Any time you have kids with parents who put them under the care of authority figures you’re setting up a stage for abuse of trust and power. Abusers seeks these positions of trust and exploit them. [edit Penn State] and Sandusky, the Olympics, the Catholic Church, other religious orgs, schools, etc.
There needs to be more oversight and kids need a better reporting environment while also protecting good people from ‘revenge’ unsubstantiated accusations. I don’t see an easy solution. But in most large cases, there are years or even decades of repeated accusations which go ignored. That can’t be squared. That’s a leadership failure.
> Any time you have kids with parents who put them under the care of authority figures you’re setting up a stage for abuse of trust and power
The same could be said of many ‘adult’ institutions, like corporations and governments. America elevates the idea of a titular, all-powerful leader (CEOs, President, etc), yet we seemingly cannot go a day without news of a new scandal or abuse of power.
Fair, but adults have full emancipation and can make their own decisions. Children are not full adults, so they need extra care when put in these situations.
Totally agree. My point was that perhaps the problem is our tendency to vest complete, unquestioned authority to individual leaders within many different institutions.
> The last century has been painful for children as every venue of leadership has been used for abuse...
I'm going to preface this with "I have no hard data to back this up", but I have a feeling that this isn't a matter of the last century as being more of a problem than previous ones. Rather, I think it's the globalization of communication that has brought it to light in that time. This sort of thing has probably been going on since there have been positions of power (pretty much forever) but in the last century it's become much more easy to report on cases when they're found. And now thanks to the internet, with the ease of communication between people that you may never meet in person otherwise, corroborating stories and figuring out that there's a problem is an easier process.
It does a lot to highlight the dumpster fire that is the terrible side of the human race, and many positions of power are still powerful enough to evade consequences too much of the time, but maybe one day it will give voice enough to the oppressed and abused to be able to start making a real difference. (Not that it should be _solely_ their responsibility, but in order for the process to start, they have to be able to speak and be heard.)
I think economics play a role as well. Specifically, when the economy increases rewards to education and higher-level thinking, the damage caused by child abuse becomes felt more broadly. It's always been horrible for the individual victims, but it's easier for society to turn a blind eye when it's an easily replaced unskilled child laborer than when it's a young student on a long road to a sophisticated trade.
I think you can see this dynamic in many places. For example, the birthrate goes down when wealth goes up. You invest more in fewer children. That investment includes caring more about ensuring they are treated humanely.
It's always been wrong, but now it's also expensive.
Agreed, bit for the notion that parents with more children would care less per child: As a parent with multiple children, there seems to be a network effect, because you see them interact more with one another as a group, so the caring compounds.
I was thinking someone along these lines as well, but then taking into consideration the massive number of wars and total number of deaths in the last century compared to much of human history, we are still slowly recovering from that.
> while also protecting good people from ‘revenge’ unsubstantiated accusations
It's important to note that such accusations are incredibly rare, and that the presence of multiple accusers (as in the Larry Nassar case) leaves little room for doubt.
Of course there have been cases of false allegations of crimes against children (as in the Satanic panic), but those were due to mishandled interrogations of young children, not to adults attempting "revenge."
This is a big issue tbh. I've been through one interrogation, in a fairly peacefull country and not as a suspect, i'm sure i could've handled that poorly enough to help convict an innocent man (he was still convicted, then found not guilty).
Interrogations are hard for good reasons (its easier for the police to get people off their feet and incriminate themselves), but using the same interrogation techniques on adults and children is a recipe for disaster. In my country we had a fiasco caused by this.
Should that be charged? Convicted would imply they were found guilty, to be charged a prosecutor only needs to think they have a reasonable chance of their case succeeding at trial.
Saving face at all costs may be a reason, keep up the outer appearance and do business as usual. Cowardly, makes me sad when i think about it.
(edit) Well, i guess it is better for the own career, rocking the boat seems to be frowned upon a lot. Maybe we need to create an atmosphere where dissent is allowed instead of ostracized? Where people are fine with differing opinions. Where we can accept differences. And do the right thing when it is needed. Is it our biological wiring that disagrees? The dog-eat-dog scarcity mindset? The conservative "As long as my car is bigger than the neighbours everything is fine." frame?
It should be a requirement that every public school classroom is live streamed so the parents can watch. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy between a government employee and children.
University endowments, the crystallization of privilege, should be seized and distributed as reparations. There is very little value in these places besides the maintenance of power and economic hierarchy.
Except I don’t want my kids’ broadcast to other people. Plenty of other kids’ parents are just as problematic as the teachers. It takes one family to opt out of this for the whole thing to be moot for that classroom so this wouldn’t work.
You don't get to opt out of police wearing body cams when they arrest you. You don't get to opt out of public school teachers wearing body cams when they teach you.
Actually I do. Schools have you sign a photo and video consent policy where you get to choose whether you do or do not consent to having pictures/video of your child taken while at school.
Police work is a strawman argument. I’ll give you another strawman: installing cameras in all the bathrooms would prevent abuse in this bathrooms, wouldn’t it? Except all the unintended terrible consequences this plan is bulletproof.
Moreover, classrooms isn’t where abuse happens, by and large. Private offices, bathrooms, locker rooms, are all much more likely places.
They also don't give you a handy link to share the video when something does go down. Giving all the parents a way to view the video at any time is a very different proposition. Besides, the number of times you hear about a camera being shut off or obstructed, either on purpose or "accidentally" when something is hinky is afoot happens too often to think that it's _the_ solution.
I watched a video the other day of a geologist talking about the fact that the hardest thing she had to deal with when working in Antarctica was the way her thesis advisor acted. And since she needed a letter from him to proceed then his threat of "you'll never work in science again" had some basis in reality.
She talked about how deeply it impacted her but that she only reported when her 3 year old daughter said she wanted to be a scientist like her.
It did make me wonder about how we could restructure academia/society so that random individuals don't have so much power over other people. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
I wonder if this is where the seniority thing that people complain about in unions came from. If there's some subjective element then you've basically given control of your whole life over to the person who makes the decision.
edit: one idea, randomisation. If you give the person in power the ability to choose X people, but then the eventual winner is picked in some documented and fair manner from that list, then that may reduce their leverage.
I’ve noticed this is very prevalent in industries and academia where there are very few spots with oceans of people trying to “make it” into said spots. For example, academia is absolutely insane how insular it is. The communities of experts in fields is so small, and mainly due to tradition in most cases professors pretty much dictate who succeeds because the communities and available positions are so small. Surprise surprise, after decades of this cutthroat rat race in academia, there are many assholes in power. Rinse and repeat for Condé Nast (old school media (newspapers, magazines) were exactly this gate keeping BS. Hollywood!! (Harvey Weinstein and co) and honestly we are starting to hear about it with startups and VC. I’m sure this is everywhere, but especially in these areas/industries where there are a few kingmakers and swathes of people willing to do anything to get ahead, the kingmakers take advantage of their power.
Medical residency for newly graduated medical doctors is another academic training program where abuse runs rampant.
Basically, the residency program owns you for at least 3 years (often more) and the only protection you have is that you can’t work over 80 hours per week averaged over a 4 week period (gee, thanks).
The issue is that people are afraid to report their hours accurately because if they do the program director will meet with them and ask, “sooo it seems like you’re not as efficient as the other residents [who are all lying to evade the ire of higher-ups]. You really need to work on that, or else you might need to be held back or even dismissed.”
If you’re dismissed, you can’t work as a doctor. No one will hire a doctor without residency training. You’re completely screwed.
There was a resident anesthesiologist at the University of New Mexico who was allegedly raped by her boss. She reported it to the program and was dismissed. She later settled a lawsuit for only 800k, essentially two years worth of salary as an attending (fully-trained) anesthesiologist and she likely only saw less than 100 or 200k of that after lawyers fees, taxes, and paying off her medical school loans (mine are 350k, and that’s only because COVID has stopped the 7% compounded interest rate).
She now teaches anatomy at a community college because no one will accept her into their residency program.
And then people wonder why many doctors lack empathy. It’s hard to have empathy when you’ve been essentially tortured for years until your spirit has broken. Hurt people hurt people.
> If you’re dismissed, you can’t work as a doctor. No one will hire a doctor without residency training. You’re completely screwed.
I thought you needed to complete residency to get a license to practice as a doctor (reimbursable by CMS). Hence, of course no employer will hire you as a doctor because they would not get paid for your work.
The parallels we see in abusers across cultures and institutions likely indicates that this is a dark face of human behavior that needs extreme mitigation strategies (there are documented cases in essentially every institution with a power structure).
There are a lot of ways forward that will improve the lives of children, the biggest hurdle is getting adults to listen and then implement.
Swinging back to the article in question - this has devastating results on the victims when the questions are ignored by others in authority. So in addition to questioning authority, those in authority also need to be held accountable for their actions.
> It did make me wonder about how we could restructure academia/society so that random individuals don't have so much power over other people. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
Transparency. People in power intent on abusing it can only be disincentivized by the possibility of being outed. Hence why I think it should be legal to record any audio you are privy to. There are far too many places with all party consent laws about recording audio, which only serve to help those with power take advantage of those without power.
>It did make me wonder about how we could restructure academia/society so that random individuals don't have so much power over other people. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
Never work in a job you're not prepared to quit.
The people who talk about their harrowing experiences have had a lot of less harrowing experiences that should have made them quit much earlier if they weren't living in a fairy tale.
I saw it first hand when the head of my school, a woman, started berating me for trying to get into a more 'prestigious' program than the one I was in at the time. The whole meeting was so weird I started asking around for career prospects of high energy physics - two months later I dropped out and moved to be a quant and saved myself a wasted 20s.
> Never work in a job you're not prepared to quit.
Most humans working today can't quit their job without another job already lined up. Some people (like those in the later stages of their PhD) can't quit at all. They would end up losing potentially years of progress.
> I saw it first hand when the head of my school, a woman, started berating me for trying to get into a more 'prestigious' program than the one I was in at the time. The whole meeting was so weird I started asking around for career prospects of high energy physics - two months later I dropped out and moved to be a quant and saved myself a wasted 20s.
This situation has absolutely nothing to do with what you were responding to. Changing career tracks in your early 20s isn't a big deal if you have fungible skills that are in high demand. Not everyone is in their early 20s or has high-demand skills, and that doesn't mean it's suddenly their fault that they're being abused.
Your single anecdote where you were a brave hero who wasn't "living in a fairy tale" doesn't give you some special insight or authority to tell other people they're stupid for trying to push through the early stages of a bad situation. No one knows whether or not it'll get worse or how long it will last. They do know there will be potentially severe financial and career consequences for leaving.
>Most humans working today can't quit their job without another job already lined up. Some people (like those in the later stages of their PhD) can't quit at all. They would end up losing potentially years of progress.
I was in the later stages of my PhD. It was rather easy once I got over my ego.
>This situation has absolutely nothing to do with what you were responding to. Changing career tracks in your early 20s isn't a big deal if you have fungible skills that are in high demand. Not everyone is in their early 20s or has high-demand skills, and that doesn't mean it's suddenly their fault that they're being abused.
There are plenty of unskilled jobs you can move to and you'd be no worse off than the 50% of Americans who work in them.
>Your single anecdote where you were a brave hero who wasn't "living in a fairy tale" doesn't give you some special insight or authority to tell other people they're stupid for trying to push through the early stages of a bad situation. No one knows whether or not it'll get worse or how long it will last. They do know there will be potentially severe financial and career consequences for leaving.
You sound extremely defensive, may I suggest you objectively review your situation?
This dynamic exists in pretty much every situation where you can't switch or move somewhere else without losing your progress or suffering other significant penalties.
If you're doing your PhD, you can't really switch to another supervisor in most cases without almost starting over. Additionally in small fields it could really hurt to make an influential enemy.
This can happen in regular jobs if you are desperate to keep it, e.g. you have no real financial buffer and not many alternative jobs in the area. But in many cases it's a lot easier to just switch to somewhere else, which reduces these kinds of power imbalances.
> It did make me wonder about how we could restructure academia/society so that random individuals don't have so much power over other people. It seems like a recipe for disaster.
As someone working my way through (and hopefully out of) academia, the issue here is that the thesis advisor is not some random individual. Yes, even under favorable conditions the circumstances are ripe for abuse. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the solution would be.
In a science fiction novel I read, the power problem was said to be solved with a hierarchy that was not acyclic, so nobody was another's absolute superior. I don't think this would work in reality though.
> The FBI's investigation into Nassar started in July 2015, after USA Gymnastics President and CEO Stephen Penny reported the allegations to the FBI's Indianapolis field office.
> That office, then led by Special Agent in Charge W. Jay Abbott, did not formally open an investigation.
> The FBI only interviewed one witness - Maroney - several months later, in September 2015. It failed to formally document that interview in an official report known as a "302" until February 2017 - well after the FBI had arrested Nassar on charges of possessing sexually explicit images of children in December 2016.
> Abbott, who retired from the FBI in 2018, also violated the FBI's conflict of interest policy by discussing a possible job with the U.S. Olympic Committee while he was involved with the Nassar investigation.
> As the FBI delayed its probe, Nassar went on to abuse more victims. At one point in Wednesday's hearing, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked all four athletes whether they knew of victims who were abused after the July 2015 disclosure to the FBI.
It certainly seems like this agent was wildly negligent in his duties but I wonder if part of the slow and insufficient response might have been induced by the way in which the CEO handed over the complaint. One of the hallmarks of this case seems to have been large amounts of willful ignorance of the part of USA gymnastics leadership. I wouldn’t be surprised if less than 100% of the full import of the accusations made it across to the FBI from the CEO. Of course the FBI ideally should investigate everything professionally and thoroughly no matter the framing and how powerful the people involved are...
i'm not an FBI agent but it seems reasonable to me that the next thing you do after reading one accusation is pick up the phone and call the accuser. Whether you have 1,100, or 1,000 accusations makes no difference, after reading the first, you pick up the phone.
This makes me very sad. How do these individuals look in the mirror? How do they justify the compensation for their work? Why did they do nothing to protect these girls from a predator?
They won’t investigate child abuse but they will hatch a plot for a soft coup, a domestic terrorist kidnapping plot, or send a dozen agents to investigate a garage door rope.
FBI ignored a tip/report I filed about the corrupted residency program director at one of the biggest (probably the biggest in NY metro area because they accept like 30+ PGY-1 residency spots each year) training hospitals in Brooklyn, NY. It is well known in the medical community that if one wants to get into that residency program, one needs to approach a woman who has a good connection with the program director. Then one must pay up and get accepted in the residency program (from the rumors, I hear that it costs about $60K). I shared FBI the Facebook profile of the woman and the name of the program director along with other detailed information that I knew. It was enough information for any ambitious FBI agent to start investigating and easily catch the corruption (residency application cycle is short; it starts in September and last until about January/Feburary and one can easily track the communications between that lady and the program director). I also told them that they can contact me if they want more details.
I presume they receive thousands of reports like mine, so my tip/report was probably ignored. I wonder how many people are tasked to filter such reports at FBI and how many credible tips slipped through the cracks.
All these stories about power/sex abuse sound so similar. It always seems a ton of people knew and did nothing to stop it. Reading about this guy was like reading about Jimmy Savile or Harvey Weinstein.
Happened to me. Another med student and I (both male) introduced ourselves to to the patient and asked if it would be ok if we observed her fibroid removal surgery. She consented.
Then, after the patient was anesthetize but before surgery, the fellow (subspecialist trainee) doctor told us to palpate her fibroids, and showed us how. Basically, we had to stick our whole hand into her vagina and press it against our other hand on the outside.
I felt really uncomfortable about it, but I did it anyways because I was afraid that if I didn’t the fellow doctor would give us bad marks for not participating/not showing interest.
I guess the lesson is always have someone with you when you are going under. In India, they actively remove all family members when examining patient even when the patient wants them present. Most places will not even allow the husband to be present by his wife for a delivery. I always found that very disturbing.
The FBI needs to begin wearing body cameras too, especially when taking statements. That would have prevented this as well as lot of other failures by the agency.
> FBI Director Chris Wray made no excuses and said the bureau had fired one of the agents who had falsified the details of Maroney's 2015 interview about the abuse.
What kind of logic is this? The people got caught did get caught. It does not indicate all of them got caught.
Also, those people got caught for falsifying one piece of evidence, but it does not mean they only did once in their career. There are just too many things can’t be verified anymore.
If you trust high level law enforcement then you don't know high level law enforcement. They wrote a suicide letter for MLK in the 60s... and 50 years later not much has changed. It's been rotten since day 1 and somehow we keep trusting them to solve their own problems.
