In an inverted system, the guilty go free to continue harming youth and the victims are locked up for “talking”. The system is seen to bend over in protection of the perpetrators against credible victims.
INTRODUCTION
On June 21, 1991, 21-year-old Alisha Jahn Owen was pronounced guilty by a jury in Douglas County, Nebraska, on eight counts of felony perjury. On August 8, 1991, she was sentenced to serve nine to twenty-seven years in prison.
Owen was indicted for telling a grand jury, before which she testified in 1990, that she was sexually abused as a juvenile, by a Nebraska district court judge, by the chief of police of the city of Omaha, by the manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, and others.
Alisha Owen also witnessed, she said, the abuse of other children by figures in Nebraska's political and financial establishment whom she named, among them the publisher of the state's largest newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald.
She testified that she was in a group of Nebraska children who functioned for years as illegal drug couriers, traveling nationwide, for some of Nebraska's wealthiest, most powerful and prominent businessmen.
Two grand juries, one local and one federal, had a mandate to consider these and other charges of child abuse connected with the Franklin Credit Union.
They indicted the victim-witnesses for perjury instead!
"This is unprecedented, probably in the history of the United States," commented Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, a lawyer, psychiatrist and nationally prominent specialist on child abuse, during her visit to Nebraska in December 1990.
“If the children are not telling the truth, particularly if they have been abused, they need help, medical attention. You don't throw them in jail!"
Both grand juries admitted that Paul Bonacci, Alisha Owen and whose testimony extensively corroborated Owen's, had been badly abused. But this was done, they concluded, by persons other than those the young people named.
Bonacci, too, was indicted for perjury. Two other victim-witnesses, whose stories buttressed those of Owen and Bonacci, recanted under immense pressure.
Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci refused to recant. America is suffering an epidemic of child abuse.
“S.O.S. America," a 1990 report from the Washington, D.C.-based Children's Defense Fund (CDF), said that "a survey by the American Association for Protecting Children indicates that 2.2 million children were reported abused, neglected, or both in 1987–a 225 percent increase since 1976, and a 48 percent increase in the previous five years."
CDF and other estimates caution, however, that only one in every five cases of abuse and neglect gets reported. "The dimensions of the abuse are staggering,"
Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, director of the sex offender program at the Connecticut Correctional Institute, told the New York Times in 1990,
"If we saw these same numbers of children suddenly developing some kind of illness, we'd think we had a major epidemic on our hands."
Shocking as the numbers are, the nature of the crimes is more so. Ever more frequently, abuse involves what law enforcement officials refer to as “sadistic, ritualistic" features, or, to speak plainly, satanism.
What the victims of this type of abuse describe is so horrific, that parents, teachers, and even child welfare workers have great difficulty to grasp what they are being told.
The mind recoils from such evil, inflicted on the most innocent of all people, children. In recent months, news media around the country have been full of propaganda to the effect that children who report abuse are just telling what they fantasized, or stories fed to them by adults.
As for satanic or ritualistic abuse, many newspapers declare that it does not even exist, as the New York Village Voice did in a June 1990 article, which attacked “the great ritualistic abuse hoax."
A banner-headline story in the Chicago Tribune of May 17, 1991, “A chilling tale of child abuse no one can prove," gave typical coverage of the debate over whether or not children are being abused by satanists: All nine children tell the same story, a grisly tale of being taken out of school and abused in a blue house.
They name the same culprit, a school administrator who performs satanic rituals as part of his twisted routine.
In the 14 months since the first child came forward, police said they have conducted 150 interviews and cannot substantiate the claims of the children, who range in age from 5 to 9.
Prosecutor Stanley Levco is more blunt: He doesn't believe them, and he plans to publicly clear the accused.