Pound Pup Legacy

Below is a random sample of how a child learns extreme violence in the home.  Most people like to think children who are adopted are saved from such domestic scenes.  [As if adoption prevents future cases of child abuse!]

I believe the reason why people don't think abuse takes place in adoptive families is because no one discusses what happens behind adoptive family doors until it reaches the court house.  [One of the best links that features the cases of adoptees in prison with violent records can be find here:   http://www.amfor.net/penpals/display.cgi.]

So for the sake of "article interest", I thought the two following reports about "domestic violence" prove the United States has much to learn about their own laws and policies on "protection".

Wife admits stabbing husband in chest

By LAURIE MASON
phillyBurbs.com

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-08212007-1395535.html

Just as jury selection was about to begin in her case, a Buckingham woman entered a surprise guilty plea Monday to charges she stabbed her husband in the chest last December.

Lawyers for Ann Marie Albert, 50, of Michener Road had indicated that they planned to mount a battered woman defense. Prosecutors opposed the tactic, saying Albert admitted that her husband never physically abused her.

Bucks County Judge David Heckler was set to rule on the argument when the defense announced the plea Monday afternoon. Albert will be sentenced Wednesday in county court in Doylestown and could serve more than five years in prison.

Police were called to the Albert home about 8:30 p.m. Dec. 13 by the Alberts' 10-year-old son. They found James Albert, 57, bleeding on the floor of an upstairs bedroom “in obvious pain.”

Prosecutors said that Ann Marie Albert admitted stabbing her husband with an 8-inch folding knife during an argument. Prosecutors also said the child witnessed the stabbing.

James Albert suffered lacerations to his liver and diaphragm and internal bleeding. He spent 10 days in the hospital and is still undergoing medical care for his wounds, said Deputy District Attorney Monica Furber.

The couple is separated and the son lives with the father, Furber said.

In court Monday, Max Kramer, one of Albert's defense attorneys, said he planned to call an expert on battered woman's syndrome to the stand.

Although his client concedes that she wasn't physically abused by her husband, the defense can be used when the woman undergoes “emotional battery which causes her to believe that she was in danger of serious bodily injury,” Kramer argued.

Furber disagreed. She said the law is clear that physical violence must be part of the equation.

Although Heckler never got a chance to decide the trial issue, Kramer said he will call an expert on battered woman syndrome to testify at Albert's sentencing.

Kramer also argued to keep the jury from hearing the child's 911 call after the stabbing, saying it is “prejudicial and inflammatory.”

On the 7-minute tape, police said, the boy wept as he described his father's injuries and his mother's demeanor, saying she was “slamming things” and was going to flee the house.

Heckler denied the motion.

Albert, a certified public accountant, trembled and wept before the judge. She pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and related charges.

James Albert watched his wife plead guilty then left the courtroom with prosecutors. Furber described him as “cooperative” with investigators and said he will testify Wednesday at the sentencing.

Ann Marie Albert remains free on bail while awaiting sentencing.

Unless social services is called, domestic violence and emotional abuse can go unreported for decades, if not generations.  Meanwhile, I find it very interesting how the US is trying to define "torture" and "captivity" these days. 

Mental Torture Same as Physical Abuse

IslamOnline.net & News Agencies

CHICAGO — The United States has no point in trying to redefine torture to exclude psychological torture, which appears to inflict the same kind of long-term mental damage as physical abuse, a study released Monday, March 5, said.

"Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological manipulations, humiliating treatment, and forced stress positions, does not seem to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of mental suffering they cause," the study's authors wrote in the journal of the Archives of General Psychiatry, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Researchers who evaluated the mental health of soldiers and civilians tortured during the 1990s Balkan wars found that victims of psychological abuse were just as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression as victims of classic physical torture methods.

They said their analysis of 279 Bosnian, Croatian and Serb torture survivors showed that the individuals who suffered psychological abuse had the same rates of depression, PTSD, and social and work-related problems as others who had endured beatings, burnings, sexual abuse and other forms of physical punishment at the hands of their captors.

They suggested that the trauma is the same, because regardless of the form of aggression, the effect is to create fear or anxiety in the detainee while at the same time removing any form of control from the person in order to create a state of total helplessness.

"Thus, these procedures (psychological torture) do amount to (physical) torture, thereby lending support to their prohibition by international law," the study added.

The study was written by Metin Basoglu, head of trauma studies at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, with help from colleagues at the department of psychiatry at the Clinical Hospital Zvezdara in Belgrade.

US Distinction

The authors of the study said that based on their analysis of the experiences of torture victims from the modern Balkans conflict, the US appears to be drawing a distinction without a difference.

"The distinction between torture and degrading treatment is not only useless, but also dangerous," said Steven Miles, professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in an accompanying editorial in the journal of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

The investigators said their findings undermine moves by the US government to narrow its definition of torture in order to free interrogators to use certain psychological methods aimed at breaking a prisoner's resistance.

In 2003, lawyers for the US Justice Department and a Pentagon working group report on detainee interrogations made the case for a narrow definition of torture that excludes procedures such as blindfolding and hooding, forced nudity, isolation and other psychological manipulations.

The Justice Department memorandum argued that the scope of the term torture should be limited to those acts which could be shown to result in "prolonged mental harm," according to the study.

The study followed allegations of human rights abuses at US detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The trial of terror suspect José Padilla in a US court on suspected terror charges has turned the spotlight on the "psychological torture" practiced by American jailers, who are accused of driving terror suspects insane to the extent that they see their interrogators and torturers as a father-figure.

Padilla himself has claimed he was subjected to sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold, threats of execution, exposure to noxious fumes, and was forced to wear a hood and stand in one position for extended periods of time.

Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones.

Human rights activists said the techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantanamo Bay, the notorious US detention camp in Cuba in which the US is holding hundreds of terror suspects without charge and incommunicado.

Electrocuted, sexually abused and put in a tiny cell flooded with water and human waste are a few but to mention examples of the horrors faced by Iraqi detainees at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison as reported by the American media.

Several US dailies revealed that former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former top US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, gave free reign to US officers in charge of Abu Ghraib to adopt various torture and abuse tactics used at Guantanamo.

I don't dare to pretend I know what happens within the walls of a prison.  However, I know for many, the first taste of prison-life and torture tactics comes from "home".

All one has to do is read how some adoptive parents are "treating" their adoptive children with "attachment disorders".    I challenge any adult to argue the children featured in our Abuse Cases [http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/19469] were NOT victims of trauma and torture.  In fact, in many of the reported cases, the phrase "breaking resistence" should become incredibly sickening and clear in  terms of who is doing the resisting and who is doing the breaking.

If the United States can't take care of its own children, and regulate who can or cannot adopt a child in need of love and safety, how can they ensure anyone is safe from the sort of sadistic abusive power and mental manipulation most people claim to hate?