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Spotlight (I) (2015)
R | 128 min | Biography, Drama, History | 31 December 2015 (Singapore)
Ratings: 8.4/10 from 2,276 users Metascore: 93/100
Reviews: 22 user | 106 critic | 41 from Metacritic.com
The true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Catholic Church to its core.
Director: Tom McCarthy
Writers: Tom McCarthy (screenplay), Josh Singer (screenplay)
Stars: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams | See full cast and crew »
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/
Carly Simon revealed in a new interview that she was the victim of sexual abuse as a child for years, beginning at age seven. She told People that a family friend, who was in his teens, carried on a physical relationship with her until her mother banned him from the house and sent her to a psychologist.
The singer, now 70, said that she'd told her older sisters about the molestation, but they refused to believe her. "I told them the first year that it was happening, and they thought I was just trying to be one of the bigger girls," Simon said.
When her mother barred the boy from visiting the home – Simon is unclear as to whether or not her mom was aware of the abuse – she did not know how to handle it. "I was devastated because I thought I was in a romance, which I think happens to a lot of girls," she said. "Your libido overpowers everything. You're so libidinous even at the age of nine and ten. And sometimes there's an outlet there. I bet in many more cases than we know about there is."
She said she even tried to protect the boy when she met with a child psychologist. "I wanted to keep it quiet, because I wanted to keep it going," she said.
She wrote about the incident in her memoir, Boys in the Trees, which will come out next week.
Looking back on the incident in her People interview, though, she felt disgusted. "It was heinous," she said. "It changed my view about sex for a long time."
A pedophile struggles to find his place in the world.
Understanding that her job is among the tougher ones a documentarian (much less a first-timer) might bite off, Veronika Liskova begins Daniel's World with a disclaimer: "Pedophile" does not mean "child molester," and the young man she's about to ask us to care about, an admitted pedophile, swears he would never put his desires into action. Moreover, as certain as he is that he'll never act on his attraction to prepubescent boys, 25 year-old Daniel knows that this attraction is no more a matter of choice than homo- or heterosexuality is. The film clearly agrees, and its sympathy toward his attempts to "come out" in a world he knows will be horrified will earn it instant condemnation in many quarters. It will be a challenging sell even at festivals, and arthouse distribution would likely stoke (and perhaps benefit from) controversy. But those who brave it may find themselves rooting for this sad but self-aware young man.
A Czech student of literature, Daniel is seen early on consulting with a sexologist, who shows him a series of photographs and nonjudgmentally confirms what Daniel has been adjusting to for years. So long, in fact, that he has told at least one or two "normal" friends and sought out others who hope to deal openly with similar desires. In one scene, they meet on camera in disguises to discuss their strategies for keeping what goes on in their minds from ever becoming a physical reality.
Daniel and some peers open a can of worms by attempting to make common cause with those falling into other marginalized sexual categories. He meets with the organizer of a gay pride parade, hoping to add one more initial to the growing LBGT acronym. He's clear that he's not fighting for the same kind of acceptance, and that he is reconciled to living a celibate life — "I don't want [actual sex with pre-teens] to become legal...those are absurd thoughts"; even so, the age-old conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia in the imagination of the ignorant makes the parade's organizers understandably uncomfortable.
As for viewers who have managed to set discomfort aside, that task gets harder when Daniel speaks of the six year-old boy — the son of a friend — he's in love with. They see each other once a month or so, in the presence of the boy's parents, and the child knows nothing of his feelings. (Daniel insists he never will.) As Daniel anxiously waits to learn when they'll be able to hang out again, it's hard to conceive any way for this scenario to end happily.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... ilm-843782
U.K. Child Sex Abuse Inquiry to Probe VIP, Political Allegations
BY REUTERS 11/27/15 AT 9:32 AM
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New Zealand high court judge Lowell Goddard arrives at Portcullis House for a pre-appointment hearing after being confirmed as the new chair of the independent inquiry into child sex abuse in London February 11. SUZANNE PLUNKETT/REUTERS
A major British inquiry into decades of child sex abuse will investigate allegations involving "people of prominence" and politicians as well as the Catholic and Anglican Churches, councils and schools, its head said on Friday.
The inquiry, which will last at least five years and cost about 18 million pounds ($27 million), was set up in July 2014 after a series of child sex abuse scandals dating back to the 1970s, some of which have involved celebrities and politicians.
Various institutions have been accused of failing to deal with abuse allegations and, in some cases, of actively covering them up at the behest of powerful establishment figures including senior lawmakers, spies and police officers.
"We will conduct an objective factfinding inquiry into allegations of abuse by people of public prominence associated with Westminster," said the inquiry's chairwoman, New Zealand High Court judge Lowell Goddard.
She added: "The investigation will focus on high-profile allegations of child sexual abuse involving current or former Members of Parliament, senior civil servants, government advisers and members of the intelligence and security agencies. It will consider allegations of cover-up and conspiracy."
The government ordered the massive independent inquiry in July last year following notorious cases such as that of late BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, who abused hundreds of victims for decades, and revelations that 1,400 children had been abused in just one town in northern England.
Goddard highlighted findings this week by the Children's Commissioner for England which suggested as many as 450,000 children were sexually abused between 2012 and 2014 but only one in eight were identified.
"The scale of child sexual abuse in this country requires urgent and careful attention," she said.
Local authorities, residential schools, youth detention centers, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the armed forces and the Foreign Office would be among the institutions which would be investigated.
Some of the 12 separate investigations—a number unprecedented for a UK public inquiry - would take 18 months to complete while others might take years, as criminal proceedings would delay their progress, Goddard added.
Freud was very much part of general opinion in considering the seduction of children as harmless. Freud even sided with perpetrators of seduction. [...] He blamed the children because their sensuousness provoked the sexual assaults by adults: “The last word on the subject of traumatic etiology [is] that the sexual constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculated to provoke sexual experiences of a particular kind namely traumas.”63 His psychoanalytic colleagues often blamed the victim too. Karl Abraham called sexual molestation of his patients by adults “desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution,”64 concluding they had “an abnormal desire for obtaining sexual pleasure, and in consequence of this undergo sexual traumas.”65 Many other psychoanalysts after Freud continued to label patient reports of childhood sexual abuse “wishes.”66[...]
Academics who study human sexuality often agree with Kinsey (“It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched…or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts”),68 his co-author Pomeroy (“incest between adults and younger children can…be a satisfying and enriching experience”),69 sexual historians Edwardes and Masters (“there is no shame in being a…pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied”),70 social worker LeRoy Schultz “[incest can be] a positive, healthy experience”)71 or any of the hundreds of others in anthropology, psychology and history who preach the pro-pedophile agenda in their fields today.72 Scholarly academic journals have even published special issues praising pedophilia as “nurturant” and advocating abolishing all laws against sex with children.73[...]
The record of psychiatry is little better. When I gave an address at the American Psychiatric Association Convention in Philadelphia on the subject “The History of Child Assault,” I gave extensive evidence showing that the majority of children today in the countries for which we have statistics were sexually abused. The audience eventually seemed to admit that what I said could be true. Then they discussed among themselves the following proposition: “If childhood sexual abuse has been so widespread for so long, then perhaps we are wrong, and we shouldn’t be creating a conflict in children’s minds. Since everyone does it, maybe sex between children and adults isn’t wrong at all.” In addition, they asked the question: “What might gentle incest be like? Might it not be OK?” I was not surprised when, a few months later, the American Psychiatric Association classified pedophilia as a disorder only if it bothered the pedophile, professing, according to one dissident psychiatrist, that “a person is no longer a pedophile simply because he molests children…He is a pedophile only if he feels bad or anxious about what he’s doing.” Otherwise, having sex with children can be healthy.74[...]
Massive denial of the origin of humanity’s problems in the traumatic abuse of children is, then, one and the same as the massive denial of the psychological origins of social behavior. They are two sides of the same historical coin. Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears are stored in a separate brain system that remains largely unexplored by science and that is the source of the restaging of these early traumas in social events. Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated traumatic memories are made fully conscious can we understand the waking nightmare that we call history.
The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emot ... f-history/
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