PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Here again, in the name of protecting children, someone entrusted to take care of a kid has caused irreparable harm by concocting images of sexual abuse that came not from the kid, but from the caretaker. The teacher admitted that he had no training in “facilitated communication,” though if he he did, I’m not sure it would matter — he would have received training in a bogus technique."
STORY: "Junk science leads to father’s wrongful arrest, false accusation of raping his son," by Radley Balko, on his Blog 'The Watch, published by The Washington Post on March 8, 2018. (Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces - and the recently published, 'The cadaver king and the country dentist: A true story of injustice in the American South.'
GIST: "During the ritual-sex-abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s, children undergoing recovered memory therapy
and other dubious psychological treatment recounted crimes so horrific
and depraved, they’re hard to even think about. They described bizarre
satanic-themed sex abuse where children were penetrated with knives.
They described orgies with adults and children who could barely walk.
They described animal and human sacrifice. A big reason why these kids
were believed despite the complete lack of physical evidence — if
children were murdered, there should have been children in the area who
were missing (there were no such missing children); the children who
described being raped should have showed signs of sexual abuse (they
didn’t); there should have been bloody knives, animal carcasses and
other evidence of these rituals (there weren’t) — is that the gruesome
details seemed too macabre and perverse to have come from the
imagination of kids. They didn’t, of course. And
this is where the whole scandal gets truly horrifying: The gory details
came not from the kids, but from the imaginations of the police
officers, prosecutors and psychiatrists. They came from the very people
who were supposed to protect the kids. They were the ones conjuring images of the kids involved in orgies, sacrifice and murder. I was reminded of all of that when I read this crushing story out of Florida: "After
he was accused of molesting his young special needs son, Jose Cordero
spent 35 days in a Miami jail and was barred from seeing his family for
months. The allegations did not come directly
from the 7-year-old boy, who has autism, speaks little and cannot write
on his own. Instead, they came from the child’s elementary school
teacher who claimed he relied on a technique called “hand over hand,”
guiding the boy’s hands with his own to write down the disturbing
details of sexual abuse. This form of
“facilitated” communication is a science that has been largely debunked
in the wake of high-profile scandals involving wrongfully accused
parents over the past couple decades. That
didn’t stop Hialeah police from arresting Cordero in October. But
Miami-Dade prosecutors soon grew suspicious of the teacher’s story. The
boy, working through the teacher with the same technique, later made
even more outlandish claims, using words and phrases familiar to adults
but not to young children. And when paired with another teacher and
specialists, the boy could no longer write a single word, let alone
repeat detailed accusations about molestation. Weeks
after the initial arrest in October, prosecutors rushed to get Cordero
out of jail while they awaited results of DNA testing. On Wednesday,
after those tests came back negative, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s
Office officially dropped the sexual battery case against Cordero. “Due
to significant inconsistencies within the victim’s disclosures coupled
with controversial means by which the disclosure was obtained, and a
lack of corroborating witnesses, the state would be unable to prove this
case beyond a reasonable doubt at this time,” according to a final
State Attorney’s report released Wednesday. The
conclusion of the case now raises questions whether the Hialeah
elementary special-education teacher, Saul Fumero, made up the
allegations — and whether the Miami-Dade school district knew he was
using a largely discredited method of communication with the autistic
child. And not just discredited. There was never any reason to think this was legitimate in the first place. James
Todd, a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University who has
studied facilitated communication, reviewed the State Attorney’s final
report and said the school district still bears responsibility. “The
bottom line is that that school let a teacher use a technique that was
never credible and was already scientifically discredited in the early
1990s,” said Todd, who has worked as an expert for people falsely
accused in similar cases. … Researchers and
critics deemed facilitated communication nothing more than junk science
preying on the hopes of parents who long to communicate with their
non-verbal children. Even the American Psychological Association, in
1994, declared there was “no scientifically demonstrated support for its
efficacy.” “There’s not one study in 25 years
that holds up to scientific scrutiny that shows that this is a viable
means of communication,” said Dr. Howard Shane, an associate professor
at Harvard Medical School ...The Miami
Herald did find at least one researcher who stands by the method, but
this isn’t the first example of a parent being wrongfully accused
because of it. Here’s the part that reminded me of those old ritual-sex-abuse cases: “Essentially,
we and experts in the field believe that the facilitator is ‘writing’
the message and not the student/user,” Kevin McCormick, director of the
Palm Beach County school district’s special education department, said
in an email. The teacher also
claimed that the boy told him that his mother was involved, and that his
sister had “been conditioned to be a sex slave.” Here
again, in the name of protecting children, someone entrusted to take
care of a kid has caused irreparable harm by concocting images of sexual
abuse that came not from the kid, but from the caretaker. The teacher
admitted that he had no training in “facilitated communication,” though
if he he did, I’m not sure it would matter — he would have received
training in a bogus technique. The article does not say whether the
teacher is still working at the school."
The entire post can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
