D.A. Hynes:Against Rabbincal screening

Jewish Week  Intimidation aside, what is your impression about how often rabbis are discouraging people from coming forward when asked for advice?

Hynes: What I’ve said to [Agudath Israel vice president] Chaim Dovid Zwiebel is that his suggestion that rabbis have to screen is wrong for two reasons: One, rabbis have no expertise in this area to determine what reaches a level for reporting, and what he’s doing is putting the rabbis in a very dangerous position; because one of these days a rabbi is going to make a mistake cross the line and tell someone under no circumstances are they to report abuse and they are going to be indicted for obstructing governmental administration. I made it very, very clear to Dovid that was my position.

Do you view this the same as witness tampering or witness intimidation? Are there constitutional issues protecting a rabbi’s advice?

Hynes: You’re changing the fact pattern. Why don’t you stay with my fact pattern? My fact pattern is, a rabbi says under no circumstances should you report this, that’s crossing a line. If a rabbi says mesirah prohibits you from reporting then that’s something I can’t deal with; I can’t  pierce that religious connection.

In fact in the legislation I submitted to state DA’s Association’s legislative committee — which has now been passed on to the executive committee for the summer — specifically says in cases of confession or confidential communication to a religious person, whether a rabbi or a minister that would not require mandatory reporting. Mandatory reporting would be finding out about abuse of a third party. There is no reason why clergy should not be mandatory reporters as far as I’m concerned. Twenty-six states in this country have mandatory requirements, only two of them have clergyman-penitent exception: Remarkably, 24 do not. In New Hampshire and West Virginia, despite the clergy-penitent exception they require mandatory reporting in those cases where sex abuse of a third party is involved. There is no reason you can’t have that here for clergy as well.

You said earlier that rabbis don’t have the judgment to assess cases. Agudath Israel has said they are offering training courses for rabbis.

Hynes: I think he has backed away from that. The danger in that … I don’t think a clergy person has the ability or even should have the authority to do screening. The only thing I can do to get around this is hope I can get support in the legislature to change the mandatory reporting to include members of the clergy.

Agressive police questioning caused false convictions?

Jewish Week by Hella Winston The Jewish Week also spoke to the mother of a boy who attended a class that produced 23 counts of sexual abuse against Jesse Friedman. The mother — who requested anonymity for fear of being “run out of town” by a few people who are “still uber sensitive” about the case, but who said she would allow her taped interview to be shared with the district attorney — told The Jewish Week that she always thought that “this wasn’t exactly right.”

“I would go into the classroom [all the time] and pick my kid up and say ‘ooh, what did you do today on the computer?’ and everything seemed fine,” she continued. “If something had happened, don’t you think the kids would have been upset? They wouldn’t have been sitting at the computer playing games like nothing happened.”

The mother also recounted how she came home one day to find two police officers in her living room. While the officers assured her that they had not yet spoken to her then 11-year-old son, they told her they wanted to question him about the classes. According to the mother, the officers “started to grill him … they hammered him for a while, [asking] him the same question 95 times in different ways. After a while I said, ‘I [almost] wanted to confess to something.’”

While her son “stuck to his guns,” the mother claims she “never believed anything after that interview, because I could see how they could drag stuff out of kids that didn’t happen.”

Effects of False Allegation of Child Abuse on a Family

IPTForensic  ABSTRACT: The personal, clinical, and legal experience of an intact family of four in which which a false allegation of sexual abuse was made by the daughter toward the father was reported.  The family was followed for two years.  The experience destroyed the family and the parents and children all suffered depression, stress, rage, distress, hurt, and alienation.  This case study parallels the available literature which indicates that a false allegation of sexual abuse is destructive and traumatic.

Iran's world-wide terror plans

Rav Eliashiv zt"l What we have lost

More haredim to study in academia

YNet  The Council of Higher Education recently decided to open new study tracks that will allow haredi students to pursue academic degrees in engineering, exact sciences, optometry, banking, architecture and arts.

The reform aims to give the haredi public access to the academia, with the goal of doubling the number of haredi students from 6,000 to 12,000 by 2017. The reform, which will be supported by a budget of some NIS 180 million (about $45 million), was initiated by Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Chair of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg.

Chareidim break silence about child abuse

YNETקשר השתיקה סביב תקיפות מיניות של ילדים חרדים הוא עדיין קונצנזוס הדוק בלב המגזר. ולא שאין חיה כזאת - פדופילים  חרדים פעילים, אלא שבתקשורת ובשיח ככלל, מעדיפים אידיאולוגית שלא לדבר על כך

את המדיניות הזו מכתיבים, איך לא, רבני המגזר – ואילו ההורים שילדיהם הותקפו מינית מעדיפים את שיתוף הפעולה. הם לא מתלוננים במשטרה הן כדי לחסוך את החקירה המשטרתית מילדיהם, והן כדי לתת להם סיכוי להינשא בשידוך ראוי. 

אם לא די בכך, הרי שגם התקשורת החרדית הממוסדת, הכוללת את עיתוני המגזר ותחנות הרדיו החרדיות, שומרות על קשר השתיקה. אלא שזה החל להיסדק לאחרונה עם התקשורת האינטרנטית, שמעזה לעורר שיח במקומות שבהם השמרנות החרדית קפאה

מי שפרץ לראשונה את חומת השתיקה התקשורתית הוא צעיר חרדי בן 21, בשם ישי (ישראל) כהן, העובד כעיתונאי באתר החרדי "כיכר השבת". לפני כחודשיים החל לפרסם סדרת כתבות על פדופילים הפוגעים בילדים בשכונות חרדיות

Who should be mandated to report child abuse?

silive  If enacted, the bill would make every adult resident of South Carolina the equivalent of New York’s mandated reporters, minus, of course, their professional expertise. Granted, some instances of child abuse are so blatant that they’d be apparent to the most benighted layperson. Conceptually, however, child abuse and neglect are imprecise terms, their incidences often susceptible to lively debate among professionals in the field. 

To expect the average person to analyze every potential situation and make a reasonable judgment as to whether child abuse or neglect likely exists is unrealistic; to punish him for wrongly concluding that it doesn’t when, in fact, it actually does is unconscionable.

Making everybody a mandated reporter also invites abuse by those inclined to use the requirement as a pretext to maliciously defame others. 

False accusations of child abuse, particularly child sexual abuse, have already become the nuclear option for desperate combatants in custody and visitation cases. They and similarly unscrupulous types would be further emboldened under a broad reporting mandate.

Unity Government Disbanding Over Dispute on Draft

NYTimes  The national unity government formed in Israel two months ago unraveled Tuesday when the head of the centrist Kadima Party, Shaul Mofaz, announced he was withdrawing because of intractable differences with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party over a proposed universal draft law. 

The broad coalition, which had given Mr. Netanyahu a supermajority of 94 of the Parliament’s 120 members and led Time Magazine to dub him “King of Israel,” has been in turmoil for weeks over the issue of how to draft more ultra-Orthodox Jews as well as Arab citizens into either the military or civilian service. 

Mr. Netanyahu remains extremely popular in Israel, and most here see his re-election as all but assured. The key question is what will become of Kadima, a centrist party that broke away from the Likud in 2005 and has recently lost traction in public polls.

Can We Trust Psychological Research?

Time Magazine  Psychologist Dirk Smeesters does fascinating work, the kind that lends itself to practical, and particularly business, applications. Earlier this year, the Dutch researcher published a study that showed that varying the perspective of advertisements from the third person to the first person, such as making it seem as if we were looking out through the TV through our own eyes, makes people weigh certain information more heavily in their consumer choices. The results appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a top American Psychological Association (APA) journal. Last year, Smeesters published a different study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggesting that even manipulating colors such as blue and red can make us bend one way or another.

 Except that apparently none of it is true. Last month, after being exposed by Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Smeesters acknowledged manipulating his data, an admission that been the subject of fervent discussions in the scientific community. Dr. Smeesters has resigned from his position and his university has asked that the respective papers be retracted from the journals. The whole affair might be written off as one unfortunate case, except that, as Smeesters himself pointed out in his defense in Discover Magazine, the academic atmosphere in the social sciences, and particularly in psychology, effectively encourages such data manipulation to produce “statistically significant” outcomes.[...]\\

Many psychologists are aware of these issues and very concerned about them—in fact, most of the concern about this problem has been raised from within the scholarly community itself. This is how science works, by identifying problems and trying to correct them. Our field needs to change the culture wherein null results are undervalued and scholars should submit their data along with their manuscripts for statistical peer review when trying to get published. And we need to continue to look for ways of moving past “statistical significance” into more sophisticated discussions of how our results may or may not have real world impact. These are problems that can be fixed with greater rigor and open discussion. Without any attempt to do so, however, our field risks becoming little more than opinions with numbers.

Fiduciary relationship - free-will or rape?

I recently received the following letter

I am writing to you about finding sources in halacha regarding sexual abuse. I have an adult client who was molested by an adult from the age of 12-18. This adult man was responsible for her housing and care. She was told by her rabbi that she bears no responsibility even though she sometimes took the initiative. She clearly has emotional and psychological problems and a low I.Q. However she understands right from wrong and knows that after 12 she is an adult. She doesn't understand why she is responsible if she transgresses Shabbos or doesn't say a beracha before she eats but she is not responsible in this area. She definitely is very upset by what she did as well as being told she didn't sin.

 Any suggestions of where I might look to find this information?

 In secular law there is a concept called a fiduciary relationship where one person is dependent on another because of trust or expertise or authority. It accepts that because the relationship is not equal one party will submit to doing things against their free-will and is therefore not held accountable. Thus in the realm of sexual abuse a commanding officer having a sexual relationship with a subordinate would be considered rape rather than an act of free-will.  It sometimes also applies teachers and students, employers and employees as well as rabbi's and congregants. Is there a comparable view in halacha?

All I could find is that the seduction of a child is considered rape by all authorities - except for the Rambam. For an adult the only exemption is if she is a shoteh. Any suggestions?

Recent lawsuit concerning whether in NY State - rabbi-congregant is considered fiduciary relationship
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Update - these are the halachic issues that need clarification:

Questions 1) Tinok shenishba (Shabbos 68a) : If she lives a life sheltered from knowledge of sexuality – has she sinned by participating in sexual activity? In other words is she a tinok shenishba in regards to sexuality? In fact this is even more of an excuse than tinok shenishba in that she has been taught by authority figures that the sexual activity is permitted.

Question 2) yetzer elabasha  (Kesubos 51b) - Even if she knows it is wrong do we say that if she were abused as a child but she enjoys and participates as as 12 year – do we say “at first it was rape but then it becomes willing and therefore she is patur? Would we also say this if she was first abused as a 12 year old? Or is this leniency only for a single act of intercourse but it doesn’t carry over to the future? The Hafla’ah (Panim Yofos Vayikra 20:17) says that she is guilty only if she was warned in between sexual acts - while Kerisos (15a) indicates that each maaseh bi’ah is viewed separately.

Question 3) Does halacha acknowledge that there are authority figures such as a father or rav whose authority or trust overcomes free-will and therefore seduction by an authority figure is considered rape – even for an adult?

Question 4) Does halacha acknowledge that sexual abuse – where there is psychological trauma and strong conflicting feelings that involve guilt and shame – that the victim isn’t viewed as sinning even if at some point he/she initiates the activity?

Pilegesh permitted by rav if wife is sterile

bhol   אב בית הדין הרבני בירושלים, הרב אליהו אברג'יל, בפסק הלכה חדשני: במקרים שבהם אין לגבר ילדים, אם אשתו אינה יכולה   ללדת ילדים, הוא רשאי לקחת פילגש.

בעיתון "ישראל היום" פורסמה הוראה שנכתבה בספרו החדש "דברות אליהו", שם כתב הרב: "הקמת משפחה זו מצווה חשובה.

"אישה שמסרבת או שאינה יכולה להביא ילדים לעולם, ולא מוכנה לתת גט לבעלה, מעכבת אותו מלבנות משפחה ולהמשיך את זרעו. במקרה שכזה הבעל רשאי לקחת לו פילגש ואין עם זה שום בעיה הלכתית. הדבר יסייע לאותם בעלים לקיים את מצוות פרו ורבו גם במחיר של לקיחת פילגש על בסיס קבוע. אותה פילגש יכולה גם לגור יחד עם בני הזוג", כך בספר.

Myerson Get: Rav Sternbuch & Rav Karelitz

Rav Sternbuch and Rav Karelitz - Mayerson Get

Eida Chareidis handcuffs kids to protest Draft