almost 9 times the rate of increase in abuse reports:

QUOTE:

‘From 2009 to 2012, the number of sexual abuse reports rose from 3,244 to 3,374 — a 4 percent increase.

During the same period, the number of what the Pentagon calls “unfounded allegations” based on completed investigations of those reports rose from 331 to 444 — a 35 percent increase.

In 2012, there were 2,661 completed investigations, meaning that the 444 false complaints accounted for about 17 percent of all closed cases last year. False reports accounted for about 13 percent of closed cases in 2009.

Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and analyst at the Family Research Council, is writing a book for Regnery Publishing Inc. about the Pentagon’s push to put women in direct ground combat in the infantry, armor and special operations.

“In the course of conducting interviews with commanders, I heard time and again complaints about female service members making sex-related allegations which proved unfounded,” Mr. Maginnis said. “Not only do some women abuse the truth, but it also robs their commanders from more important, mission-related tasks.

“Female service members told me that some women invite problems which lead men on and then result in advances the woman can’t turn off. Too often, such female culpability leads to allegations of sexual contact, assault and then the women feign innocence.”

Comment:

“As in the hyped Indian rape crisis, the cause for the increase in assaults and false accusations of assault lies in ill-conceived laws put in place to satisfy the gender feminists’ need to have perfect equality with men, regardless of the dictates of nature or nurture.

See “Flawed new rape laws roils military justice system,” MacClatchey, Sept. 21, 2011 which reports on the crisis in military justice caused by a badly thought out law provoked by the rise in intimate contacts between men and women as they become more integrated in the army. In other words,  integration of the sexes has back-fired in ways gender feminists refuse to accept.

QUOTE:

“Six years ago, Congress tried cracking down on rape in the military. Prompted by disturbing reports of sexual assaults in military academies and war zones, lawmakers rewrote the rules. They wanted to protect victims and help prosecutors.

Now it’s clear that the effort backfired.

The politically attractive but poorly understood legal changes have incited courtroom confusion, judicial frustration and constitutional conflict. Extensive interviews and a McClatchy review of thousands of pages of court documents and internal studies find a congressionally caused crisis of military justice that few civilians know anything about.”

Fake “Rape Crisis”: UK rape rate ten times Indian

Posted on by

One feminist notices something odd in the hype about the Indian rape crisis:

QUOTE:

“Let’s look at the numbers for India, population 1.2 billion (about 48% of whom are women):

In 2011 there were 24,206 reported rapes. Of these 26 per cent resulted in convictions.

The UK has a population of about 56.2 million.”

Lila: This  article was written in January 2013.  I don’t know where the author got her numbers.

The UK population in 2011 was 63.3 million. The population in 2012 was 63.7 million.

The Indian population in 2011 was approx. 1.21 billion.    In 2012 it was 1.22 billion.

That means that the UK has a population that is roughly 20 times smaller than India’s.

The article continues:

QUOTE:

“Fifty-one per cent are female.

In 2011 there were 14,624 rapes reported. Of which 24 per cent resulted in a “conviction or caution”.

Lila: If these rape statistics are in any way accurate, then the rape numbers in the UK are nearly half those in India, even though the Indian population is 20 times greater.

That means that the per capita rape rate in India is TEN TIMES smaller than that in the UK, a settled and developed country, with high levels of prosperity and education, one of the major powers.

Moreover, the UK rape rate is this high, even though Britain is a heavily policed country, with perhaps the most extensive surveillance networks in the world that routinely and illegally snoop on British citizens.

Britain also has a large and complex criminal justice system with multiple agencies to protect women and an academic culture that often shills for the feminist agenda.

But nonetheless the British rape rate is ten times that of India.  Where is the outrage?

Remember that the Indian rape rate is ten times smaller, despite extensive and severe poverty in India, few social networks outside kinship networks, and a very low per capita rate of policing.

Remember that India also has a very large population of illiterate young males, many without jobs and routinely experiences huge influxes of migrant workers into  severely overcrowded cities, already suffering from near-collapse in infrastructure and utilities.

Remember that India suffers from critical energy and water shortages, from soaring food and gas prices, from inflation and endemic corruption.

It has some of the world’s most congested and dangerous roads and some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and separatists.

It is the target of unrelenting espionage and interference from the major powers.

India suffers in addition all the extraordinary stresses of very rapid economic development coupled with the crushing impact of  an alienating foreign culture on its traditional social fabric.

Finally, remember that behind the Indian rape rate are financial incentives created by feminist laws that reward women with windfall sums for bringing rape charges.

The Indian law privileges women as rape-victims while denying even the possibility that women might molest and rape, thus erasing the male as victim of sexual violence.

India has a jurisprudence weighted in favor of the woman coupled with a  feminist leadership that nonetheless demands even greater privileges and exemptions.

It has a media culture that is sensitive to every outrage to women and silent on outrages against men.

And yet, incredibly, the rape rate in India is ten times smaller than that in Britain.

So, where, I repeat, is the outrage?

Where is the United Nations study on the parlous condition of women in the United Kingdom, which rapes at ten times the rate of India?

Where is the UN study on the US, which rapes at higher rates than India?

Where is the UN study on South Africa, which rapes at higher rates than India?

UN study slanders Asian men as rapists

Posted on by

I need to expand more on the way that “rape” is being used to slander Asian societies as a whole in the Western mainstream media, controlled ultimately by a small group of owners.

The basis for the slander is a UN-led study:

The UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The study is sponsored by Partners for Prevention—on behalf of UNDP (UN Development Program), UNFPA (UN Population Fund) UN Women, and UNV (UN Volunteers).
and is described as follows:

From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey on men’s perpetration and experiences of violence, as well as men’s other life experiences. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The study was a collaborative effort involving partners from academia, research institutes, civil society, the United Nations family and governments around the globe

Vietnam is also included, though not mentioned in the paragraph above.

The UN Population Fund’s goal is very clearly defined, behind the rhetoric of “rights.”

It is monitoring population growth and migration, ensuring family-planning through contraception and abortion, and securing female emancipation with a view to ensuring the previously-stated goals.

QUOTE:

The goals of UNFPA – achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and MDG 5 – are inextricably linked. UNFPA also focuses on improving the lives of youths and women by advocating for human rights and gender equality and by promoting the understanding of population dynamics. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality and migration have an effect on every aspect of human, social and economic progress. And sexual and reproductive health and women’s empowerment all powerfully affect and are influenced by population trends.

The findings of the UN study were trumpeted uncritically in the major media:

See “Nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape,” Kate Hodal, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2013.

However, a few critical observers found gaping holes in the methodology used:

“One in four men in Asia “admit to committing rape”? It doesn’t add up,” Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

Brown points out the incredibly shoddy and tendentious reasoning behind the statistic that claims that one in four Asians are rapists.

QUOTE:

“The shocking headline figure that 25% of the men surveyed admit to raping a partner or a stranger appears to offer unequivocal confirmation that Asian women are the victims of a deep-rooted, cultural problem.As with many studies of this type, however, what we’re witnessing is the wide dissemination of one hopelessly misleading statistic, while the rest of the research in the report – the stuff that actually matters – is ignored.”

The study covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Sri Lanka, and Papua and New Guinea.

That itself is odd. Why would Korea, India, and Japan be left out?

The second oddity is that  the samples are not even representative nationally.

For instance, for Papua and New Guinea, the sampling is drawn entirely from one place – the island of Bougainville.

The third oddity is that there are only two places where “yes” responses to rape are over 25% and they are both areas with a recent history of violent conflict. A higher incidence of rape would be expected in such areas.

Without those two areas, the proportion of “yes” answers falls to 18%.

Finally, except in the case of Bangladesh, the question signifying admission of rape doesn’t even clearly indicate the use of force, but runs as follows:

“Have you had sexual intercourse with your partner when you knew she didn’t want to, but believed she should agree because she was your wife/partner?”

In the Bangladesh sample, where the question most directly mentions force, the number of “yes” answers is also the lowest.

This suggests that the results of the whole study have been dramatically skewed by the ambiguous structuring of a question that doesn’t even deal with what most people would call rape, but rather with the inherently problematic dynamics of marital relations.

But, even apart from the bogus nature of the questioning itself, there is the sheer ludicrousness of slandering the whole of Asia – some 4 billion plus people – on the basis of a questionnaire circulated to some 10,000 people, replete with elementary methodological flaws.

Indeed, the study looks less like a study and more like the kind of  public relations concoction that has armed the “anti-trafficking agenda” with equally sensational and equally flimsy claims.

See “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” Village Voice, March 23, 2011.

Like bogus sex trafficking research, the bogus rape research seems to be driven by the need to come up with lurid statistics to draw funding, media attention, and political backing.

And what could be the goal of the study’s political backers, which are departments of the UN?

That too is evident.

The UN has always pursued the goals of the Western elites, under cover of internationalism.

Those goals include the need to corral and control the populous nations of Asia, lest they compete too strongly with those of the West for resources.

See the following:

George Kennan, Head of the US State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, Memo PPS23, Feb 28, 1948:

QUOTE:

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Thus, the obvious implication of formulating bogus “rape studies” targeting Asian countries, let alone drawing wildly exaggerated conclusions from them, is the need for more surveillance and control of Asian populations by the international proxies of the Western elites.

Given the results of such surveillance and control in the US, where the prison population is the highest in the world and overwhelmingly black and brown, it is shameful that Asian media and government have not called out the slanderous characterizations of the UN study for what they are –

– Racist propaganda masquerading as social-science.

If the targets of the study had been African Americans, there would be no doubt that the researchers would have immediately been unmasked as latter-day theorists of classic scientific racism.

Fake Indian “rape crisis” driven by Western elite media

Posted on by

Update: My blog post on the bogus nature of UN rape studies:
http://mindbodypolitic.org/2014/02/02/the-highest-rape-rates-by-country/

ORIGINAL POST
An Indian “rape crisis” has been evoked in the major media in the wake of the infamous Delhi gang-rape of 2012.

The “rape culture” narrative about India has come to signal the regressive, medieval nature of traditional Indian masculinity.

Palash Ghosh argues that Indian men, who, after 9/11, were conflated with the category “terrorist,” are now being conflated with the category, “rapist.”

Delhi gang-rape trial: A new and negative image for Indian men? Palash Ghosh, Ibntimes.com, Feb 5, 2013

I would suggest that this conflation is intentional and it is typical of the demonization campaigns carried out by the Western state media against countries targeted for intervention, whether that takes the form of bombing or of proxy wars or of NGO psyops.

 

I would suggest that there is no “rape crisis” in India in need of such international intervention.

There is, however, an over-hyped, UN-backed,  elite-manufactured issue that functions as a site for state intervention.

The ” rape crisis” is actually the creation of  the left-liberal ideology that fronts for the corporate interests of Western elites.

This can be readily deciphered from the media stories about the Delhi gang rape.

The major media (Western elite) coverage of the Delhi rape posited it as typical of the medieval village culture characterizing Delhi, in which no Westernized/modern woman can ever be safe.

In contrast, the truly cosmopolitan cities of the West protect women, ran the elite narrative.

Statistics, of course, do not bear this story out.

Poulami Roychowdhury has argued as much in her lengthy academic analysis of the story:

“The Delhi Gang Rape: The Making of International Causes.”

QUOTE:

“CNN likened the assailants to men in other “traditional societies” who “see improvements in the status of women as a challenge to their own” and who use rape as a weapon of power against such advances.”

Roychowdhury shows how the international media created a false narrative of a Westernized, modern woman attacked by traditional, patriarchal, village men.

The truth is both the victim and her assailants were remarkably similar in moving from lower-class agricultural backgrounds into an urban setting.

The international media narrative also ignored the Indian man who attempted to save the victim.

He was also stripped and assaulted.

But the media erased him entirely from public consciousness.

QUOTE

“It goes almost without saying that Pandey’s case illustrates the ongoing resilience and appeal of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
Spivak’s theory illuminates why Pandey’s male friend, Awindra Pandey, disappeared from the pages of international media while Pandey and her assailants took pride of place in the discussion. Commentators seemed to forget that Awindra was even on the busand was also physically assaulted, stripped naked, and dumped on the side of the road. He disappeared, Firstly, because his body stood outside the economy of international care: white men are not in the business of saving brown men from other brown men. He also had to disappear because brown men are not typically viewed as allies of brown women.”

Chowdhury also demonstrates how the  emancipated female subject in the third-world  exists in a  narrative that ties her emancipation to her full participation in the neo-liberal economy.

She is described as going to malls and movies on her own, wearing Western clothes and accoutrements.

Meanwhile  the atavism of her male attackers is tied to their lack of integration into that economy.

Neither construction is accurate.

The “rape crisis” was a creation of  radical feminism embedded in the neo-liberal market-place, not an off-shoot of traditional Indian culture.

ITEM A The rape crisis is driven by financial incentives created by misguided, if not malicious, laws put in place by feminist ideologues.

See, “India to pay women big money to cry rape,” False Rape Society, January 8, 2010

It describes the law which has driven the “crisis of rape” now bearing fruition.

” It [India] has decreed that every woman who testifies that a male raped her will be handed the equivalent of 4,374.96 US dollars, a not-insignificant sum anywhere, but a huge payday in India.”

[Lila: in terms of Indian salaries, this would be the equivalent of $200,000 in the West, if we use the exchange rate prevalent at the time. Of course, this translation doesn’t account for the differing purchasing powers of the currencies, but $4, 374.96 is nonetheless a very large sum in India.]

ITEM B

The “rape  crisis” is driven by cultural Marxism

The goal of cultural Marxism is to create morally and biologically neutral “genders” that are fungible and detached from the traditional family structure.

Indeed, it is to construct “gender” so that it is inimical to family life.

In that regard, it’s notable that the man behind many of the protests following the Delhi gang-rape case was a left-wing radical.

 

He was a communist radical from the hot-bed of left-wing ideology, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The protests following the rapes were also organized mainly by left-wing radicals.

Many of the protests turned violent, injuring nearly 150 people.

QUOTE:

“The protests, largely by students, saw hooligan elements mingled in the crowd uproot wooden poles erected for the Jan 26 Republic Day event and set them afire at five places. They upturned vehicles, smashed window panes of buses and other vehicles and also hurled stones and water bottles on policemen in response to tear gas and baton attacks to prevent protesters from marching towards Raisina Hills, where prohibitory orders were put in place.”

Pictures of the protests were circulated world-wide, bringing even the UN into the picture.

The UN made official pronouncements about a “rape culture” in India.

 

This led to the usual politically-motivated commentary from the liberal-left spectrum of the Western media.

However, a few conservative/men’s rights blogs didn’t buy the story and correctly diagnosed the “rape crisis” as a concoction of left-feminist ideological activism.

Similar accusations of an American “rape-culture” have been accurately deconstructed by Dr. Christina Hoff Summers

“Researching the “rape-culture” of America,” Christina Hoff Summers, False-rape.net.

Only a year after the Delhi gang-rape case, the JNU communist who was behind the Indian “rape-crisis” agitation was himself accused of rape. He became the subject of the usual  trial-by-media-innuendo-and-womyn’s-assertion.

He killed himself, a victim of the left-anarchist monster he created.

The extremist ideology behind the “rape crisis” is evident in the new unequal laws in India.

In the case of rape:

See “Only men can be booked for rape,“ Nagendra Sharma, Hindustan Times, March 5, 2013

“Bowing to pressure from women activists, the government has decided to restore the term rape in criminal law that states only men can be booked for committing the offence against women. It has also decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 18 to 16 years.”

This is not gender-neutrality but gender-privileging.  It means that a female assault of a male, or a male assault of a male, or a male or female assault of a male child, are lesser crimes, to be treated under the separate section in the Indian legal code that pertains to unnatural sexual acts.

But that section does not make the rape of a male a crime against a person. Instead, it treats it as a crime against nature, like voluntary homosexuality.

That means female rapists/molesters of men or children can be guilty of unnatural acts, but not of rape, a most significant perversion of equal justice under the law.

In the case of domestic violence:

A woman can get a restraining order against her husband or boyfriend if he threatens suicide.

Under Indian law, threats of suicide by a man, however, are treated as domestic violence against the woman.

The reverse does not obtain.

If India were really a woman-hating patriarchy, as the feminists proclaim, would such laws pass?

At one men’s rights site, an activist writes:

[Note added: Paul Elam, the founder of the site, “A Voice for Men,” seems to have anger management problems that have led him to make incendiary statements I do not in any way endorse. I also do not support the harassment of feminist activists.]

“We’ve already seen men in that country [India] forced to the back of buses like African-Americans in 1950s America.  We’ve seen them beaten up by members of the public and female police officers alike for accidentally boarding the “female only” carriage of a train.  And now we’re seeing the government actively denying them equal protection under the law in sexual assaults.“

Conclusion: What is going on in India is not a rape crisis but a crisis of misandry.

1. “Indian Communist feminist Khurshid Anwar commits suicide after rape allegations,“ Anil Kumar, A Voice for Men, Dec. 30, 2013.

2.” Woman should be booked for filing fake rape case, says HC,” Urvi Mahajani, DNA India, August 1, 2013

3. “Be vigilant about false rape cases: HC to trial judges,” Harish Nair, Hindustan Times, May 24, 2013

4. “18% rape cases false, study,” Times of India, Dec. 27, 2008

5.  Delhi gang-rape case: Police find discrepancies in victim’s statement,” FirstPost, Jan 28, 2014

6.  Activists: Indian media sensationalized Delhi gang-rape case, Venus Upadhyaya, Epoch Times, October 11, 2013

7. Attributing rapes to unique Indian culture reeks of bias, Gajanan Khergamker, Eurasia Review, March 28, 2013

8. Indian government – men don’t matter, David Cuspis, A Voice for Men, March 29, 2013

9. One in four men in Asia ‘admits to committing rape’? It doesn’t add up, Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

10. A sad day for male rape victims in India,  Toy Soldiers, March 6, 2013

Ex-CIA Station Chief Admits Drugging & Molesting Algerian Woman

Posted on by

And all in the name of “intelligence” the tax-payer has to support this huge bureaucracy of underemployed, over-sexed meddlers..

Reuters reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A former CIA station chief in Algeria pleaded guilty on Monday to sex abuse stemming from a 2008 incident in Algiers and to cocaine use, the U.S. Justice Department said. Continue reading →

Crime Rates and Propaganda

Posted on by

Here’s an odd article in The Brunei Times, June 3, 2008 that lists India as the country with the highest numbers of murders.The caption reads India records highest number of murders in world. Now, what would the average reader take that to mean? The highest murder rate…

But that’s not the case at all.  Here’s the piece, with my comments:

“INDIA has recorded the highest number of murders in the world, a latest study by a government agency shows, news reports said yesterday. Data put together by the National Crime Records Bureau, a department of the Federal Home Ministry, showed that the number of murders in India, was three times that of Pakistan and double of the United States.“

Lila: Anyone glancing at this would immediately come away with the impression that the murder RATE in India was higher than anywhere else. When we say there are more murders in Gary, Indiana, than elsewhere in the US, or when we assess a city for its safety, we look at murder or crime stats in relation to the population.

“There were more than 32,000 incidents of murder recorded in India over 2007-2008, whereas there were nearly 16,700 murders in the US and about 9,700 in Pakistan, the NDTV network reported.”

Lila: This is clearly misleading.  Raw numbers placed next to each other suggest implicitly that the crime levels are comparable. They are not, because the population size varies.

“However, the survey clarified that the rate per population of murder and other crimes in India was much less compared to other countries.”

Lila: The figures for the rates of murder are tucked inside the body of the piece, where the casual reader isn’t immediately going to spot them.  Most people read the headline, the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.

So, what’s the last paragraph here?

“Indian crime rate has been increasing every year.”

Lila: Well, India’s population has been increasing every year too. But is that mentioned?

This piece was in the Brunei Times last year. A casual reader might assume from this that India had more murders and rapes than South Africa. It actually has twenty and thirty times fewer, despite much greater population, population density, and poverty. Even in absolute terms, the US has more than four times the number of rapes than India, and South Africa has almost double.The US population is over 300 million, which is nearly a quarter of the Indian population of over 1.1 billion. So this really means the rape rate per capita in the US is sixteen times that in India.

This is the second article I’ve seen recently, which seems to be trying to give a misleading impression of India as a very violent country – more violent than Pakistan. There is violence in India – from terrorism. And a lot of that is fomented by rebels, secessionists of various kinds, and yes, by jihadists – many of whom are trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Report of Extensive Rapes and Beatings at Irish Church Schools

Posted on by

In the news:

“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”

— More at AP

My Comment

This is sad and horrible. And not the first time for the Catholic church, as this HuffPo article on mission school abuse indicates and this piece on the abuse of Canadian Indians. And in other churches, some in India

(I’ll add a link here to a recent case).

Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.

Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,

But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..

But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to know how these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.

Thirty thousand children went through this system.  These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?

Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.

Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.

On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.

Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.