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Showing posts with label child abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child abuse. Show all posts
Bill O'Brien  ☭ Moira Wood was born in London 89 years ago. 

She was born into an indigenous English Catholic family who were royalist and old Colonials. Indigenous English Catholics tend to be more royalist than anyone else in British society. Jacob Rees Mogg is a typical example of an indigenous English Catholic these days. The Duke of Norfolk is also an indigenous English Catholic. Historically, Guy Fawkes attempted to bomb the Houses of Parliament to do away with Parliament altogether and restore an absolute Catholic monarchy for indigenous English Catholicism. This is the mentality that was ingrained in Dr Moira Woods. She spoke with an old colonial accident throughout her entire life. People thought she spoke with a home counties accent which was not so: it was an old colonial accent that she retained.

Woods' infancy was spent in places like Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma where her father administered control as a high-ranking civil servant on behalf of the British Empire. He also had investments in rubber plantations. She benefited from a one-to-one education of the highest standard that would stand to her for the rest of her life.

After qualifying from Trinity College Dublin as a doctor at a very young age, she married a fellow student and went to work in Belfast and then the East Midlands of England as a hospital doctor. After the birth of two children the marriage broke down and she returned to Ireland. At the age of 29, and after getting her marriage annulled by the Catholic Church, she got married to one of her lecturers in Trinity College, Dr Robert Bobby Woods, a 62 year old eye specialist. It's believed the Roberts Woods' wife died by suicide and his marriage to Moira took place soon after that event. They were to go on to have four children together. Moira Woods was to inherit vast wealth from her late husband's estate, which included a house on Aylesbury Road in Dublin, properties in Merrion Square plus an art collection apart from whatever investments was attached to the estate. She wanted for nothing.

Moira Woods had the minimum of medical qualifications. She never practiced as a general practitioner or worked on a daily basis as a doctor. She kept her registration on the medical register and paid her annual fees. In reality, she kept her profession as a hobby that gave her a status in society. Soon after the death of a second husband she went into a 20 year relationship with the Chief of Staff of the Official IRA, Cathal Goulding. She was to have two more children with him. At this stage a group of middle-class women with strong bourgeois connections were demanding a greater slice of the bourgeois cake. Woods joined them in their campaigns, a lot of which were necessary and long overdue. They focused on genuine grievances towards women and were quite successful in focusing on serious inequalities and discrimination that women suffered. This is to their credit.

Unfortunately, eventually, they would become overzealous and one of the most hidden and disgusting chapters of recent Irish history was about to commence and has since remained hidden. But with the death of Woods on 27 March this year a new focus needs to be brought to all of it. 

Woods set up the Sexual Assault unit in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin approved by the then Minister for health Barry Desmond. It was to deal with adult rape victims, Woods extended that to child sexual abuse. This was to lead to her eventual demise, with permanent lifelong suffering for her victims, their families and their children, as a result of misdiagnosing so many. She got the backing from all of the feminist movement that to this day stands by everyone of her diagnoses to the very last, belittling any hard evidence to the contrary. They never once saw the victims of hers who are still suffering from the experiences of her evil work, as the feminist movement doesn't want its champion exposed. Her victims deserve the truth.

Woods claimed to have diagnosed sexual abuse in an extreme amount of the thousands of children she examined. She had no qualifications in this field whatsoever. She did not work in a multidisciplinary team. She was totally in control of everything, a self appointed guru. She was absolutely callous towards any man that was unfortunate enough to come into her orbit. Her apologists will tell us that only five cases were brought to the Medical Council out of the hundreds she dealt with. The reality is that five of the courageous families who were falsely accused said they were going to fight her to the bitter end and they did. The truth is that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

The false allegations of child sexual abuse and misdiagnosis would have horrendous consequences for a lot of innocent working class families with limited resources and only formal education. They found themselves up against the establishment, the feminist movement and Moira Woods' old colonial mentality along with her stiff upper lip arrogance.

Families were split up, children taken into care. In one case a child was taken away from her parents at three years old and only returned when she was six. Any child falsely taken from their parents carries a lifetime of pain when reflecting on the event. There are many adults today walking around Dublin and other places in Ireland who can verify that.

There were incidence of suicide among parents and particularly grandparents when these false allegations were made. 

Probably the most horrendous and serious of all were two incidents of arson carried out in the Dublin area. There are photographs to show the extent of the damage of these arson attacks. Two families that would be later vindicated by the Medical Council had been the victims of those attacks.

When these false allegations were made men became particularly defenceless. If the marriage was not on a sound footing the women, if they supported the diagnosis, left the men defenceless. No appeal or a second opinion was available. Woods had complete control and had built up an industry around herself with a few militant feminist and social workers.

One of the cases where the marriage was on a firm footing and the children were taken from the parents, was of a soldier in the Irish army. He had been burned out of his house on the south side and had to be rehoused on the north side. A Sergeant in rank, he was shot at on a rifle range in the Dublin mountains by lower ranks. This is the sort of hysteria that was created around these false allegations. They were devastating beyond belief. This couple decided to fight Woods in the High Court and won.

It was to be the beginning of her the downfall and led to serious questions about her credibility. It was to lead to one of the fastest pieces of legislation ever to go through the Dail. The children had been taken into the care of the Eastern Health Board on a Fit Persons Order. The High Court took the view that a Fit Persons Order was meant to be governor or governess of an orphanage in the 19th century. And the Eastern Health Board was a corporate body and not a person. The children were being held illegally. This meant any child (there was believed to be between three and four hundred at the time been held on a Fit Persons Order) were also been held illegally. Any parent, therefore, could go and take a child back. Legislation had to be rushed in. Alan Shatter, shadow Minister of Justice, said the opposition would not oppose this legislation as it was brought about because of the overzealousness of a certain female doctor working out of a hospital in central Dublin.

Eventually a lot of the victims concerned organised themselves into an action group. They made serious allegations in the most detailed of ways and eventually forced the powers that be - the Medical Council and the hospital involved to take action. As more cases came to the notice of the courts Woods credibility began to sink further. It took the authorities a very long time to hold a proper inquiry and even then only because of the pressure put on them. The Eastern Health Board insisted that it be conducted in private behind closed doors. The excuse for this was to protect children who would be coming forward as witnesses. At this stage the children were adults and were prepared to have the case heard in public. In any event the case was held in private. Out of the five case three were proven against Woods and the other two were inconclusive. Yet, they did not strike her off the medical register. She was given an opportunity to be retrained, which she refused. By that stage she was in her 70s and didn't need an income.

Some of the families got compensation but by this time Woods had accumulated all the wealth she had in Ireland and had moved to Tuscany in Italy where she was to live another 27 years. She clearly put all the money out of the reach of the families as they might have pursued her for damages.

Never once did she acknowledge the harm she done and the hurt that she caused. She lived a vivacious  life in Tuscany found a new love life with some American Italian and came back to Ireland only a few months before her death.

People might wonder why bring all this up now? The answer to that is quite simple: her victims need to be acknowledged. All the tears shed by left groups of Ireland will not wash away the truth and hurt behind the whole saga. It is shameful. The stories and experiences of the victims should not be allowed to be swept under the carpet.

There are lots of families out there that have lived through the brittleness with regards to this woman, They need a voice as well. Someone said she went to Tuscany like an old colonial without acknowledging any harm she done to the natives in a place where she lived for years and got her wealth. It seems she died the same way she was born, a stiff upper lipped old colonial to last.

The point of this article is not to add to the distress of her family and her many children. It is to give the families of some of her victims an acknowledgement of what they suffered, now she has gone.

🖼 Bill O'Brien is an independent republican.

Dr Moira Woods ✑ An Old Colonial To The Bitter End

Anthony McIntyre ✒ As a rule I am not given to responding joyously to the death of other people.

I used to back in the day when the IRA took out its enemies, in particular torturers, but not any more. Maybe it is just age but too much energy goes into sustaining a life and so little into ending it, that the balance sheet never quite works out no matter how it is flipped.

Sun Tzu' s observation that “if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by” might be satisfying to some but ultimately a waste of time. You might know what you are sitting by the river for, but the corpse most assuredly will not. Besides, downstream, somebody will have stayed longer than you and they will eventually see you drift by. 

That said, Salman Rushdie's belief that ''when a tyrant falls, the world’s shadows lighten and only hypocrites grieve'' strikes a particular chord. Nor can I claim to be repelled by the H.H. Munro perspective on a certain type of character that “he is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.” I even derive solace from the witticism that if a cunt is held under water long enough they stop being a cunt. 

These ruminations all bring me to the death of Davy Tweed, 'a serial paeodophile who was prepared to use extreme violence to get his way.' The least unkind thing I can say is that during his baptism his exposure to water was of such short duration as to have contributed absolutely nothing to humankind.

When this vile, violent thug died in a motorcycle crash en route to who knows what sordid session or predators' convention, it seemed that news had barely got out before the Deification of Davy had begun. Here, we learned, was a rugby legend who had kept his hands firmly on the ball rather than on children. Having listened to Nicola Tarrant's interview with three of his daughters, Amanda, Catherine and Victoria, about 'the monster behind the legend' the thought occurred that had he been castrated by the handlebars of his bike, his family to whom politicians were offering sympathy might have seen in it a form of poetic justice.

Ian Paisley when told of his death commented:

The one time leading Ulster and Ireland rugby star, political activist, elected official and leading Orangeman David was a well-known Ulsterman ... To his family I send my condolences and heartfelt prayers at what must be an unimaginably heartbreaking time for them. I pray God will comfort them and give them peace at their point of need.

TUV leader Jim Alister was:

deeply saddened to learn of the death of former Ireland rugby star and Ballymena councillor, Davy Tweed, in a road traffic accident in north Antrim yesterday. Davy, a larger than life character, was widely known across North Antrim and further afield. His family is deeply rooted and respected in the Ballymoney/Dunloy community. This is a devastating blow to his family and wide circle of friends. I wish to express my deepest sympathy to his grieving family at this very difficult time.

DUP Assembly member Mervyn Storey was no less gushing in his eulogizing of the monster:

I have known Davy and his family most of my life and cannot begin to imagine the sorrow his family have been plunged into. Just on Sunday past he sat in front of me in church. He was a larger-than-life character, not just only in his physical presence. A former elected councillor on Ballymena Borough Council, Davy was also to the fore in Dunloy Orange Lodge and Apprentice Boys. A formidable rugby player, having made more than 30 appearances for Ulster and capped four times for Ireland after making his international debut against France in the 1995 Five Nations championship. He was also part of Ireland’s squad at the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. We extend to his family our sympathy and assure them of our prayers at this time of great loss and sadness.

The daughters of the monster seemed not to appreciate the condolences. Instead they:

wanted to set the record straight. This man was much more than a sporting hero and a loyal DUP and TUV politician. He was a predatory paedophile and a violent thug who smashed our mother’s face to a pulp.

Commenting on this type of lionisation, Tweed was the beneficiary of, Hugh Jordan opined:

there were people who are public figures who said nice things about Davy Tweed. And they must have known that the reality of Davy Tweed wasn't as a unionist politician. It was as a paedophile, a serial paedophile who put these young women through a horrendous life experience in their own home.

The Ireland rugby team in its match against Japan did not observe his passing. That silence about the bastard rather than for him quite loudly drowns out the sickly sound of sycophantic eulogising. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Dirty Davy

Stanley L. Cohen on the Revolting Legacy Of Canada’s Residential School System.


Tsi Wá:ton tsi Enskarihwahserón:ni – Tsi Niká:ien Rati’terón:tahkwe ne

Ronnonkwehón:we Tsi Ionteweiénsta Ronwati’terontáhkhwa

… [I]f anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young. The children must be kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions - Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial schools for Indians and Half-Breeds, 1879.
The Sum of Memories by Joni Sarah White.

Of late, there’s been a rebirth of interest about the notorious residential “school” system contrived and operated largely in Canada. Because it’s been my honor, for more than thirty years, to represent indigenous women, men and movements throughout North America on matters of self determination and international law, recently, I was asked by some friends abroad to write an article detailing the residential school system. Although much has been written about it, the narrative is usually a detached academic monologue that fails to put a real face on its true horror.

By now, many are aware of the government sanctioned history of stealing native children, isolating them far from family and communities in cold Christian edifices where the braids of young boys were shorn away to pilfer visual identity; where screams were ritual with victims beaten for the dare to speak their native tongue; where sex abuse was endemic among the dark, seedy hallways of a foreign faith; where thousands died from staggering neglect including starvation and unchecked disease such as tuberculosis and typhoid.

Yet, a practice strewn throughout Canada and parts of the United States was so much more insidious than physical assaults and shaved heads alone. For a calculated sanctioned scheme to erase entire cultures . . . a wretched effort to recast the millennium to suit the colonial needs of the moment . . . cannot be reduced to mere inadvertence or uncertainty. Indeed, if ever cultural genocide had consequential meaning and application it was in the residential school system with its deliberate effort to eradicate all aspects of Aboriginal culture and to sever and thwart its passage from one generation to the next. With ordained regularity, all captive students were belittled, humiliated and scorned no matter how hard their effort to accommodate their personal suffer and sacrifice or how well they acceded to the demands of their proselytizing wardens. As much forced labor camps as classrooms, in Canada, indigenous children were mandated by law to attend these hovels in which administrators became their legal guardians through a perverse partnership between the government and major churches as they conspired to wash away the identity and independence of the age-old Rohsken’ra:kete . . . gatekeepers of the land.

Meanwhile, never one to be out-purged by the “nuanced” cultural cleanse of hundreds of thousands of indigenous youth to its north, the United States expanded its age-old use of “trails of tears” to build schools of sobs. What began with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which legislated the military’s forcible removal of a hundred thousand natives from east of the Mississippi River to the West leaving thousands dead along the way of disease, hunger and cold moved to the Compulsorily Attendance Law of 1891. Largely a difference without distinction both lawful strategies were the philosophical bastard of a conscious effort to eradicate by assimilate. To compel attendance, this law authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to withhold food, clothing and annuities from those that refused to surrender their young to these early day (original) internment camps. Like their Canadian counterpart, once there in order to “civilize and Christianize” a generation of indigenous children, students were forced to abandon their Native-American identities through a crafted, imposed Euro-American culture in which their hair was cut, all indigenous languages banned and traditional names replaced by European ones. Like their Canadian counterpart, these schools were notorious for their cruelty leaving most subject to sexual, manual, physical and mental abuse. Many died. Others, broken beyond repair or return to their communities, spent the rest of their lives in misery, de facto exiles, far from their homes and culture.

In summing up long standing US aspiration–be it by relocation and march or removal and boarding–President Theodore Roosevelt infamously announced: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are. And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Rather than present an abstract, academic review of its calculated purge of the history, culture and future of North America’s indigenous people, with the permission of a client, I’ve elected to put a personal face on the Canadian residential school system. Submitted as part of a mitigation argument in a U.S. federal criminal case, which can vest the court with enormous sentencing discretion, this narrative and other aspects of our client’s life moved the probation department (which recommends a sentence) and the Government to agree with the one proposed by the defense. Fortunately, the court concurred that under the totality of circumstances incarceration was not called for.

Whisper into the Sky by Joni Sarah White.

What follows is a verbatim*, albeit reduced, and hopefully informative glimpse into the horrific residential school system through the format typically used in federal pre-sentence memoranda. And with this introduction, welcome to the childhood world of Clifford Smoke of Akwesasne, the Mohawk Territory which straddles the borders of the United States and Canada as part of a sovereign Nation that sits between the two. Under Longhouse tradition, Akwesasne, like all original pre-treaty land, has direct roots to Turtle Island… the centre of creation that began when the Creator seeded the indigenous journey… that survives despite the trials and trepidations imposed upon it by a European colonial project of an earlier time; one that continues to date.

The seeds for Clifford Smoke’s PTSD began as a young child when he was subjected to the trauma of the notorious Canadian residential school system which inflicted untold damage on countless Native children in Canada, be they those isolated from their community and families through removal to live-in schools far away, or local ones where they attended classes but returned home each night. Clifford Smoke was one of those traumatized young kids. Subjected to physical and emotional abuse from his teachers and some peers, called “retarded” and humiliated daily, by grade three Cliff had withdrawn emotionally from his class… unable to spell or write his name. As noted in the Pre Sentence Report prepared for Your Honor:

“[Smoke’s] early education occurred at a “residential” school. He was among the last of Native children who were forced to attend such schools. Residential schools were operated by the Canadian government and were used largely to remove Indigenous youth from the influence of their culture and assimilate them to the dominate Canadian culture. Residential schools were notorious for a high prevalence of student abuse and neglect and ultimately closed due to such conduct. [Smoke] recalled experiencing significant emotional and verbal abuse from school staff.” See, PSR at p.22¶115[i]

In the second half of the 1980s, Clifford Smoke was among the last generation of Native children forced into the government schools for aboriginal peoples in Canada. These schools were closed a decade later, as a result of Native and government revulsion over their conduct.[ii] The experience for Mr. Smoke at the TSI Snaihne School in Quebec, from age five to age nine, managed to combine academic failure, physical abuse and humiliating emotional trauma in equal measure. As his mother Sharon notes “[Clifford] was beaten up by other students and hit by teachers for being backwards.” The elder Mrs. Smoke notes [iii] her belief that his life-long struggles stemmed from this early experience, and that later schools tracked him as “special needs,” when he could not read or write on level with his age cohort. This, she believes, is what caused him to start skipping classes and eventually led to Clifford’s quitting school as soon as he could.

While indigenous people in North America suffered centuries of violence at the hands of their European foes, the full dimensions of which will never be understood by non-natives, “the closing of the frontier” in the 1880s[iv] did not bring an end to warfare visited upon native communities. A new cultural and social warfare took its place, as government institutions in the U.S. and Canada sought to “normalize” and assimilate the surviving Indian populations into the structures of conquest. Dispossessed of lands and livelihoods, natives were regarded as a recalcitrant population to be “led,” beneficently, into the new century by way of institutionalization, often justified in “well-meaning,” lofty rhetoric, but bluntly supremacist in its intent. The “white man’s burden”[v] in Canada would process some 150,000 indigenous children through its national system of native schools, with lasting communal trauma spread across generations.

Founded in 1831,[vi] revamped after 1885, and ultimately disbanded in 1996,[vii] Canada’s native school system employed custodial, locked-down schools typically in remote places where First Nations children were forcibly brought, often having been abducted by missionaries or pastors, and separated forever from their parents and even siblings, raised far from homeland or reservation, in brutal institutional settings which had been designed to “civilize” the young men and women. At their best, the schools offered a half-day of standard pedagogy—teaching English and basic math, and a half-day of vocational training—with the express purpose of making young natives into proper “self-sufficient” Canadians, and so that government social dependency welfare programs might one day no longer be needed.

These schools and their leadership explicitly undertook to extinguish in their young, innocent charges, the cultural bases of their identity, through deliberate acts of erasure of their culture and ethnicity.[viii] Children were beaten for infractions; it is now estimated that over 6,000 indigenous children died in the schools in the period from 1900 to their closing, including those who tried to run away. Yet the forced removal from family and kin proved the worst of all the traumas inflicted—separated from their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and tribal elders, the youngsters of the residential schools lost contact with their own bloodlines, or became estranged, returning many years later as adults to discover they could no longer even speak to their own parents, who wore different clothing, and worshiped different gods.

Clifford Smoke had a similar experience in his early childhood, when he found he could not hold conversations with his great-grandparents and other elders, who spoke little English in their later years. He recalls that the linguistic gulf separating them, standing face-to-face, was only bridged by his self-immersion in the Longhouse religion of the Mohawks, in its period of great revival during the early 1990s ferment of Akwesasne political life.

The Canadian residential school system is now widely understood[ix] to be a component of the long, tragic genocide[x] wrought upon indigenous peoples everywhere in North America, targeting their language, culture, religion and kinship structures in a deliberate attempt to erase those unique communal bonds. Clifford Smoke experienced the final years of that systemic oppression during his grammar school years in Snye, and although he counts himself fortunate to have returned to the fold of his community, learned his native language, and kept his identity—he survived with scars that continue to haunt him through this day.

As noted in the forensic examination and therapeutic findings of Drs. Johnson and James, Mr. Smoke’s experience with the Canadian residential school system was to be but the first in a series of adverse life informing experiences that have left him suffering for years from chronic PTSD and significant bouts of depression. As found by Dr. Johnson, Mr. Smoke:

[s]uffers from clinically significant anxiety, post traumatic symptoms and depression incident to a series of extreme traumas beginning in childhood and extending into his adult life. These traumas have included his experiences of abuse, bullying, and humiliation as a learning disabled student in a racist and highly punitive school environment.” See, Exhibit B at p.7.

In noting that “Mr. [Smoke] has lived with chronic post traumatic symptoms, periods of severe depression, guilt, shame, and anguish and continues to experience very significant psychological symptoms and deficits . . . [exhibiting] chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as well as clinically significant symptoms of generalized anxiety and depression” Dr. Johnson concludes his report stating his “strong recommendation that he remain in treatment with Dr. James.” Id.

Clifford Smoke is but one of more than a hundred and fifty thousand indigenous women and men who suffered the deliberate, targeted pain and punishment that was the residential school system. It was by no means aberrant . . . isolated . . . hidden. What began hundreds of years ago with a military and settler assault upon native communities throughout North America soon evolved to the Canadian Indian Act and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs; both ceded control over indigenous people to government agents empowered to forcibly assimilate them into the dominant white culture. The linchpin of these efforts was an insidious, euro/ethnic theological molest of indigenous youth stripped from their communities and culture in a conscious effort to tear away at the guideposts of their unique journey and voice. As noted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and reconciliation Commission of Canada, p.3…

The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been absorbed into the body politic, there would be no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights.

Though the doors to residential schools have been shuttered and shamed, their malicious endeavour has not. Today, it persists through the disappearance, rape and murder of thousands of indigenous women and girls and a corrupt system of mass incarceration that selectively imprisons native men in numbers disproportionate to all others often for little more than their political and religious beliefs or community efforts at economic self-determination. No less vile or colonial in its reach stands the brazen corporate loot of indigenous natural resources throughout North America. Once again, what is “theirs” has become ours, as the economic lure of minerals and raw material further relegates fundamental indigenous rights to little more than a series of cheap and readily transparent government talisman.

While the standoffs at Wounded Knee in the 1970’s, Kanesatake in 1990 and more recently at Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en were explosive and drew international attention and solidarity with indigenous people, the long-standing pernicious residential school system operated from beyond the shadows, with no concern of consequence to non-natives, for more than a century. The marked, ever-present assault on indigenous rights, aspirations and sovereignty continues unabated, lost to the public at large until a periodic face-off explodes into violence leaving distant spectators stretching for meaning. Like “badges and incidents of slavery,” to non-natives the ugly supremacist define of Aboriginals is, for most, a perpetual stare . . . one veiled from behind the romanticized, exploited myth of “our” indigenous people.

Here a sixty page legal brief moved the court from the 50 plus months of prison Clifford Smoke faced to a sentence of probation. But 600 years of land theft, occupation and terror cannot, and will not, be undone by words or liberal illusion alone. That mirage left long ago.

* The identity of the various participants in this prosecution, including the defendant, has been changed in order to protect their privacy.

Notes.

[i] See , also, Exhibit B, Report of Dr. Johnson at p. 2 ¶ 2 which, in relevant part, notes “[Smoke] relates that his teachers were insensitive, belittled him and called him “retarded,” and he was made fun of and bullied by the other children. He relates that he was traumatized by this experience and as a result learned to hate school. He reports that he was mistreated as a Native American and that his culture and language were completely dismissed and ignored.”

[ii] As noted supra Cliff is a member of a class-action settlement of a suit brought by surviving students and/or their families against Canada for various damages suffered at residential schools. See, generally,https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/canada/indigenous-forced-adoption-sixties-scoop.html; https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-court-approves-class-action-lawsuit-for-indigenous-students-stripped/

[iii] Comments attributed to Mr. Smoke’s mother about his experiences in school and later life are based upon a series of interviews with her.

[iv] As described by Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal (and long-controversial) 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the US census ceased demarcating a geographic line between settled and “un-settled” areas of the west after 1890; the Canadian west may have arrived at that moment even sooner, with the completion of its own transcontinental railway in 1884.

[v] The phrase comes to us from Rudyard Kipling’s unabashedly imperialist, white-supremacist 1899 poem—urging civilization upon America’s “new-caught, sullen peoples/half-devil and half-child.”

[vi] The earliest schools in the 1830s were formed by French Catholic missionaries for eastern indigenous children, and were mostly at the time voluntary, as the early settlers relied on Iroquois and Six Nations bands for survival, and could not until later force compulsory education on tribes that traded, supplied and went to war with them.

[vii] The last school closed in Saskatchewan that year.

[viii] The schools forced Christian religion upon the children, and forbade under threat of punishment any native religious practice; native languages were forbidden, under pain of beatings. Each child received a Christian name, with his or her Indian name discarded forever; boys had their hair-braids forcibly cut off, and were made to wear western dress, while native clothing and cultural symbols became outlawed; the schools served a diet of food that in some cases indigenous children could not eat.

[ix] See, http://caid.ca/DTRC.html Findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2007.

[x] Raphael Lemkin, a research member of the American prosecution team at Nuremberg, coined the term “genocide” and proposed it as a working concept to be applied after Nuremberg to foresee other genocides committed on a gradual footing, perhaps employing institutional means slowly, across time: “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. . . . Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

Images by Joni Sarah White. More of her work can be found on her website: www.JoniSarahWhite.com. She can be reached at: JoniSarahWhite@gmail.com



Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.
Follow Stanley Cohen on Twitter @StanleyCohenLaw


Stealing Native Children ➖ The Revolting Legacy Of Canada’s Residential School System

Haaretz ✒ At a Knesset pre-hearing, groups working to prevent the abuse suggested there may be a 'significantly higher proportion' of cases in the ultra-Orthodox community.


 Israel has become a safe haven for Jewish pedophiles from around the world, a leading advocate for child sexual abuse victims warned Monday at a Knesset committee pre-hearing on pedophilia in the ultra-Orthodox community.

Number of Israeli Children Sexually Abused by Their Brothers Doubles
Jewish Community Worker Is Charged With Child Rape in St. Louis
Fleeing Abuse in Israel, non-Jewish Women Fear Violence and Deportation
Israeli Man Accused of Raping Stepdaughter for 15 Years, Siring Boy

“Sex offenders tend to move from country to country to avoid jail, but what makes Israel unique is the Law of Return, which essentially grants unhindered access to anyone who is Jewish to come here without any real screening,” said Manny Waks, the chief executive officer of Kol v’Oz, a newly formed nonprofit that aims to prevent child sexual abuse in the global Jewish community.

Continue reading @ Haaretz.

Israel Becoming A 'Refuge For Pedophiles' ➖ Warns Advocate For Child Sex Abuse Victims

Anthony McIntyre looks at the latest child sex abuse scandal to come to light.

Scouting For Boys

Guest writer Frankie McKillen with a piece commenting on the pervasiveness of child abuse and the extent of the cover-up.


Frankie McKilllen


The Establisment


Everyday more and more stories are emerging about what sounds like institutionalized child abuse with politicians and celebraties. On the 'fringe' there is a sister covering for a brother or a brother covering for his brother.

People Telling People What to Think are Doing the Unthinkable

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