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| Brooklyn's DA Is Unfit for Office Charles Hynes Shows He Does Not Understand the Crime of Child Sexual Abuse Failed Messiah June 12, 2009 http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2009/06/why-brooklyns-da-is-unfit-for-office.html VosIzNeais posted a video interview with Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes done for it by Yair Hoffman. Hoffman, a haredi rabbi, may be familiar to some of you for his reporting on the Agriprocessors issue. Hoffman's video camera found only happy workers, a perfect, sparking clean plant and nothing wrong. A few days later the State of Iowa hit Agriprocessors with over 9300 counts of child labor violations. You can see his transparently pathetic attempt at ambush journalism against Machom Shilo head Rabbi Bar-Hayyim on YouTube, as well. No one should be surprised that Hoffman was less than professional interviewing Hynes. For his part, Hynes made some troubling statements that again show he does not understand the crime of child sexual abuse: 1. Hynes said a "very, very small percentage of priests" in Brooklyn were found to be molesting children.What this last point means is that third party reporting of Catholic clergy abuse was not investigated properly. For example, a secular studies teacher at a Catholic school a child displaying signs of sexual abuse, and sees a priest take that child into a secluded area of the building. The teacher reports the potential abuse to the District Attorney. What you have at this point is a terrified child and parents unaware of the abuse. What you get from that in 10 days is usually nothing. The kid is too afraid to talk and the parents have only the highest regard for the priest. A good investigator would spend time talking to all the parents from that school going back as long as the priest was employed there. She would check previous places of employment and ask neighbors and coworkers about the priest. On television, this takes a few minutes. In real life, it takes weeks of hard police work. Under Hynes' arrangement, that police work is dramatically cut short. That means many priests were prematurely cleared by Hynes. He wants to do the same for haredi rabbis. To understand the rest of Hynes' errors you need to understand how sex abuse prosecution now works. Because the Statute of Limitations ends at a victim's 23rd birthday, almost without exception the only possible prosecutions Hynes could have are for fresh cases of molestation, meaning a child must come forward, tell his parents, be believed, and then the parents must pursue justice. In practice, this rarely happens. Children do not usually come forward. When they do, pressure from their religious community very frequently keeps parents from reporting the abuse to police. This means Hynes only knew about a tiny fraction of cases. Past that, the scandal of the Catholic Church wasn't that every other priest was molesting children – although if that were true it would certainly be a huge scandal. The scandal was the Church knew about pedophile priests but did not report them to police. Instead, the Church transferred them from parish to parish, and those priests kept on molesting children in their care. We know of similar coverups in the haredi community. We also know of molester rabbis who remained in place in their original schools even after credible complaints of sexual abuse. The Markey Bill, also known as the Child Victims Act, is meant to deal with this type of childhood sexual abuse by recognizing the pathology of victims. The CVA extends the Statute of Limitations to better reflect when abuse survivors are well enough to actually come forward. The CVA also opens a one year window where anyone outside the Statute of Limitations up to the age of 53 can sue the pedophile who abused them along with the school or other institution that negligently ignored evidence of abuse. If the CVA had been law 15 years ago, Hynes would have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of lawsuits filed against the Church. Many of them would have been successful. And Hynes would not be able to say there was no scandal. Yair Hoffman could have pressed Hynes on any of these points, but he did not. How much of this has to do with his own ignorance and how much has to do with his own bias is an open question. What Hoffman has proven time and time again is that having a video camera doesn't make you a journalist, and being a rabbi doesn't make you honest. These are lessons VosIzNeais should take to heart. As for Hynes – who also downplayed the widespead problem of haredim refusing to report crimes to police do to mesirah law – he should be voted out of office. I doubt that will happen, though, in what many call America's own third world country – Brooklyn, NY. |
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