Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Reporting suspected abuse

Reuters reports:
United States speedskating coach Jae Su Chun has been placed on administrative leave after officials launched an investigation into his training methods following complaints from athletes.

Nineteen skaters, including five Olympic medalists, filed a grievance complaint about Chun, claiming verbal, physical and psychological abuse, U.S. media reported.

The complaints include accusations that he once slammed a skater against a wall and that he repeatedly insulted female skaters by telling them they were "fat" and that he also forced other skaters to train while they were recovering from injuries.
What did they expect when they hired a Korean skating coach? Was he supposed to immediately adopt American tolerance for fat girls?

Olympic athletes all train while recovering from injuries. Otherwise, injuries would set them back too much. You have to train continually to get to the Olympic level?

Maybe the coach has tyrannical methods that work better in Korea than here. But it is silly to complain about the verbal abuse of calling a female skater fat.

Reuters also reports:
The Boy Scouts of America could face a wave of bad publicity as decades of records of confirmed or alleged child molesters within the U.S. organization are expected to be released in coming weeks. ...

About 1,200 "ineligible volunteer" files dating from 1965 to 1985 are set to be publicly released under a June order by the Oregon Supreme Court, including some already reviewed by the newspaper. ...

The organization said it has maintained an internal "ineligible volunteer" file since at least 1919 to prevent suspected or confirmed child sex abusers from joining or re-entering its ranks. ...

The organization is facing more than 50 pending child sexual abuse cases in 18 states, according to Kelly Clark, another plaintiff attorney in the Oregon case.
The BSA is a private organization that has helped many millions of kids. It seems completely reasonable to me for them to keep their own secret scout blacklist, even if it meant discriminating against gays.

Greedy lawyers will try to squeeze millions of dollars out of the BSA by accusing it of a coverup, just as they have fleeced the Catholic Church and will fleece Penn State University. But the BSA has never stood in the way of anyone making a criminal complaint.

The upshot of these lawsuits is that no organization is going to be able to keep a private blacklist, and all suspicions will have to be reported to the govt. Govt agencies will keep their own blacklist of suspected abusers.

I think that the gay lobby ought to be in the forefront of complaining about these policies, because all gay men are (unfairly) suspected abusers.

I myself got put on one of these govt lists of suspected abusers. There is no due process. California does not even have any procedures for falsely accused men to be removed from the list. In the opinion of the bureaucrats who manage the list, it makes no sense to remove anyone from the list because it is just a list of suspected abusers. Thta is, if an innocent man is falsely accused of abuse, then he still belongs on the list of suspected abusers because the accusation made him a suspect.

State law requires teachers and medicos to report suspected abusers. In one case, a physician turned to an expert to evaluate whether a medical record was indicative of abuse, and the expert said no. The physician was criminally prosecuted for failing to report the suspected abuse. The DA said that he must have suspected abuse, or why else did he ask for expert opinion?

My opinions are in the minority here. This is another way in which the world has gone mad.

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