sick and other things

[strangelings]

Well, Friday morning at four am I woke up to being violently sick (made it to the bathroom, though) and realized I had food poisoning/or something I'd eaten had a violent disagreement with my stomach.  Which sucked.  I was up for about an hour throwing up- then called Angel, as I knew she'd be up at that hour...

Needless to say, I didn't go to the

Comments

[ra_watch]

It's awful when you know that kids are at risk and/or actually being abused, but there is nowhere for that information to go. I had a situation a few years ago where a woman in a ritually abusive group was sending a friend of mine information about the ritual abuse of several children, which was intended (of course) to leverage my friend back into the group.

We gave that information to the police - phone numbers, names, times, dates, text messages, emails, notes of phone conversations, the lot. The police couldn't understand what we were talking about - organised abuse, ritual abuse - so they didn't do a thing. They presumed that we were crazy and ignored us. I phoned the child abuse unit in the state police force, and they informed me that they couldn't act on the information without it being referred first via a local police station. I had a meeting with a police rep, and he made it clear that without a victim's statement, the police could not act.

I came to realise that the cops are not about 'protecting the innocent' - they are an arm of the criminal justice system, and they act to collect evidence to push a case through the dept of pub prosecutions. That's all. They don't gather intelligence on bad guys and they don't investigate cases that are unlikely to get past a committal hearing. Survivors often see this inaction as evidence of a conspiracy, but it's really just the nature of the police force. They aren't the "thin blue line" that NYPD Blue would have us believe in.

Nobody gathers intelligence on organised forms of child sexual abuse - not child protection, not the police, not the FBI, nobody. That information goes nowhere. Sad but true.