As many of you would be aware, I was sexually abused as a child while a student at Melbourne’s Yeshivah College and a member of the Yeshivah community.

/snip

My major grievances are directed solely at the Yeshivah leadership, past and present. They failed then, and are failing now.

How does it make sense that the Yeshivah leadership that was in place during much of the abuse and cover-ups, and among other things:

was directly responsible for shipping off a perpetrator (former Yeshivah teacher David Kramer), who went on to re-offend overseas (please read the powerful Victim Impact Statement written by one of Kramer’s victims and read out by me in court on their behalf);

despite the many allegations that were brought to their attention, allowed Cyprys to remain in charge of security until the mid-2000s;

despite the many allegations that were brought to their attention, allowed Cyprys to attend Chabad Summer Camps;

despite the many allegations against Cyprys, placed a student in his care whom he repeatedly abused;

asked a victim to leave the school for daring to speak out and take action regarding his abuse by Cyprys;

was publicly criticised by Victoria Police in court for not cooperating with them in these investigations; and
includes a senior member whose testimony was described by the Magistrate as being “unfathomable”;

My Imam abused me nearly every day for four years at the local mosque
17 Mar 2013 09:10
Midland Muslim woman was sexually assaulted regularly between the age of 7 and 11.

I WAS abused almost every day between the ages of seven and 11.

My abuser was the leader of my mosque, the Imam.

One day, he asked me to come to his room, as he lived at the mosque.

I found this strange, but he said I could read to him and get ahead with my prayers before the others arrived.

Inside his room, he began touching my face and stroking my hair, telling me what a pretty little girl I was.

I was only seven, I didn’t understand what he was doing other than I knew I didn’t like it. It made me uncomfortable.

A religious guru and music teacher was legally declared a sexual predator and sentenced to life in prison Thursday afternoon for repeatedly abusing a 10-year-old student during her weekly drum lessons.

/snip

The girl, now 14, testified that Munshi, 49, molested her, forced her to perform oral sex and masturbated in front of her.

Before the judge imposed the mandatory life sentence, prosecutor Mary Ann Braun read a letter from the victim's family: "You are a far cry from the word guru [religious teacher]. Words cannot describe the pain, agony and mental torture you have brought upon my family and most of all a happy-go-lucky, beautiful and loving child."

From New Scientist
Perishable materials usually rot away, so the oldest string on record only dates back 30,000 years. But perforations in small stone and tooth artefacts (sic) from Neanderthal sites in France suggest the pieces were threaded on string and worn as pendants. "The wear patterns provide circumstantial evidence of early use of string, but the evidence is not definitive," says Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Similar circumstantial evidence has been found in perforated shells.

Now, Hardy and his colleagues have found slender, 0.7-millimetre-long plant fibres that are twisted together near some stone artefacts at a site in south-east France that was occupied by Neanderthals 90,000 years ago. Such fibres are not twisted together in nature, says the team, suggesting that the Neanderthals were responsible (Quaternary Science Reviews, doi.org/pzx).

From Past Horizons
As these fibres are not twisted in their natural state experiments were carried out involving incising, planing, whittling, scraping and boring. In all cases, no twisted fibres resulted.

Further experiments conducted by Bruce Hardy involved the scraping, cutting and slicing of a variety of non-woody plants (roots, tubers, reeds, etc.), and again these also produced no twisted fibres such as those observed.

While not definitive, the lack of twisted fibres in these experiments lends some credence to the hypothesis that these derive from cordage.

“If they are indeed remnants of string or cordage, then they would be the earliest direct evidence of string,” says Hardy. “Albeit very fragmentary evidence.”

"She strips the bark off the saplings she collects and peels the cambium fibre...away from the outer bark or shongol (lit. skin) which she discards. She allows the bark to dry first before stripping off its fibre, slitting the wands gathered lengthwise in two and placing them indoors over a fire, leaving them for about a week. But the fibre of ponjip figs, she may strip off green and dry separately; women often excoriate these saplings during collection, returning home with bags of unseparated bark..., and there peeling off and drying the bast. On average, 5g of dry phloem fibre will produce 10 metres of string. Sillitoe 1988 pg 245