BishopAccountability.org
	Precious Years Were Lost in Mohler Investigation Kansas City Star November 23, 2009 http://www.kansascity.com/340/story/1589492.html The courts will eventually determine what happened on Burrell Mohler Sr.'s rural Bates City farm. But one thing has become abundantly clear as this horrifying story unfolds: The investigation into alleged sexual abuse of children is a decade or more overdue. There is no excuse for the lack of serious investigation of accusations of this nature once they passed beyond the family. Sunday's Kansas City Star said accusations went outside the family as early as 1995. Complaints made their way to legal authorities by 2000. These allegations should have been taken more seriously by state agencies, law enforcement, court and church officials. A distraught father whose son may be among the victims said: "You mean it took them nine years to figure this out?" Experts in sexual abuse, particularly of children, sadly note that the lag time between allegations and serious investigation is not unique to this case. The experts fear that officials still vastly underestimate the difficulty for a child to come forward with abuse or incest accusations. The power that perpetrators have over young victims — their children, relatives or trusted wards — is so great that officials should never simply dismiss such charges. It's extremely difficult for a child to lay allegations at the feet of a trusted adult, someone who in the child's life is supposed to support and protect them from the rest of the world. In the Mohler case, one friend of the accused said to The Star, "Children's minds are very malleable" as an explanation of the allegations. We've heard that before, essentially a blame-the-victim notion that children lie. Incest and sexual abuse only survive in climates of secrecy and denial. As vile as the details of the Mohler case appear, there is a wider lesson in the way it was brushed aside for years. Child sexual abuse is tragically more common than anyone wants to believe. Allegations must never be ignored.
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