A retired Aurora police sergeant faces criminal charges for raping his daughter and continually sexually assaulting her and his two adopted daughters, but he remains free from custody while his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.
Unless they’re all outright lying or the newspaper has made this up whole cloth, the facts of this case are fucking horrifying.
The father sexually abused his pre-adolescent daughter. This was witnessed by his son who says he was then held under water until he nearly blacked out.
Reunification therapy would be appropriate years down the line, if this all turned out to be some kind of misunderstanding. Forcing them into a room with their abuser, forcing them to show affection towards someone they have highly complex feelings of fear, loathing, and love for, is abuse.
And that’s all without the mother’s allegations of the therapist’s behavior. The judge is a piece of work too, weasel wording his rulings. He noted CPS can make rulings based solely on the one child’s account as a way of discounting their findings. Completely ignoring the fact that there is corroboration. And then says the abuse was only proven for the older kids. So the younger ones are fine.
In what fucking country do we put children back into an abuser’s orbit/care/house because they haven’t been proven to have abused that kid yet, just other kids, exactly their age.
The fact that you’re trying to defend this by going after the news organization and sharing the WebMD of psychology is telling. The facts of the case are horrifying and you know it.
I am not arguing about this case. I definitely see problems here, and I find it odd that the therapy is being performed by some christian group as well.
My issue is the article’s portrayal of the therapy. The question I responded to was about the therapy, not this specific case, so I’m talking about the therapy more broadly, and not this specific case. This specific case is either grossly exaggerated or some extreme fluke. Like I said, in cases of severe abuse, reunification therapy is inappropriate.
I also don’t trust the publication, important details can be left out or exaggerated to make something more rage-baity, and I could not find any corroborating news. Regarding being horrified by it, it’s very hard to horrify me with anything on the internet that isn’t old and established, I stay very suspicious of the entire thing.
Much like abusers going after kids, judges who give orders like these aren’t doing it in a vacuum. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. Look up Kayden’s Law. (You know why it has a kid’s name on it) Using the courts and this therapy to re-abuse children is prevalent enough Congress had to pass a law restricting its use. Some of the stuff in the law is exactly what the article alleges on the broader scale. So it’s obviously happened.
You not wanting to believe it is just another in a long line of people deciding not to believe victims when they come forward.
I fully support reasonable restrictions on the therapy, no question. What I do not support is lumping every instance of it all together into one perceived abusive framework, when that is not the full story. There’s both bathwater and a baby here, in that there are legitimate uses for the therapy that are not abusive or enabling further abuse. These are fine.
I wish there was an emoji shovel for a situation like this.
I wish the world wasn’t quite so full of knee-jerk reactionism to sensationalist internet content, where one of everyone’s favorite things wasn’t “omg”.