Category Archives: Child sexual abuse

New Leadership, Rules at Harrington Hall

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

The Projo reports that a new agency will be running Harrington House and sex offenders will no longer have reserved beds there. From the Projo:

CRANSTON — The state has hired a new agency to run the Harrington Hall homeless shelter, ending a controversial arrangement in which beds were being reserved for convicted sex offenders.

Starting July 1, the Urban League of Rhode Island will be out, and the House of Hope Community Development Corporation will be in.

The switch does not mean sex offenders will be turned away if they show up needing a place to stay, but it does mean the shelter, about a quarter-mile from a playground and about a half-mile from the nearest school, will no longer reserve space for them.

Steve Stycos on Cranston Schools Budget, Volunteer Policy

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Steve Stycos of the Cranston School Committee provided the following update:

SCHOOL UPDATE FROM STEVE STYCOS

CRANSTON SCHOOL BUDGET

The Cranston School Committee will resume its effort to balance its budget Thursday June 4 at 6:30 PM at Western Hills Middle School. Although state funding for education is still undecided, the school committee must cut at least one to two million dollars from its budget. The committee requested $2.6 million more from the mayor and city council. We received $1 million. In addition, there is $1.7 million in stimulus money in dispute. The mayor says if we receive the stimulus money, we will not receive the $1 million increase.

We also budgeted for $1.2 million in union concessions, but have not reached an agreement with the teachers union leaving us about $1 million short of our goal.Areas for possible budget cuts include the EPIC program, the elementary instrumental music program, some sports and the elementary guidance program.

After listening to many parents, my top priority will be preserving the elementary instrumental music program. I think the elementary instrumental music is more important than EPIC because it is open to all children and impacts upon instrumental music at all grade levels. If we cut the elementary program and children start instrumental music in middle school, our middle and high school programs will suffer.

Parents may want to communicate with school committee members about their priorities. I do not find simple communications of “don’t cut that program,” helpful unless I know what cuts are preferred.

In recent months, my budget cutting efforts have focused on the school lunch program’s $250,000 deficit. I chaired a committee to reduce the school lunch deficit which met weekly. A report of a committee is at cpsed.net under “Committees and studies.”

The school committee accepted our report and endorsed some of our proposals to cut spending. We are in the process of cutting holidays for three hour school year employees from twelve/year to seven/year and reducing their sick days. We are also seeking concessions from the unionized cafeteria workers (the sixteen who work more than three hours a day.) In addition, we cut the hours of cashiers in the elementary schools from three hours a day to two hours a day and laid off three 3 hour workers.

POSSIBLE FUNDS FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

The school committee also endorsed the school food service committee’s proposal that if a elementary principal can collect the daily lunch money without using a cashier, the school will receive $1000 for its use. The principal must devise a method to collect the money with existing employees or volunteers and then the plan must be approved by the central administration. I hope this will be a fairly easy way for schools to make some money while cutting lunch program costs. If you are interested, you should discuss the idea with your principal.

VOLUNTEER POLICY

The school committee continues to debate a proposed policy requiring all school volunteers to have a criminal background check. After meeting with several PTOs and listening to their concerns, I proposed that casual volunteers at public events (sports events, book fairs, school parties) not be required to have a BCI check. My amendment, suggested by Rhodes PTO president Julie Bradley, however, would have required tutors, after school program volunteers and field trip volunteers to get background checks. The amendment failed 6-1, although three other members of the committee have expressed concerns with the proposed policy.

I will not support a policy that requires people selling hot dogs at high school football games or scooping ice cream at school socials to get background checks. I hope a compromise can be reached, but I worry that fear of child molesters may severely cripple parent involvement in our schools.

The policy will again be debated at the June 15 school committee meeting. Check the meeting agenda on line at www.cpsed.net to be certain.

I am glad that Mr. Stycos articulated the concern for people not volunteering because of the new BCI policy. While the principle of screening people more closely who are in our schools is a good one, I am worried about people not volunteering because they have a minor infraction on their record that they don’t want the schools to see, because they are embarrassed about it. I also think a lot of people who only volunteer once or twice a year, at a special school-sponsored Halloween party, for example, might forget about getting their BCI until it is too late, and then they will not be able to volunteer.

As to Mr. Stycos’s statement about hot dog vendors at football games, I was under the impression that vendors would be exempt, as was specified by Andrea Iannazzi in the interview she did with me about the policy.

Cranston Schools Consider Policy to Require BCI Checks for All Volunteers

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

The Cranston School Committee will be considering a new policy to mandate background checks for all Cranston school volunteers, the result of a subcommittee which has been meeting since September of 2008. The policy will be voted on at two consecutive School Committee meetings. Recently I emailed school committee member Andrea Iannazzi with some questions about the pending policy.

Kiersten Marek: How will this be implemented?

Andrea Iannazzi: The policy is available at www.cpsed.net. Policies take two consecutive votes (without amendments) to pass the School Committee. This policy will be enacted 30 days after passage (to allow for time for background checks).

Kiersten Marek: Will current volunteers all need to go through the screening?

Andrea Iannazzi: Yes, all volunteers will need to go through the screening.

Kiersten Marek: Will they not be allowed to continue if they do not get screened?

Andrea Iannazzi: Yes, the policy mandates background checks for volunteers.

Kiersten Marek: How long will they be given to get the screen?

However long they’d like. There is a thirty day period until the policy is enacted. However, no one will be allowed to volunteer until they have
submitted a background check.

We have tried to make it as user friendly as possible. The application is part of the policy. A prospective volunteer can fill out the application and hand everything in to Human Resources at Briggs. Cranston Public Schools will take care of the rest (getting the check, forwarding results, etc.).

Kiersten Marek: Will fingerprinting be required? Will the background check need to be repeated periodically?

Andrea Iannazzi: Fingerprinting is only required for those who have not lived in RI for at least a year.

Volunteers would only need to get a background check once.

Kiersten Marek: Who will the funds be given to for administering the background checks?

Andrea Iannazzi: We have set aside $2500 in “Safe Schools” funding. CPS will pay the
Attorney General’s Office for those needing assistance (until the $2500 is spent).

Kiersten Marek: What criminal charges will make a person ineligible to volunteer in the schools (obviously any sexual offender status, but are there other charges that will be included?)

Andrea Iannazzi: This is determined by State law and includes child molestation, sexual assault, murder, manslaughter, robbery, arson, felony drug charges, etc. See RIGL § 23-17-37,§§ 11-37-8.1 and 11-37-8.3.

Kiersten Marek: What about parents who volunteer in the schools through their PTO? Will they also need to have a BCI on file?

Andrea Iannazzi: Yes, everyone must submit a BCI check. The only exceptions are listed in the policy… “This Policy may not apply to parents observing classrooms, guest speakers, performers, student mentors who are enrolled in Cranston Public Schools, truancy court personnel, newspaper reporters, vendors for school related
items such as rings, yearbooks, delivery vendors, and alike, provided they are accompanied by the Superintendent or school personnel.”

This policy is the result of a SubCommittee that I chaired. The Committee consisted of Jane Wall (Parent, Woodridge), Pam Schiff (Parent- Park View), Peter Nero (Assistant Superintendent), Dr. Laura Albanese (Principal- Stone Hill), David Alba (Principal- Glen Hills), Donna Tocco Greenaway (School Committee- later replaced by Frank Lombardi), and myself. We began meeting in September of 2008.

Kiersten Marek: Thanks, Andrea. This policy will be discussed at tonight’s school committee meeting, taking place at 7 pm.

How Can We Miss Him if He Won’t Go Away

Posted on by ninjanurse

I’ve refrained from writing about Roman Polanski’s latest efforts to paint himself as the real victim of his rape trial in 1978. I don’t want the discriminating readers of Kmareka to think I’m cyberstalking him. I’ve already written about the reluctance of the media to call him what he is. So for the record:

He is not that interesting. He’s a perp, doing what perps do. Minimizing his crime and maximizing his pain and suffering, there in Paris. He’s hired a lawyer to make a case that he should be allowed to have his charges dismissed without coming to the US and facing a court. His victim, who is a non-famous, adult woman living an ordinary life, has to see her name in the papers every time he does something like this, but he doesn’t seem to care.

What is worse, much worse, is that the press blamed the victim at the time, and thirty years later, still fails to acknowledge the nature of his crime.

Bill Wyman, in Salon, takes apart the media spin”

Feb. 19, 2009 | Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski’s 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could — by coming back and turning himself in.

Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don’t get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished.

I doubt Polanski will take the risk. Bill Wyman’s essay is excellent, and long overdue. I haven’t seen anyone else hold the media to account for their enabling role.

As a society we have become more tolerant of sexuality in the last thirty years. We speak more openly and acknowledge choices and relationships among consenting adults. At the same time we have become less tolerant of adults who exploit children. That’s progress.

If Roman Polanski is determined to get back in the papers and re-open his case, then let the press report the real story. So far, he’s been able to tell it on his terms, with the press going along. It’s unpleasant to admit that a man who is admired by so many could commit a crime like that. He’s still important, and important men never do those kinds of things, do they?

Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner– SANE

Posted on by ninjanurse

It was 1989 at Women and Infants hospital. I was a counselor-advocate for a woman seeking emergency care after a rape. She told me she had been abducted by two men who talked about killing her. She managed to run away and hide in the woods. She was grateful to be alive.

We waited for hours in the busy emergency room. Triage demands that the most emergent patients be seen first, and a rape exam is low on the list.

Finally the doctor arrived. She rushed into the room and stared at my client coldly. ‘Is this the woman who was supposedly raped?’

I was shocked, but kept silent so that the doctor could do the exam and leave, and this exhausted woman could finally go home.

This woman was in pain, with wounds physical and emotional. No one wants to be her, no one wants to be in that place. I’ve often wondered whether the doctor’s contemptuous manner covered a fear that any woman, even she herself, could be a victim.

I volunteered for two years with the Rape Crisis Center, (now Day One), and quickly lost the illusion that women are the more nurturing sex. In fact, the doctor, police officer, or nurse you want is the one with respect and compassion. That person can be male or female. Women might be more empathetic in general, but that’s no help when you run into a woman like that doctor. There were many other doctors both male and female who were kind and professional. It’s character, not gender.

This summer Day One held a class for Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE). Nurses who complete the program take call to respond to an emergency room when needed. This spares victims a long wait and frees the emergency room doctors from having to take out time from other urgent needs. SANE nurses have a much better record of collecting evidence, documenting, and offering antibiotics and the ‘morning after’ pill to protect against sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy. The evidence collected from the rape exam can be crucial if a case goes to trial. DNA evidence can help to convict the guilty or exonerate the innocent.

The SANE program is not cheap. Emergency room services and trained professionals are needed. In Rhode Island State Crime Victim Compensation Program will pay the costs so that victims are not billed for their care.

This will remove a barrier to women, children, and men who are victims of sexual assault and need emergency care. Day One, formerly the Rhode Island Rape Crisis Center, can be reached at 421-4100. The Victims of Crime Helpline can be reached 24/7 at 1-800-494-8100.

Nice Guys

Posted on by ninjanurse

I moved to the East Side of Providence in 1977. This was during an economic recession. It was the first time I discovered how cold an apartment could get when you needed to save money on heat. I was young, inexperienced, but learning.

I had to make it on my own in many ways. No college dorm transition to independence. Lived with my parents when I went to Rhode Island Junior College (nickname — ReJeCt) and graduated broke but debt-free.

I was just getting started living in my own rented room on Waterman Street. There were still some fine old businesses on Thayer Street before the chains pushed them out. There was a diner with a guy who wore a paper cap and called everyone ‘Champ’. He was at least 103 years old and way cool. He served greasy coffee in plastic cups.

I was just getting started in my adult life. I had no phone, couldn’t afford one. They still had pay phones on the corner then. I called my Mom and she said –

“I have bad news.�

This is the preamble to the announcement of a death in the family. This time it wasn’t a death. My tough, cigarette-smoking, hard-working widowed grandmother had been raped in her home by a housebreaker.

The spring that was blooming around me, the spring of my life turned dark.

Anyone who has had harm done to someone they love knows what it is like. It’s like a death.

My grandmother survived that awful crime. She didn’t lose her health or her mind, just her house and her place in the neighborhood. My aunt and uncle built her a basement apartment, with everything except a separate entrance. Which she said she didn’t want anymore.

While she was in the hospital, the housebreaker came in and stole the gun that my grandfather carried when he was an officer in the Providence Police. The old neighborhood had changed. Housebreaking and rape were the signature crimes of the decade.

I discovered fear. I had always believed that Jesus would protect his own, but now I was faced with a dilemma. Either there was a god who knows when every sparrow falls, but turns his back on the unsaved sparrows, or my sense of specialness was an illusion. To stay under the wing of Jesus, I would have to conclude that my grandmother was cast to the whims of fate because she clung to her Catholic religion. She wasn’t saved. If she was, Jesus would have raised his hand to protect her.

This was my rough entrance into the reality-based community. Siding with my grandmother — sharp tongued, Irish, always with a cigarette and something to read. If a god will sit up on a cloud in heaven, and watch this happen to her, because she’s not the right religion — that’s not my god.

So now I had to face the world godless.

I read the Providence Journal police report like it was the weather. If I knew where the storm was predicted to strike I might avoid it. Rape, assault, threats, narrow escapes. The Providence Journal kindly refrains these days from publishing the names and addresses of rape victims. If you get roughed up by some bullies on the street, you report it to the police at your own risk. Our one local newspaper will helpfully tell them where you live.

The weather report in 1977 was turbulent social change with an 80% chance of being insulted for being a bra-burning libber and a 40% chance of being frightened by imminent violence and erupting male rage with a 10% chance of violence getting major and physical. These predictions increased in severity as your social status decreased, but affluence did not guarantee safety.

Nearly every woman I know has had some experience of threat, because she’s a woman. Being young, you feel it. Without the sense of social validation you get from being half of a couple, without the knowledge that someone would miss you if you were three hours late getting home, you feel it.

I left the rented room and moved in to another. The house was bought out and everyone was evicted. I moved in with some Brown kids, but couldn’t blend into the household. They lived on assumptions of safety and privilege that astounded me. It was like we spoke a different language. I left that place and moved in with a couple of guys in a place in Fox Point.

Right after I got my stuff into the third bedroom of the apartment lightning struck in the neighborhood. A young couple who had bought a house to fix up were broken in on. The invaders beat and robbed them, and raped the wife in front of the husband.

One of my new roommates knew the accused. “They were nice guys,� he said.

That was one of the enlightening moments of my life. Of course they were nice guys. To him. To the young couple they tortured they were the face of hell.

When a person suffers a serious wound, the power of life being strong means they will probably heal. If they have the love and help of other people to speed their recovery they will heal faster. But a scar is not the same as undamaged skin. It is marked, and more fragile than skin that has not been injured. So trust can grow back, but you can’t undo the past.

Nice guys. To other guys, when it worked for them. Regular guys who always had someone to speak up for them. Who would believe nice guys could do this?

It’s human nature. No one wants to believe that the nice guys have another side. If they are good to you they are good by you. The guys must have been drunk. Maybe the urban homesteaders were flashing their wealth. Any excuse to evade the truth that this is part of human nature, to favor your friends and rip off strangers. It works if you don’t get caught. Those guys got caught pretty fast.

This all happened around the time Roman Polanski fled to France. Now he’s knocking on the door again. A nice guy. Lots of friends. Didn’t hurt anyone important. Just a child. Just a mother. Just a woman.

Roman Polanski, Unwanted and Undesired

Posted on by ninjanurse

Gauguin was a failure in the Paris art world and a lousy provider for his wife and children so he boarded a ship for Tahiti. Leaving behind his debts and his family, taking with him his resentment, his prejudices and his syphilis he preyed on Tahitian women. Mistaking their customs for a lack of morals, mistaking difference for noble savagery, he ‘discovered’ the Tahitians and translated them to the western world. He also created some of the most beautiful paintings, the most sensitive portrayals of the island people that have ever been made. Your image of Tahiti is probably colored in the shades of a Gauguin poster on a classroom wall.

Life isn’t fair.

Recently I heard a lecture by Linda Ledray; director of a sexual assault nurse examiner program. She said, ‘When I walk into a bar I don’t wonder whether there is an offender there, I wonder how many.’

Knowing what is really going on can make you cynical and frightened. Unlike the heroic antiheroes we see on TV and the movies, perps are as common as dirt. (No offense to dirt, which is useful.) Unlike those imposing hypermasculine guys who get carried away by their uncontrollable passions, a perp is likely to be an insecure man who plans ahead and looks for a victim who can’t fight back. Or one who won’t tell.

The recent Catholic church scandals exposed a sorry pattern of men using their authority and position of respect to get access to children. ‘Father McGillicuddy would never do a thing like that,’ you can hear the believers saying. Because to admit that he could and he did would take the roof off the church. Blaming a famous director for raping a child not only invalidates a lot of people’s meal tickets, it scares us. The only way to keep a comfort level is to blame the victim.

Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), thirteen years old, was not protected by any shield law after she was raped by Roman Polanski in 1977. She was instantly branded a nymphet, a Lolita, a temptress. The poor guy couldn’t help himself. The tabloids loved it.

The child who dreamed of being an actress, of finding fame, instead got notoriety. The man who lied to a mother to get access to a child, the man who enticed that child into taking a combination of drugs and alcohol that could have killed her, the man who violated not only that child but her whole family got a plea bargain.

The rape charges were reduced to ‘having sex with a minor’ because the family could no longer bear to see Samantha put on the witness stand again. In her own words in a 2003 interview in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin…

Polanski had asked Geimer’s mother if he could photograph the 13-year-old girl for a French magazine, and her mother allowed a private photo shoot.

“My mom and I thought the photos would help my acting career,” Geimer says, laughing. “I wanted to be a movie star.”

“I had done some commercials, but I didn’t really want to be a model. I thought this would be helpful.”

But soon after her meeting with Polanski, Geimer began to feel uncomfortable around the director 30 years her senior.

“Everything was going fine; then he asked me to change, well, in front of him,” she says. “It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to go back to the second shoot. But I didn’t at that time have the self-confidence to tell my mother and everyone, ‘No, I’m not going to go.’”

During that second shoot, Polanski’s motives became apparent.

“We did photos with me drinking champagne,” Geimer says. “Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there.”
Polanski sexually assaulted her after giving her a combination of champagne and Quaaludes.

Samantha Geimer gave up on acting after the rape. She did her best to put the whole episode behind her and recover her private life. Today she lives with her husband and children. Every so often Roman Polanski is in the news, reporters show up at her door and Samantha Geimer is forced to tell her story again.

Who would want to be defined by a crime committed against her? Samantha Geimer’s recovery is to the credit of her and her family. That she has forgiven Polanski is to her credit. She wants to move on. It’s a shame that he continues to intrude on her life.

After the plea bargain, Polanski fled to France to avoid going to trial. The press replayed the nymphet story. The wording of the reduced charges was taken as proof that this child consented to sex with a 44 year old man.

That’s still how the press plays it. Polanski is a free man in Paris, wealthy, powerful, respected for his creative work. It is supposed to be a terrible injustice that he cannot come to the US without facing the charges he ran from.

Blaming the great man is so disruptive. Recognizing how dirt common it is for an adult to rape a child makes the world a more frightening place. Accepting that someone could be both a pedophile and a person who has done things that are widely admired requires some growing up.

I wish to god that all the film critics who gush over this director would just face it. Polanski might be a creative genius. He raped a little girl. There is no law of nature that ordains that accomplished people can’t do appalling things. Consistency is seldom found in humans. Polanski himself suffered terrible losses in his life. But his rape of Samantha Geimer required convincing lies to her mother, two opportunities to get her alone, and drugs. Hardly an act of uncontrollable passion. More like the MO of someone who had practiced this before and thought he could get away with it. If Polanski didn’t prey on any other children he would be the exception, but I hope that is the case. Samantha Geimer believes he is sorry for what he did. Perhaps some day he will apologize.

We have two choices in a situation when a powerful man is found doing something indefensible. We can be grownups, and face the truth. Human nature allows for good and bad in the same person. A crime is not less because it was committed by dear old Father McGillicuddy, or the great director.

Or we can invent a fantasy world where conniving children seduce innocent adults. We can portray Roman Polanski as a poor lonely guy, who ‘had sex with’ a girl and now suffers a terrible exile in the film world of Paris. That’s how most of the critics frame it. That’s the message we give our children, that no one will believe their story. That’s a perp’s best refuge.