Several months into treatment, Mr. Green admitted that he was sexually attracted to little girls. He quickly added that he had never acted on these fantasies. Dr. Gregory reminded him that it was illegal to download pornographic images of children from the Internet. They both acknowledged that it would be catastrophic to act on the fantasies.
Little Neighbor Girl Pedo Stories
When a sinkhole appears in a wealthy suburban town, it reveals a dark underbelly. A young girl disappears into the sinkhole. A father is accused of rape. An angry woman whips her neighbors into a violent mob. Temperatures climb, and a mass exodus leaves only the worst neighbors behind.
Henry Darger has been dubbed a pedophile and a sadist, a religious fanatic, a loner who worked most of his life as a janitor, and a hoarder who scavenged Chicago's North Side for the detritus--magazines, catalogs, newspapers--that inspired his art. John MacGregor, an eminent Darger scholar, characterized him as "undoubtedly...psychologically a serial killer," while a neighbor remembered him as mumbling and unkempt, possibly "retarded" (that quaint catchall for eccentricity). His gravestone memorializes him simply as a "protector of children."
Nonetheless, Chicago's back alleys erupted with vice. West Madison Street, in particular, was a playground for the city's bottomfeeders: drunks, pedophiles, homosexuals, junkies, whores, hobos. It was also where young Henry Darger and his father lived in a converted carriage house. Elledge sketches the debaucheries Darger regularly witnessed: "Homeless men and boys crowded its streets and milled around purposelessly, prostitutes of both sexes displayed themselves on street corners and along the thoroughfares day and night, and affluent men and women from other neighborhoods slummed there nightly in search of thrills of every variety." The area was notorious enough to attract sociologists interested in interviewing the neighborhood's abundant juvenile delinquents. The Jack Roller, one of the memoirs to emerge from these investigations, explains how street toughs lured homosexuals into parks, hotels, and other secluded places for the purpose of mugging and sometimes beating them.
Elledge's most harrowing chapter traces the physical and sexual horrors in the asylum, everything from a little girl mauled by rats to a man who castrated himself to quell his habitual masturbation. In 1908, a Special Investigating Committee released a report of more than one thousand pages detailing atrocities committed inside the facility. During his interrogation, William Wettle, a caregiver, confessed that a popular method of subduing unruly inmates was choking them--a grisly bit of trivia that illuminates all those strangled children in Darger's art.
Darger and Whillie's relationship was necessarily hindered by the era's social proprieties. They never lived together and could acknowledge their love only in veiled terms. When Whillie died in San Antonio, Texas, in 1959, Darger was not notified until four days after the fact. Still, their relationship was one of the few enduring highlights in Darger's otherwise painful life. The other, of course, was his art, to which he maintained a fierce and ecstatic commitment. Elledge's biography deepens our appreciation for Darger's genius while also clarifying some of the artists' persistent enigmas: "If we're to understand Henry's vision as a novelist and as artist clearly and completely," Elledge writes, "we can't ever think 'girls' when he writes or depicts the 'Vivian girls.' Instead, we have to substitute 'girl-boys,' 'gay boys,' or 'imitation little girls'--which was Henry's term--for 'girls.' "
The arrest of former schoolteacher John Mark Karr in the slaying of child beauty queen JonBent Ramsey launched a flurry of excited stories about pedophiles, child abduction and murder. The cable news stations could hardly hide their glee, and even The New York Times joined in.
Act with thought. Many people with a history of sexually offending are motivated to succeed when they re-enter society. Contrary to conventional wisdom, counseling can be very effective. Re-arrest rates for sexual offenses are actually very low. When given steady support, counseling and supervision they often pose little threat to anyone in the neighborhood.
Parents need to know that Abducted in Plain Sight, a 2017 documentary, is a troubling account of how back in the 1970s, seemingly responsible parents allowed their 12-year-old daughter to be abused and kidnapped while they looked on, oblivious to the threat. The abductor, a neighbor and churchgoer, seduces not just the girl but also the mother and father, spinning a web of lies and deceit, as described by FBI agents, the parents, siblings, and the abuser himself. Expect graphic descriptions of sexual activity, pedophilia, drugging, blackmail, and general mental instability, making this appropriate for older teens and adults only. Language includes "pervert," "penis," and "intercourse." A pedophile drugs a 12-year-old girl with sleeping pills to make her pliant.
ABDUCTED IN PLAIN SIGHT is Skye Borgman's documentary about a bizarre pedophile and predator who made inroads into the religious Mormon community of Pocatello, Idaho. A churchgoing father of five, Bob "B" Berchtold used charm and lies to insinuate himself into the confidence of the Brobergs, a neighboring Mormon family. By story's end, he has had sex with 12-year-old Broberg daughter Jan, abducted her two times, had an eight-month affair with Jan's mother, Mary Ann, and experienced at least one homosexual encounter with Jan's father, Bob. Even after all these events, the parents -- incredibly -- continue to interact with B. In fact, they make bad decisions every time there's a choice to make. Ashamed of their stupidity, bad judgment, and sexual interactions with B, they drop kidnapping charges against him after the FBI catches him across state lines with Jan. It seems they'd rather keep their adulteries secret from the community than put the guy who molested their daughter behind bars. Jan, in the meantime, has been brainwashed by B, unsurprising since B was able to persuade the adult Mary Ann to become his lover and Bob Broberg to have gay sex. Jan professes love for B, having been convinced by him that she's part alien and that she must have his child by the age of 16 in order to produce a savior who will rescue humankind -- a story not unlike those of Jan's religious upbringing, featuring Jesus and Mother Mary. (Jan recognizes the similarity today as an adult, a fact she now can see practically guaranteed her acceptance of B's incredible tale.) If she doesn't complete the mission, B warns, her sister will be kidnapped and her father will be killed. Not until she turns 16 without having given birth and without resulting calamity does she begin to comprehend that she was duped.
In the United States, however, no such reckoning has taken place. Even today the stories of the orphanages are rarely told and barely heard, let alone recognized in any formal way by the government, the public, or the courts. The few times that orphanage abuse cases have been litigated in the US, the courts have remained, with a few exceptions, generally indifferent. Private settlements could be as little as a few thousand dollars. Government bodies have rarely pursued the allegations.
Then, and in subsequent conversations, she told him about the little boy who was thrown out of a fourth-story window by a nun. She told him about a day when the nuns sent her into the fire pit to retrieve a ball and her snow pants caught on fire, and about how weeks later, as the nuns pulled blackened skin off her arms and her legs with tweezers and she cried out in pain, they told her it was happening because she was a real bad girl. She told Widman about a boy who went under the surface of Lake Champlain and did not come up again, and a very sad and very frightening story of a little boy who was electrocuted, whom the nuns made her kiss in his coffin.
As I really got older they used to make me babysit the real little ones in the nursery. There were times when I would see things the nuns were doing to them but did not know where to go to tell someone. Sometimes I would ask them why they did those things and they would say because they were very bad boys or girls.
There were other mysterious disappearances, such as the little girl whom a nun had pushed down the stairs. Irene, one of the lay employees, told Sally to keep the girl awake and get her to talk, but the little girl just moaned. She had a huge bump coming up on her forehead and big, dark bruises around her eyes.
I asked one of the enfants, a woman named Alice Quinton, if she had seen any children die. She told me that one of her friends, an especially strong-willed girl named Evelyne Richard, died after being injected with the drug we now call Thorazine. Quinton especially remembered a little girl called Michelle, who was only about 4 years old, was said to have a brain tumor, and was often bruised and marked from beatings. Michelle cried all the time and was beaten all the time. A year after she arrived, one of the nuns discovered her body, stiff in the little straitjacket that she had been tied into.
In the cold winter light, the basement dining room, once an optimistic yellow, had an uneasy green tinge. Here and there the paint blistered. I tried to picture all the girls sitting here at their little tables, eating their food and keeping their heads down, dreading the consequences if they got sick.
All the characters in the drama moved on, happily or unhappily, to the next events in their lives. All except the children whose deaths the plaintiffs said still haunted them. The boy who was pushed from the window; the boy who went underwater and never came back up; the girl who was thrown down the stairs; poor little Mary Clark who could not cry tears; Marvin Willette, the boy who drowned; and the boy in the coffin who had been burned. 2ff7e9595c
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