Respectable churchgoing sunday school teaching grandmothers arrested over 'satanic sex abuse'

[Ian David]

Three women teachers were among six people arrested today accused of sedating and sexually abusing children as young as 3 at a school near Rome.

The teachers — two of whom are grandmothers who had taught at the school and at Sunday school for decades — are said to have taken part in the repeated abuse of 15 children aged 3 and 5 for a year, filming them in sexual acts with satanic overtones at the teachers’ homes and in a wood.

The others arrested were a woman caretaker, a former producer of children’s programmes for the state television station RAI, and a local petrol pump attendant. The television producer is married to one of the arrested teachers.

The alleged abuse — in the town of Rignano Flaminio, 25 miles (40km) north of Rome — came to light when some of the children began describing their “games” to their parents. They drew pictures of a “man in black” who wore a hood and drank his own blood, and said they had played a game in which “a wolf chases a squirrel and eats it”.

<snip>

Ottavio Coletta, the Mayor of Rignano Flaminio, said that the town of 8,000 people was enveloped in “a poisonous climate of hatred and vendetta”, and Father Erri Rocchi, the parish priest, said he still believed the teachers were the victims of “malicious tongues”. He said that the women were churchgoers and taught at Sunday school.

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1706265.ece

[vickitulsa]

1. Oh dear, I HOPE we're not seeing a return to the witchhunt days

of hysteria over "satantic ritual abuse" in childcare facilities. Most people to this day don't realize that virtually every one of those big news events involving purported ritual abuse of children turned out to be hysteria or deliberate mis-accusations and the defendants found innocent. IIRC, even the McMartins were not convicted.

I helped a young woman who was imprisoned for such "crimes" get her case reversed after she spent over seven years in prison. Three young brothers who had testified against her, plus one or two of the other "victims," recanted their stories in affidavits signed by their mother, who told my friend "We always knew you were innocent."

Turned out the POLICE had blackmailed that family into testifying against Jenny. The oldest brother, who was 12 at that time, had actually been the one who carried out what little in the way of "crimes" was committed against some younger kids in the Projects where they all lived.

This was in the mid-80's, when the hysteria about such abuse stories was at its peak, and the police, who knew the 12-year-old to be involved, needed an adult whom they could prosecute more fully and who could get life sentences -- which Jenny did -- five of them!

So the cops told the mother of the boys, "If your sons don't testify against her, then we'll prosecute the oldest one instead." The mother said they even gave the boys a script they were to memorize for their testimony!

Jenny, however, was born with cerebral palsy and could not physically have performed some of the vile acts they said she did!

Martin Yant, who wrote the book Presumed Guilty, took up Jenny's cause and helped her get pro bono attorneys to work her case. GOOD attorneys, not the public defender she'd had who did nothing at all for her. A well known psychologist named Gardner also pitched in with info and help. I wrote a song about the story called "Jenny Is Innocent."

In pretty short order after she got help, Jenny was freed and allowed to return to her family, which included an aging, ailing father and two small kids of her own. Well, they weren't so small seven years later....

I am always suspicious now when I read certain stories that just have an odd aspect to them and don't seem to ring quite true. Go after REAL child molesters -- not falsely accused ones! There's almost nothing worse than accusing and prosecuting people for this sort of thing when they are innocent!

[Kingshakabobo]

5. The article says they are accused of "filming then" but doesn't say if film was found??? ...or not

Ya think that might be an important part of the story.:shrug:

[annabanana]

2. This sounds like one of those hysterical

witch hunts... Like the one in California a few years back.

[Ian David]

8. You mean the Satanic Panic that Geraldo Rivera started? n/t

[nealmhughes]

3. Good Lord! Will that stuff not die? It took 20 years, but it has spread to Europe now!

Has there ever been a documented true case of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" in the world? It smells of McMasters Preschool all over again. . .

[WinkyDink]

7. If not "Satanic", it IS pedophilia. See links for European cases:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4422016/

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0309/p06s01-woeu.html

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/Pedophocracy/child_sexual_abuse_in_Brussels.htm

[nealmhughes]

12. I see no similarity between the CS Monitor and the MSNBC links with the case in Italy.

The third link you offer is a bat turd crazy vanity site offering in its side bar such links as "Peak Oil is a Zionist Conspiracy." You ought to be embarassed to present it to the public.

Sure there is child abuse and paedophilia in Europe, and Asia, Ocania and Africa as well as the Americas. Some of the culprits may be "satanists," but do you believe that three grandmothers in Italy are part of a ring of any sort, other than a prayer circle or sewing ring?

How precisely does one recruit another to be part of a "ring" that is illegal everywhere? By classified ad? Website? Coded message? It is clear that such rings do exist, especially in child brothels in impoversihed Southeastern Asian countries where a bribe to the local police and judges is sufficient to keep the doors from being padlocked, such as Phuket in Thailand, but to think that three grandas outside of Rome who cavorted in a wood with a dark man with a hood is something that strains my credulity, given the past history of soi disant "recovered memories" and "satanic ritual abuse."

[genie_weenie]

4. This sensationalist crap is back?

Carl Sagan did a great job expousing the false memory and non-crtical thinking in The Demon Haunted World.

The worst recent case was Paul Ingram and Remembering Satan.

[WinkyDink]

6. SOMEBODY is producing all that child pornography that pedophiles get caught with.

Money talks with all kinds of people.

And why not suspect those most in contact with children?

For a priest to take the side of adults over the children, before sny trials, is not only despicable and unChristian; it is revolting, in the light of the Catholic Church's high-profile pedophile issues (I speak as a Roman Catholic).

[vickitulsa]

14. Check out this link for a good overview of the problems

associated with ascertaining the validity of abuse claims by children.

http://www.aaets.org/article50.htm

Dr. Richard Gardner is given top listing of several experts who have written books or at least articles or papers about this. He is the one my friend Jenny was fortunate to get involved in her case. He advised her new pro bono attorneys and was quite busy on her case for a while.

He felt Jenny's treatment by The System and especially the local police and prosecutor's office was particularly egregious, given that Jenny had cerebral palsy and could not physically have performed some of the abuse techniques she was convicted of doing.

We (her friends and family) learned about Gardner and contacted him for help. He was a most valuable resource, as was Marty Yant. I'll never forget the first phone call I had with Marty. He knew I'd been Jenny's penpal for a couple of years and asked me if I totally believed she was innocent of all charges. I could confidently answer YES to that, and he knew from his own research for his book, Presumed Guilty, that the American justice system deals out something far short of true justice to around three percent of those incarcerated who are innocent. That was the LOW figure -- three percent of two million inmates in this country!

Some investigators set the number higher, as high as ten percent.

People should imagine that it is them being falsely accused -- of anything -- and then caught up in a system which provides too little in the way of safeguards against wrongful conviction. As long as prosecuting attorneys achieve status and promotions based on a conviction percentage, even promotions to judgeships, we have a major problem in our justice system.

It is clearly necessary that we as a society do all we can to avoid wrongful convictions in our courts. With respect to child sexual abuse, in particular, even fleeting and minor accusations that are aimed at the wrong people can utterly destroy the accused's life -- and their families' lives as well.

Another prison penpal I had for many years is finally free on the overturning of his wrongful conviction of a double murder, for which he was serving two life sentences. He had a two-day trial and a public defender who put not one witness on the stand in Jay's behalf -- not even character witnesses! And Jay was locked up on his 17th birthday and left to rot in prison for over 29 years before he finally learned enough to put forth a successful appeal in his case.

He will forever have that history that he has to explain and live with. And there is simply no way he can be compensated adequately for the wrong that was done to him "in the name of justice."

Such wrongs are done in our names, too, we must remember. A prosecutor represents "the people" in cases he brings to trial.

Another thing many people, especially hardcore "law and order, tough on crime" proponents, don't like to think about or admit is that when the wrong person is convicted of a crime that DID take place, the real criminal is never pursued and may go on his way committing more crimes free of any hindrance or suspicion.

I am not saying we should "go easy" on actual criminals but that we must avoid "getting the wrong guy" or the convicting of innocents through dubious procedures or at the hands of unscrupulous prosecutors. "We the people" are guilty of the wrong being done when innocents are incarcerated.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

9. I hope they get castrated and raped in prison.

:sarcasm:

Is that what we usually hear in cases like this?

[piedmont]

10. WITCHES!!! If they weigh the same as a duck, we'll BURN them!

Sir Bedevere: What makes you think she's a witch?
Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a newt!
Sir Bedevere: A newt?
Peasant 3: ... I got better.
Crowd: Burn her anyway!

The Witch: I'm not a witch I'm not a witch!
Sir Bedevere: But you are dressed as one
The Witch: *They* dressed me up like this!
Crowd: We didn't! We didn't...
The Witch: And this isn't my nose. It's a false one.
Sir Bedevere: Well?
Peasant 1: Well, we did do the nose.
Sir Bedevere: The nose?
Peasant 1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
Crowd: Yeah! Burn her! Burn her!
Sir Bedevere: Did you dress her up like this?
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 3: No!
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 1: Yes!
Peasant 2: Yes!
Peasant 1: Yeah a bit.
Peasant 3: A bit!
Peasant 1, Peasant 2: A bit!
Peasant 2: a bit
Peasant 1: But she has got a wart!

Sir Bedevere: There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
Peasant 1: Are there? Oh well, tell us.
Sir Bedevere: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
Peasant 1: Burn them.
Sir Bedevere: And what do you burn, apart from witches?
Peasant 1: More witches.
Peasant 2: Wood.
Sir Bedevere: Good. Now, why do witches burn?
Peasant 3: ...because they're made of... wood?
Sir Bedevere: Good. So how do you tell whether she is made of wood?
Peasant 1: Build a bridge out of her.
Sir Bedevere: But can you not also build bridges out of stone?
Peasant 1: Oh yeah.
Sir Bedevere: Does wood sink in water?
Peasant 1: No, no, it floats!... It floats! Throw her into the pond!
Sir Bedevere: No, no. What else floats in water?
Peasant 1: Bread.
Peasant 2: Apples.
Peasant 3: Very small rocks.
Peasant 1: Cider.
Peasant 2: Gravy.
Peasant 3: Cherries.
Peasant 1: Mud.
Peasant 2: Churches.
Peasant 3: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck.
Sir Bedevere: ...Exactly. So, logically...
Peasant 1: If she weighed the same as a duck... she's made of wood.
Sir Bedevere: And therefore...
Peasant 2: ...A witch!

[hedgehog]

11. I didn't realize it at the time, but it turns out that I lived in a hot bed

of the satanic frenzy that hit Upstate New York and western Pennsylvania back in the 80's. A lot of the hysteria was generated by well meaning police departments faxing each other faxes they'd received describing satanic rituals supposedly taking place in the area. Today it'd be e-mails. I never worried about it, becaue I figured it was teenagers paiting the odd pentagram here and there. Others were convinced their children would be kidnapped, ravaged and murdered. As one poster noted, sometimes kids are abused, but great care has to be taken to ensure that innocents are condemned out of hysteria. I'd be looking for physical evidence myself rather than the testimony of small children.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. Yes, some of these stories were the results of children's nightmares

or leading of witnesses by over-zealous prosecutors. In one case, a mother recognized a child's testimony as coming from a horror movie.

There was a case in a small town in Minnesota during the 1980s, and I remember thinking that the prosecutor had a fanatic's gleam in her eye.

If all the stories about roasing babies and children having impossibly large objects stuck inside them were true, where was the physical evidence? Where were the parents who were missing babies? Where were the injuries that the children should have had if the stories were true?

And in the Italian case, if those women filmed their sexual abuse, where is the film?

No film, no case, as far as I'm concerned.