Nelsons daughter and son-in-law accused of sex abuse

[_Rosebud]

Snow's reputation should not be the issue.

The defense made Snow's reputation the issue as part of the defense. The point of pointing out that the defense did this and that media then followed suit is to move the discussion away from Barbara Snow (who is a scape goat/red herring) and back to the issue.

The point is not to protect Barbara Snow or help improve her reputation. She appears to be a capable woman. I'm sure she can take care of herself.

Cinepro seems to know the specific details of the child witness testimony, to the extent that he can discount them as false witnesses even if unwitting.

I don't have access to what they said specifically, only that other therapists were involved and came to the same conclusions as Snow after interviewing the children and drawing their own conclusions.

It seems to me that Cinepro wants to paint Whitehead, Tyler, Smith and others with the same brush..They were all bamboozled and blinded by a Satanic Panic.

I'm not sure that was the case.

What is particularly bizarre to me is that in the mind of the public, the "Satanic Panic" is somehow inextricably interwoven with the name of one woman, "Barbara Snow," as if there really could be one woman who somehow created and promoted the "Satanic Panic" all on her own. It's as if citing her methods and the cases she was involved in somehow discredits all of the reports and all other thought on the matter.

There's part of me that wishes i could do that too.... just convince myself there was some crazy woman who made this all up and hurt a lot of people with her false ideas.... that none of it is real, that nobody ever feeds excrement to kids and that nobody ever tries to terrify them into silence or not remembering. That way I could believe that kids didn't need protecting from the kind of predators who really know what they're doing. That would be a beautiful world to live in. I just don't think it's real. I think it's naïve. But I wish it were real. I'd much rather believe Snow was the entire problem than believe that predators are the problem. But I can't do that. It's not intellectually honest to me.... and it's unjust to the people I believe really are victims.

[_Res Ipsa]

Snow's reputation should not be the issue.

The defense made Snow's reputation the issue as part of the defense. The point of pointing out that the defense did this and that media then followed suit is to move the discussion away from Barbara Snow (who is a scape goat/red herring) and back to the issue.

The point is not to protect Barbara Snow or help improve her reputation. She appears to be a capable woman. I'm sure she can take care of herself.

No. The defense did not make Snow’s reputation an issue. It made her actions an issue. Actions like refusing to believe what the children told her until they told her what she wanted them to say. You’ve actually introduced a red herring by talking about reputation rather than actions.

[_Rosebud]

Just out of interest, have the children of Hadfield or Bullock ever recanted on their childhood testimony. I'm guessing that would be the only thing that could clear their names, and if they aren't doing it, why?

No, it seems that most people who have been let out of prison after being convicted are released because their cases are reappraised in light of what we now know about the reliability of children's testimony after talking with therapists at the time or other considerations.

Here's a case where the couple was let out even though "several children who originally accused the couple still oppose their release."

Falsely accused of Satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison. Now they’re owed millions.

As you no doubt know by now, once those kids have those false memories, they're going to think that stuff happened for the rest of their lives.

And all of this is why I get back to...... the MOST IMPORTANT THING IS MORE EFFECTIVE CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES THAN 2-DEEP.

Again, 2-deep was instituted and promoted when by a man who was convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography.

2-deep does nothing to protect children if we're working on the assumption that predators work together.

I'm not as worried about convictions from the past as preventing abuse in the future.

But it seems almost impossible to get people to talk about what's wrong with 2-deep.

[_cinepro]

And all of this is why I get back to...... the MOST IMPORTANT THING IS MORE EFFECTIVE CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES THAN 2-DEEP.

Okay, let's pretend this stuff is real. What kind of protection policies are you suggesting that would keep kids safe from "ritualized abuse" committed by groups of adults?

[_Rosebud]

Snow's reputation should not be the issue.

The defense made Snow's reputation the issue as part of the defense. The point of pointing out that the defense did this and that media then followed suit is to move the discussion away from Barbara Snow (who is a scape goat/red herring) and back to the issue.

The point is not to protect Barbara Snow or help improve her reputation. She appears to be a capable woman. I'm sure she can take care of herself.

No. The defense did not make Snow’s reputation an issue. It made her actions an issue. Actions like refusing to believe what the children told her until they told her what she wanted them to say. You’ve actually introduced a red herring by talking about reputation rather than actions.

Good distinction. It would be more accurate to state that it's her reputation that the public is now clinging on to in order to deny the existence of this kind of abuse. And it's more accurate to say that the Miles' seemed to think her reputation was shot enough that bringing her name up would help in their motion to dismiss.

As someone from behavioral health, I need to see evidence of what Snow really did and said. It makes complete sense to me that children wouldn't report immediately. If this is real, perpetrators told them things like, "If you ever tell anyone, I'll kill your baby brother" in circumstances in which they had every reason to believe the threats were true.

I don't necessarily believe Snow praised by saying things like "good boy" when she got the answers she wanted. Most people who work with children regularly are too insightful to do stupid stuff like that. I could be wrong, of course, i wasn't there. But I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that just because the defense accused her of something it's true. Sheesh.... in legal battles people accuse each other of all sorts of false things.

[_Mary]

No, it seems that most people who have been let out of prison after being convicted are released because their cases are reappraised in light of what we now know about the reliability of children's testimony after talking with therapists at the time or other considerations.

Here's a case where the couple was let out even though "several children who originally accused the couple still oppose their release."

Falsely accused of Satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison. Now they’re owed millions.

As you no doubt know by now, once those kids have those false memories, they're going to think that stuff happened for the rest of their lives.

Well. You did quote elsewhere, a case where the kids did recant in a custody case.

Again, it seems that the Prosecution only proceeded where there was enough evidence, and weeded out testimony that seemed bizarre and without any foundation in reality. They tried to do the just thing despite the panic.

[Guest]

And all of this is why I get back to...... the MOST IMPORTANT THING IS MORE EFFECTIVE CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES THAN 2-DEEP.

Okay, let's pretend this stuff is real. What kind of protection policies are you suggesting that would keep kids safe from "ritualized abuse" committed by groups of adults?

Well, speaking of that.... I have written documentation of all of the below:

I sent a policy to the Salt Lake Tribune along with an article I published. I mentioned Smith and his conviction for child porn in the article. I mentioned that he was in charge of child protection at the time 2-deep was instituted.

They printed the article, but not the policy. They did this without my permission.

I complained.

They put the policy up in the online version, but not until after most people had read the article. The policy never went to print.

I complained that not enough people would see the policy since it didn't go up at the time the article went up. We agreed that I could write a followup article in a few months linking to the policy. It was a good solution.

A few months later I wrote and submitted the followup article. But I found that the policy had been removed from the Trib's website.

I wrote to ask why.

No answer.

I waited.

I emailed again. Asking again. Telling them I needed the answer as child protection is a very important topic.

No answer.

My followup article was never printed.

This shouldn't be that difficult.

[_Rosebud]

Here's the altered article as it stands now: http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?i ... type=CMSID

I released the documentation of this interaction and the policy earlier in this thread via Google docs, but I've made it private again for now.

[_cinepro]

What is particularly bizarre to me is that in the mind of the public, the "Satanic Panic" is somehow inextricably interwoven with the name of one woman, "Barbara Snow," as if there really could be one woman who somehow created and promoted the "Satanic Panic" all on her own. It's as if citing her methods and the cases she was involved in somehow discredits all of the reports and all other thought on the matter.

That's not true at all.

Barbara Snow is being emphasized in this thread because, if you'll recall, we were talking about the Miles (see: the thread title), and it was Snow who was a key figure in that case and the other Utah incidents of the 1980s.

But Snow was just a reflection of the larger moral panic that spread worldwide through the 1980s and 1990s. She was a part of it, but certainly not the source of it or the sole instigator.

That's part of the reason we can be so confident that the stories she produced were false. Not because they were so unique, but because they were so similar to all the other stories of Satanic Ritual Abuse being told in other parts of the country. As the media picked up on it and therapists (who no doubt really believed in what they were doing) discovered patients who had suffered at the hands of the local baby-killing cult, it was being spread by the therapists and law enforcement who really believed that, in spite of the total lack of physical evidence, these things were really happening.

You really should know this by now. It happened with the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA. It happened all over.

This article about the Bakersfield panic is the best example of how such things started and spread in a community:

Kids Don't Lie

I've already pointed out that when you post articles that were written in the 1980s and 1990s, you are posting artifacts from the moral panic, not about the moral panic. They serve to show us what people were thinking at the time, but they should be read with the wider (and hopefully more informed) perspective that additional research and time can give us.

[_Mary]

No. The defense did not make Snow’s reputation an issue. It made her actions an issue. Actions like refusing to believe what the children told her until they told her what she wanted them to say. You’ve actually introduced a red herring by talking about reputation rather than actions.

It is such a messy area because children may be ashamed; they love their abusers and may have been threatened emotionally and physically; they may recant even where they have been abused.

As I understand it the vast majority of abused children do not tell.

I think Snow started from the assumption the children had been abused particularly if they showed evidence of having been abused in terms of inappropriate sexual knowledge, changes in personality and other physical manifestations..and it shouldn't be forgotten that children were sent to her because of concerns.

As a teacher I was told to look for signs such as a sharp change in personality. Wetting themselves. As a trainee, my teacher mentor was able to pick out a child using these pointers, and who was found to have been sexually abused by a relative. There was a successful prosecution in that case.

I think this is why prosecutors were able to say that they believed abuse was going on in many cases. They just couldn't prove it.