Friday, January 27, 2006

History of Child Abuse, Neglect and Sexual Abuse/Assault Laws and Cases in Jewish Communities

History of Advocating For Survivors of Sex Crimes From a Jewish Perspective
© (2006) By Vicki Polin


Timeline:

1400
  • History: October 26, 1407, Krakow Accusations. This marks one of the first blood libels in Poland. The Jews tried to defend themselves and were forced to take refuge in the Church of St. Anne, which was surrounded and then set afire. Any children left alive were forcibly baptized.
  • History: 1419 Sarah of Wuerzburg (Bavaria, Germany)  Received a license from Archbishop Johann II von Nassau (1396-1419) to practice medicine, making her one of the few women allowed to do so. Other Jewish women physicians during this age included Sarah La Migresse, Sara de Saint Gilles and Rebekah Zerlin of Frankfort. For the most part, women were limited to helping other women.
  • History: 1490, the first yeshiva (rabbinic seminary) established in Krakow, Poland.
  • History: 1492, Christopher Columbus discovers America. The possibility of his being Jewish is based on the origins of his name being Colon (which was a common Jewish name) and his own mysterious writings. 1492 also marks the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

1500's
  • History: 1501, First black slaves in America brought to Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.
  • History: 1503, Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa.
  • History: 1504, Michelangelo sculpts the David
  • History: 1536, Henry VIII executes second wife, Anne Boleyn.

1600's
Sabbatai Zevi - Cult Leader
  • History: In 1607 the Virginia Colony at Jamestown was the first permanent English colony established in what would become the United States of America.
  • History: In 1619 a Dutch ship brings the first African slaves to British North America.
  • History: 1633, Inquisition forces Galileo (astronomer) to recant his belief in Copernican theory.
  • Case: Case of Sabbatai Zevi. In 1648 he proclaimed himself the Messiah.

1700's
Jacob Frank - Cult Leader
  • History: 1773, The Boston Tea Party.

1853
  • Case / History: Responsa includes a case of a teach accused in one town and ran to another town. Parallel to case of today.  

1860's - 1930's
Zwi Migdal Society
  •  Case of The Zwi Migdal Society; story broke but was forgotten for many years.Thousands of naive, impoverished Jewish girls from eastern Europe were sold by mobsters into sexual slavery. The kidnapping, rape and forced prostitution of young Jewish women lasted from the end of the 1860s until the start of the Second World War.





1874
Mary Ellen Wilson
  • History: Mary Ellen Wilson was a nine-year-old girl from New York, who was being severally abused and neglected by her foster parents. Mary Ellen might have died if it wasn't for a nurse who was working in her neighborhood. The reality of what happened is frightening, Back in 1874 there were NO laws on the books to protect children, yet there were laws on the books to protect animals. The sufferings of Mary Ellen, led to the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first organization of its kind.


1877
  • Organization: The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) and several Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from throughout the country joined together to form the American Humane Association.

1899
  • History: The first Juvenile Court was founded in Cook County (Chicago, IL). By 1920, all but three states had juvenile court legislation.

1904
  • Case of the Kidnapping Chazen
    Case:      Case of The Unnamed Kidnapping Chazen (Cantor); story broke but was forgotten for many years. The Cantor was accused of kidnapping young boys from Europe and bringing them to Toronto, Canada.


1912
  • History: As a result of President Roosevelt's 1909 White House Conference on Children, Congress created the United States Children's Bureau.

1913
  • History: In 1913, Mary Ellen Wilson, attend the American Humane Association's national conference in Rochester, NY, with Etta Wheeler, her long-time advocate. Ms. Wheeler was a guest speaker at the conference. Her keynote address, "The Story of Mary Ellen which started the Child Saving Crusade Throughout the World" was published by the American Humane Association.

1919
  • Legal: The nineteenth amendment was passed giving women in the United States the right to vote.  
    • The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.  Passed June 4, 1919. Ratified August 18, 1920.
1921
  • Legal: Congress passes the Sheppard-Towner Act, which established Children's Bureaus at the state level and promoted maternal-infant health.

1923
  • Legal: Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was first introduced to Congress. The ERA states that "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." Suffragist leader Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman's Party, wrote the ERA in 1923. The ERA was introduced to Congress every year from 1923 to 1972, when it was finally passed as the proposed 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It then needed to receive ratification from 38 states. In 1979, Congress extended the ERA's seven-year time limit for ratification for another three years, but by the amendment's 1982 deadline, only 35 states had ratified it-three states short of the requirement. The ERA has been reintroduced into every session of Congress since 1982.

1944
  • Legal: The Supreme Court of the United States confirmed the state's authority to intervene in family relationships to protect children in Prince v. Massachusetts.

1946
  • Legal: Aid to Dependent Children was added to the Social Security Act.
  • History: Dr. Caffey, a pediatric radiologist in Pittsburgh, published the results of his research showing that subdural hematomas and fractures of the long bones in infants were inconsistent with accidental trauma.

1948
  • History:  May 14, (5 Iyar 5708) Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel Independence Day).  On this day David Ben Gurion declared the founding of the State of Israel. It is celebrated annually on its Hebrew date, and is preceded by Yom Hazikaron, Israel's National Memorial Day.

1952
  • Book: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) was published by the American Psychiatric Association . The term used for traumatic stress disorders was called "Gross stress reaction". It described the aftereffects of previously normal persons who began having symptoms related to intolerable stress.

1956
  • History: Mary Ellen Wilson died in 1956 at the age of 92. Mary Ellen was severely abused as a child. The end result led to the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.


1959
Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
  • Case: Rabbi Moshe Feinstein made a rabbinic decree banning the music of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach in hopes of being able to protect teenage girls and adult women from being assaulted by this alleged serial sexual predator.  Allegations against Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach can be dated back to the early 1950s. This story did not hit the news media until 1998 when Lilith Magazine published an article.  Spiritual leaders, psychotherapists, and others report numerous incidents, from playful propositions to actual sexual contact. Most of the allegations include middle-of-the-night, sexually charged phone calls and unwanted attention or propositions. Others, which have been slower to emerge, relate to sexual molestation. Today many are trying to re-create this offender's image, by creating a cult-like following by recreating history.

1961


1962
  • History: Following a medical symposium the previous year, several physicians headed by Denver physician C. Henry Kempe, published the landmark article The Battered Child Syndrome in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Through the article, Kempe and his colleagues exposed the reality that significant numbers of parents and caretakers batter their children, even to death. The Battered Child Syndrome describes a pattern of child abuse resulting in certain clinical conditions and establishes a medical and psychiatric model of the cause of child abuse. The article marked the development of child abuse as a distinct academic subject. The work is generally regarded as one of the most significant events leading to professional and public awareness of the existence and magnitude of child abuse and neglect in the United States and throughout the world.21
  • History:  In response to The Battered Child, the Children's Bureau held a symposium on child abuse, which produced a recommendation for a model child abuse reporting law.


1963

1964
  • Legal: Passage of Civil Rights Act, which creates The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to enforce the prohibition of employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and national origin.
  • Organization: Prison Research Education Action Project (P.R.E.A.P.) created by Fay Honey Knop. This was the first organization created that addressed the issues relating to sex offenders.  Name was changed to The Safer Society Foundation, Inc. in 1985.

1965
  • History: On July 2, 1965, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) commenced operations.

1966
  • Organization: JANE, one of the country's first abortion counseling services was founded by Heather Booth.
  • History: June 1966, at a luncheon at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., 28 people planned the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW).


1967
  • Legal: 4 states had adopted mandatory reporting laws. The remaining six states adopted voluntary reporting laws. All states now have mandatory reporting laws. Generally, the laws require physicians to report reasonable suspicion of child abuse. Reporting laws, now expanded to include other professionals and voluntary reporting by the public, together with immunity for good faith reporting, are recognized as one of the most significant measures ever taken to protect abused and neglected children. Reporting is recognized as the primary reason for the dramatic increases seen in cases of child abuse and neglect.


1968
  • History: Young feminists protest the Miss America Pageant's objectification of women.
  • Book: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) was published. "Gross stress reaction" was replaced with the diagnosis of "(transient) adjustment disorder of adult life".

1969
  • History: First "speak out" on abortion. The women's liberation movement developed the "speak-out" in response to frequent occasions when women were excluded from testifying on issues that affected their lives because they were not considered to be the "experts." First used to publicize women's abortion experiences, speak-outs were events in which people offered first-person testimony in a public setting, asserting their authority based upon their own experiences. - Gloria Steinem. 
  • History: Barbara Seaman writes letter to Senator Gaylord Nelson about dangers of birth control pill, leads to Senate hearings in 1970
  • Organization: Association for Women in Psychology was co-founded by Phyllis Chesler
  • Orgainzation: New York Radical Feminists was founded by Shulamith Firestone. She is the older sister of Rabbi Tirzah Firestone.
  • Case: Case of List of Abuses at Ner Israel; story broke - Toronto Star (Canada)
  • Case of Wayne Stephen Young (Baltimore, MD); story broke.  Young was Convicted of the murder of Esther Lebowitz, who was a fifth grade student at Bais Yaakov School for Girls in Baltimore, MD. Wayne Young was sentenced to life in prison. .

1970
  • History: Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine others.
  • History: Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band was created by Naomi Weisstein.
  • History: Phyllis Chesler demands reparations for women from American Psychological Association.
  • History: The Feminist Press was founded. - Florence Howe
  • Book: Marriage Agreement by Alix Kates Shulman is published.
  • Peter Yarrow
    Case     of Peter Yarrow - Singer; story breaks in the New York Times, when Yarrow sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl     who came to his hotel room after a concert. He served three months in jail; 11 years later he was pardoned by President Carter.


1971
  • History: First Public Speak-Out On Rape was organized by the New York Radical Feminists. The women's movement was instrumental in bringing attention to the incidence of rape and domestic violence that was being perpetrated against women.
  • History: Ezrat Nashim was created. It grew out of a study group on the status of women in Judaism that formed in the fall of 1971 in the New York Havurah. - Paula Hyman.
  • History: The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) co-founded by Letty Cottin Pogrebin. The Caucus was formed to identify, recruit, train, endorse, and support women seeking office at all levels of government, regardless of party affiliation.
  • Legal: California Court of Appeals recognized the Battered Child Syndrome as a medical diagnosis and a legal syndrome in People v. Jackson.22.

1972
  • History: Chaim Shatan was studying the effects of other kinds of trauma on children. He chaired a roundtable discussion at the IV International Psychoanalytic Forum in New York, comparing delayed survivor reactions in two parent groups: Vietnam veterans and concentration camp inmates, having noted significant symptoms of unresolved mourning in young adults who were children of World War II veterans from 1965-1970.
  • History: Rape crisis workers in Illinois had established 24-hour crisis lines, conducted education and training programs, created thousands of brochures, offered self defense classes, organized and marched in "Take Back the Night" events and devoted thousands of hours to helping victims heal from the devastation of rape.
  • History: Ezrat Nashim, presented the "Call for Change" to the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement on March 14, 1972 and disseminated it to the press.
  • Legal: Congress passes Title IX of the Education Amendment. Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Title IX led to the growth of school athletic facilities and programs for girls and women.
  • History: Ms. Magazine first hit the newstands in January, 1972.
  • Article Published: Post-Vietnam Syndrome, by Chaim Shatan - New York Times (May, 1972)
  • Book: Our Bodies, Ourselves by Nancy Miriam Hawley, was published.

1973
  • History: Children's Division of the American Humane Association testified before a Senate Committee, estimating that 100,00 children were sexually abused each year.
  • History: First National Conference on Jewish Women held in New York City.
  • Legal: The United States Supreme Court legalizes abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision.

1974
  • History: Ann Burgess and Linda Holstrom at Boston City Hospital described the "rape trauma syndrome" noting that the terrifying flashbacks and nightmares seen in these women resembled the traumatic neuroses of war. Susan Brownmiller and other feminist writers and thinkers redefined rape as an act of violence directed at maintaining dominance. In doing so, they placed the act of rape squarely in a political framework of power relationships, laying the groundwork for cross-fertilization with colleagues working with other survivor groups.
  • History: Patty Hearst, age 19, was kidnapped by a terrorist group, while sitting at home with her boyfriend. She was a captive of the group and was physically, sexually, and emotionally tortured.She developed a new persona (dissociation) and a new name, "Tanya" and was caught by the FBI while participating in a bank robbery with the group.
  • Legal: Congress passed landmark legislation in the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA; Public Law 93-273; 42 U.S.C. 5101). The act provides states with funding for the investigation and prevention of child maltreatment, conditioned on states' adoption of mandatory reporting law. The act also conditions funding on reporter immunity, confidentiality, and appointment of guardians ad litem for children. The act also created the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) to serve as an information clearinghouse. In 1978, The Adoption Reform Act was added to CAPTA. In 1984, CAPTA was amended to include medically disabled infants, the reporting of medical neglect and maltreatment in out-of-home care, and the expansion of sexual abuse to include sexual exploitation.
  • Book: Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, by New York Radical Feminists, edited by Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, published by New American Library in 1974.

1975
  • History: Chaim Shatan was studying the effects of other kinds of trauma on children. He presented a paper at the 1975 meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (1975) looking at the delayed impact of war-making, persecution and disaster on children. But there was a great deal of professional resistance to recognizing that previously normal and healthy children could be severely damaged by exposure to psychologically traumatizing events.
  • History: United Nations (UN) holds first World Conference on Women in Mexico City.
  • History: William Niederland, Chaim Shatan and Henry Krystal organized a conference on victimization at Yeshiva University, New York, NY
  • Legal: Rape Victims Emergency Treatment Act passes the Illinois General Assembly and is signed into law.
  • Organization: National Organization of Victim Assistance (NOVA) was founded and other victim-centered groups emerged, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Parents of Murdered Children.
  • Organization: Incest Survivors Resource Network International (ISRNI) created. This is the first organization created by survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Anne-Marie Erikson and her husband Eric Erikson were the founders. This was a Quaker-affiliated organization.
  • Book: Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller.
  • Book: The Politics of Rape: The Victims Perspective by Diana E.H. Russel.
1976
  • History: The first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women was held in Brussels.
  • History: Lilith Magazine was founded by Susan Weidman Schneider

1977
  • History: Women activists from nine community-based rape crisis centers in Illinois gathered to "form a mutual support group...adding strength to any issue such as legislative action, and giving our strength to each other." Searching for a name that reflected the profound social struggle necessary to end the degradation and rape of women, these activists named their group the Illinois Coalition of Women Against Rape (ICWAR). Later changing their name to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
  • History: Jewish Theological Seminary convenes Commission on the Ordination of Women as Rabbis

1978
  • History: Ann Burgess and her colleagues noted that "concern for the victims of sexual assault has become a national priority only during the past five years. In that time, both public awareness of and knowledge about sexual assault and its victims have grown immeasurably".
  • Book: Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest by Sandra Butler was published.

1979
  • History: Lenore Terr published the first of her series of papers and a book on the children of the Chowchilla, California kidnapping which introduced a developmental focus on the effects of trauma.
  • History: Lenore Walker published her landmark study on victims of domestic violence.
  • History: Founding of Drisha Institute, first center for women's advanced study of classical Jewish texts.
  • Unpublished Article: All in the Family: A study of Intra-familial Violence in the Los Angeles Jewish Community, by Betsy Giller and Ellen Goldsmith, unpublished master's thesis, Hebrew Union College and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1979.
  • Case: Rabbi Perry Ian Cohen was fired from Congregation Shaar Shalom (Chomedey, Montreal, Canada) for sexual impropriety.

1980
  • Legal: Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (Public Law 96-272; 42 U.S.C. 420) designed to remedy problems in the foster care system. The act made federal funding for foster care dependent on certain reforms. In 1983, the act was amended to include "reasonable efforts." The reasonable efforts amendment provided for special procedures before removing a child and reunification strategies after removal. Important provisions for case review were also included. The act and its amendment essentially provided fiscal incentives to encourage states to prevent unnecessary foster care placements and to provide children in placement with permanent homes as quickly as possible. The law also gave courts a new oversight role.
  • Article Published: "Battered Women Urged to Save Their Own Lives," B'nai Brith Messenger, Los Angeles, Nov. 21, 1980, p. 31
  • Organization: VOICES In Action, Inc. (Victims of Incest Can Emerge Survivors).  VOICES is one of the first self-help organizations developed to address childhood sexual abuse. Diana Carson was the founder.

1981
  • History: Judith Herman, MD and her colleagues in Boston began to document the effects in adult women of having been sexually abused as children.
  • Legal: Title XX of the Social Security Act was amended to include the Social Services Block Grant to provide child protective services funding to states. This became the major source of state social service funding.

    • Illinois Department of Public Health receives allocation with designation for Rape Crisis and Rape Prevention.
  • Article Published: "Community Denial Prevents Recognition: Alcohol Causing Problems for  Israelis," B'nai Brith Messenger, Los Angeles, May 8, 1981, p. 9.
  • Article Published: "Helping the Abused Jewish Wife or Child," Sh'ma, by Barbara Harris, Oct 16, 1981, 11(219):145.
  • Article Published: Child Abuse Said Worsening, by Charles Hoffman. Jerusalem Post, Nov. 29, 1981.
  • Case of Peter Yarrow - Singer. Yarrow receives presidential pardon after he pled guilty to taking "immoral and improper liberties" (sexual assault) with a 14-year-old girl back in 1970. Peter Yarrow was married to the niece of Democratic Senator Eugene J. McCarthy at the time of the pardon. Yarrow served three months of a one- to three-year prison sentence.

1982
  • History: Ratification period for ERA ends and the ERA expires, three states short of ratification.
  • Book: Father-Daughter Incest by Judith Lewis Herman was published.
  • Book: Rape in Marriage by Diana E.Russel was first published

1983
  • Legal: Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act is signed into law, revising Illinois rape and incest statutes.
  • Legal: Illinois Confidentiality of Statements Made to Rape Crisis Personnel grants absolute privilege to sexual assault victims.
  • Book: I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton was published.
  • Article Published: "Today, The Silent Scream," by D'vora Ben Shaul, Jerusalem Post, July 1, 1983, p. 9.
  • Article Published: "Rape, Incest, Taboo Topics In The Orthodox Community," by Lisa Schiffren, The Jewish Week and American Examiner, August 23, 1983.
  • Case: Allegations made against Rabbi Matis Weinberg, Yeshivat Kerem, Santa Clara, California. This (case never made it to the news media until 2003.

1984
  • Legal: Federal Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) passed Congress, promising future funding for victim services.
    • Passage of the Illinois Violent Crime Victims Assistance Act made funds available for increased counseling and advocacy with victims of sexual assault. Rape crisis centers hired full-time advocates and 16 centers established specialized counseling services for children.
  • Case of Eugene Aronin
    Organization: VOICES In Action, Inc. (Victims of Incest Can Emerge Survivors) moves to Chicago. VOICES is one of the first self-help organizations developed to address childhood sexual abuse.
  • Case of Eugene Loub Aronin (AKA: Gene Aronin, Eugene Aronin), School Counselor/Teacher; story broke - The Texas Record.
  • Case of Michael Ashbal, Hebrew Academy Teacher; story broke - Miami Herald
Dr. Rabbi Avrohom Mondrowitz
  • Case of Rabbi Melvin Teitelbaum (Charges Dismissed); story broke - United Press International

1985
  • Article Published: Sexual Offenses Redefined, by Bar-Natan, Ya'acov. Israel Scene, 1988, 10(5):9.

  • Organization: Self-Help Group For Jewish Survivors: VOICES In Action, Inc. creates the first Special Interest Group (SIG) for Jewish Survivors of childhood Sexual Abuse. This basically was a pen pal group using snail mail. Vicki Polin developes resources and referals for survivors on an international level.
  • Case of Rabbi Marc Gafni
    Case of Rabbi Ben Zion Sobel; story first broke in 1985, yet was never made public until 2006.
  • Case of Rabbi Isadore Trachtman; no news media attention, yet everyone in Chicago knew about this case - court documents

1986
  • Legal: Congress passed the Child Abuse Victims' Rights Act, which gave a civil damage claim to child victims of violations of federal sexual exploitation law.
  • Article Published: The Bond Abused: A Survivor of Incest Breaks Silence, Sharon Lowenstein. Moment, 02:2, January/February, 1986.

1987
  • Article Published: "Beyond Inclusion: Redefining the Jewish Family," by Marcia Cohn Spiegel. Genesis, Autumn, 1987. (describes violence and addiction in  Jewish families and our denial of problem).
  • Organization: Justice For Children was founded by former Harris County, Texas prosecutor, Randy Burton.
  • rabbi Ephraim Bryks
    Case     The board at Herzlia-Adas Yeshurun had hearings relating to the allegations made of sex crimes committed by Rabbi Ephraim Bryks. Their attempt to deal with the allegations themselves was disastrous.
  • Case of Rabbi Ephraim Bryks. In 1987, the Winnipeg Council of Rabbis wrote a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Post & News alleging that Rabbi Bryks plagiarized several articles in his Weekly Torah commentaries from a book by Ottawa Rabbi Reuven Bulka's called Torah Therapy. Rabbi Bryks' lawyer threatened the newspaper with a lawsuit if the letter were published. It was never printed.

1988
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed prohibiting polygraph examination of sexual assault victims.
  • Legal: Illinois - Hearsay Exception is granted to child sexual assault victims under the age of 13.
  • Organization: Agunah, Inc. and GET founded in Brooklyn, NY
  • Article Published: The Abuse Child, by Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz. Halakhic Insights." Ten Da'at, Sivan 5748 (Spring 1988), vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 11-12.
  • Article Published: The Last Taboo: Dare we Talk about Incest?, by Marcia Cohn Spiegel. Lilith, #20, Summer, 1988.
  • Article Published: "A Stumbling Block Before the Blind: Sexual Exploitation in Pastoral Counseling, Rachel Adler and Arthur Gross Schaefer. CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Spring 1993, pp.13-54. Summer 1995, pp. 75-79.)
  • Article Published: Child Abuse, by Gertrude Conrad and Janet Cohen Hurwitz, Hadassah, 1988, 69(8): 26.
  • Article Published: identifying the Abused Child: The Role of Day School Educators, by David Pelcovitz. Ten Da'at, 1988, vol. 2, pp. 9-10.
  • Book: The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse was first published.  The book written by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.
  • Book: Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest  by Mike Lew was first published.
  • Book: Outgrowing the Pain: A Book for and About Adults Abused As Children by Eliana Gil was published.
  • Case of Rabbi Ephraim Bryks. First known investigation of Rabbi Bryks regarding inappropriate behavior with children conducted by Winnipeg Child and Family Services. There would be further investigations by investigative journalists and the Winnipeg police over the next decade. The police investigation remains open to this day and involves several allegations of criminal conduct against multiple children. There is no statue of limitations in Canada on sex crimes against children. Rabbi Bryks initiated libel lawsuits against the CBC and CNN networks as well as against several investigative journalists personally in both Canada and the US. Rabbi Bryks abandoned his lawsuit in Canada and his US lawsuit was dismissed on technical grounds. Rabbi Bryks left Canada in 1990 and has not cooperated with the police.

1989
  • Article Published: "Abused Women do not Make Choices" by Marcia Cohn Spiegel . Genesis, Spring, 1989.
  • Organization: Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) was founded by Barbara Blaine, MSW, JD.  This was the first organization created to address clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

1990
  • History: First issue of BRIDGES: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and our Friends was published. Created by Ruth Atkin, Elly Bulkin, Rita Falbel, Clare Kinberg, Adrienne Rich.
  • Organization: Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI) was formed.
  • Article Published: Confronting Sexual Abuse in Jewish Families," Sharon Lowenstein. Moment, 15:2, Apr-90, 48-53.
  • Book: What Lisa Knew: The Truth and Lies of the Steinberg Case, by J. Johnson. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1990.
Case of Rabbi Aron B. Tendler
  • Case of Rabbi Ephraim Bryks.  Rabbi Bryks left Canada after serious allegations of sexual abuse were made against him.  There is no statue of limitations in Canada on sex crimes against children.  This story originally broke in 1988. To this day has refused to cooperate with Canadian police.
  • Case of Rabbi Aron Boruch Tendler. Replaced as principal of the girls Yeshiva University Los Angeles after allegations were made that he molested teenage girls. There is no news media reporting of this case until 2006.

1991
  • History: Reporter Nina Totenberg breaks story of Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, sparking three days of Senate hearings.
  • Legal: Congress passed the Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990, aimed at improving the investigation and prosecution of child abuse cases.
  • Legal: Illinois - Civil Statute of Limitations for Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse becomes law.
  • Article Published: Healing Words, An interview with Laura Davis, child abuse survivor, by Liz Galst. The Advocate, Oct. 22, 1991, p. 87.
  • Article Published: Jewish Women Talk About Surviving Incest, Bridges, Spring 1991, 2 (1): 26-34.
  • Article Published: Battling Violence in Israeli Society, by Rena Kronenthal,  Na'amat Woman, Nov.-Dec. 1991, pp. 5-7
  • Article Published / Proposal: The Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Abuse of Children, by Rabbi Mark Dratch. Proposal submitted to "The R.C.A. Roundtable," Nisan 5752.
  • Article Published: The Plague of Child Abuse, by Ruth Ebenstein. Jerusalem Report, Nov. 21, 1991, II(5):18.
  • Article Published: Physical and Sexual Violence by Husbands as a Reason for Imposing a Divorce in Jewish Law, by Mordechai Frishtik. The Jewish Law Annual, 1991, v9, p. 145.
  • Article Published: Forgiving God: An Incest Survivor's Struggle, by Chaya Sarah Sadeh, Neshama, Winter 1991, p.1.
  • Book: Rape and Rape Survivors in Israel, by Esther Eilam (translated by Sharon Ne'eman), in Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, edited by Barbara Swirksi and Marilyn P. Safir, New York: Pergamon Press, 1991, pp. 312-318.
  • Case of Shimon Rosen; no story written. Information from sex offender registry. 

 1992
  • Legal: Illinois: Citizens vote "yes" for the Illinois Constitutional Amendment for Victims Rights.
  • Article Published: Physical Violence by Parents against their Children in Jewish History and Jewish Law, by Mordechai Frishtik. The Jewish Law Annual. 1992, v10, p. 79.
  • Letter to the Editor: Reporting Child Abuse by Mark Dratch, The Globe and Mall (Canada).
  • Case of Robert Taylor, former board member Temple Beth Emet ; story breaks - Los Angeles Times.

1993
  • History: Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes the first Jewish woman to be appointed to the US Supreme Court.
  • Legal: As part of the Omnibus Budget and Reconciliation Act, Congress provided funding for state courts to assess the impact of Public Law 96-272 on foster care proceedings, to study the handling of child protection cases, and to develop a plan for improvement. Funds were made available to states through a grant program called the State Court Improvement Program. The program was the impetus behind a nationwide movement to improve court practice in dependency cases.
  • Organization: One Voice: The National Alliance for Abuse Awareness was founded by Sherry Quirk, Esq., and 1958 Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur. One Voice was a 501-c-3 non-profit.
  • Article Published: Rabbinic Sexual Misconduct: Another View, by by Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer. Rabbinics Today, Dec. 1993, 2(3), p. 3-4.
  • Article Published: Surviving Incest in a Holocaust Family, by Lilith Goldberg. Lilith, Winter 1993, 18:1, pp.20-23.
  • Article Published: Survery Finds 70% of Women Rabbis Sexually Harassed, by Jennifer R. Cowan. Moment, Oct. 1993, 18:5, pp. 34-37.
  • Article Published: Rape crisis: Development of a center in an Israeli hospital. Special Double Issue: An international perspective on social work in health care, by N. Edlis. Social Work in Health Care, 18, 169-178.
  • Article Published: Rape on Kibbutz, by Tamar Gozansky. Lilith, Spring 1993, 18(1): 16-17.
  • Article Published: Jews Begin to Address Allegations of Sexual Misconduct by Rabbis, by Andrea Heiman, Andrea. Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1993, B4.
Rabbi Eliezer Eisgrau
  • Article Published: A Model Child Abuse Prevention Program, by S. Jaffe. Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Winter 1991-2, pp. 114-122.
  • Article Published: Yesterday's Victims: Today's Perpetrators? by Mark Levine, Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1993-94, 40(4): 11-16.
  • Book: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, by Judith Herman was first published.
  • Case of Rabbi Eliezer Eisgrau. Allegations of childhood sexual abuse were disclosed to Aviva Weisbord. Rabbi Eisgrau is currently the prinicipal of the Torah Academey in Baltimore, MD.  The case was kept quiet until 2004 when Levi Ford reported it on his blog.
  • Case of Michael Scott Wheeler; story breaks - The Arizona Daily Star

1994
  • Legal: Passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act by Congress and signed into law.

  • Organization: The American Coalition for Abuse Awareness, a legislative lobbying group, was founded by Sherry Quirk. The ACAA was a 501-c-4 organization.

  • Article Published: Common Coping Mechanisms Used by Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, by Vicki Polin and Gail Roy.

  • Article Published: Common Symptoms of Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, by Vicki Polin and Gail Roy.

  • Artilce Published: What's Behind Rabbi's Touch: When a kiss results in a violation of trust, by Phil Jacobs. Detroit Jewish News, July 8, 1994, p. 1.

  • Article Published: Our Silent Seasons" A Ceremony of Healing From Sexual Abuse, by Leila Gal Berner "in Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones by Debra Orenstein, editor, Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights, 1994, pp. 121-136.

  • Article Published: Breaking the Silence: Rabbinic Sexual Misconduct, by Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer. Sh'ma, April 1994, 24(473).

  • Article Published: Combating Clergy Sexual Misconduct, Risk Management, by Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer. May 1994.

  • Article Published: Rabbi Sexual Misconduct: Crying out for a Communal Response, Comment & Analysis, Fall, 1994.

  • Documentary: Unorthodox Conduct" airs regarding the case against Rabbi Ephriam Bryks.

    • Produced in 1994 by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Ran twice nationally and twice on local affiliate. Run on the CNN Headline News network. Nomminated for several and won at least one major journalism award (The New York Festivals' 1994 International TV Programming and Promotion Awards - bronze medal news documentary/special). Most extensive and expensiv.e journalistic investigation in this area (reprortedly over $25,000 spent producing).

  • Case of Dr. Rabbi Samuel Mendelowitz; story breaks - The Record (Bergen County, NJ)

1995
  • Web Page: David Baldwin's Trauma Information Pages begins. The focus is on Traumatic-Stress, PTSD and Dissociation.

  • Book: Sexual Abuse in Nine North American Cultures: Treatment and Prevention, edited by Lisa Fontes. Chapter: Jews and Sexual Child Abuse, Joan Featherman, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995.

  • Case of Rabbi Yehudah Friedlander; story breaks - New York Times

  • Case of Rabbi Israel Grunwald; story breaks - New York Times

  • Case of Cantor Mark Horowitz; story breaks - The Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY)

1996
  • Article Published: Rabbinical Seminaries Offer Scant Training on Sexual Ethics, by Debra Nussbaum Cohen.  Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, 74:178, Sept. 20, 1996, p. 3.

  • Article Published: "Spirituality for Survival: Jewish Women Recovering from Abuse," by Marcia Cohn Spiegel . Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Fall, 1996 12(2):121-137.

  • Article Published: "Help I'm Burnt Out!  Vicarious Victimization, Secondary Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Compassion Fatigue", by Vicki Polin

  • Article Published: Too Soft on Rape? Do judges go easy on rapists, by Janine Zacharia, "Jerusalem Report, Feb. 8, 1996.

  • Series of Articles: JTA series by Debra Nussbaum Cohen

    • Rabbinic sexual misconduct -- breaching a sacred trust

    • Critics push for stricter codes for handling sexual misconduct - Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, 74:178, Sept. 20, 1996, p. 1-3

      • Also appeared as "Rabbinic Misconduct; Sexual Exploitation by some Spiritual Leaders Raises the Question: Are there really rules or is it an old boys network," Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Oct. 18, 1996, p. 10-12.
    • Victims of rabbinic sex abuse suffer pain of communal denial

    • Conspiracy of silence' fuels rabbis' sexual misdeeds

    • When Rabbis Go Astray: The dilemma for single rabbis; To date or not to date members
  • Organization: Founding of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA)

  • Case of Rabbi Arnold Fink
    Web Page: Jim Hopper. PhD creates his web page on Male Survivors of sexual violence.

  • Case of Lawrence J. Cohen, Kindergarten Teacher; story breaks - NJ Star-Ledger

  • Case of Rabbi Gershon Freidlin; story breaks - The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)

  • Case of Rabbi Robert Kirschner; story breaks - Jewish Bulletin (Northern California)

  • Case of Rabbi Arnold Fink; story breaks - JTA

1997
  • Legal: In 1997, Congress Passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA; Public Law 105-89). ASFA represents the most significant change in federal child welfare law since the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. The act includes provisions for legal representation, state funding of child welfare and adoption, and state performance requirements. In general, ASFA is intended to promote primacy of child safety and timely decisions while clarifying "reasonable efforts" and continuing family preservation. ASFA also includes continuation funding for court improvement.23
  • Legal: Illinois - Sex Offender Management Board created by Illinois General Assembly.
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed allowing a defendant's previous victims to testify about defendant's "prior bad acts," whether reported or not.
  • Book: The 1997 Chicagoland Area Sexual Abuse Resource Guide for Care Providers and Survivors, by Vicki Polin was published.
  • Aricle Published: Child Abuse in Israel -- Focus on Issues: Israeli Programs Help Families Overcome Scourge of Child Abuse, by Michele Chabin. news release from Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jan. 7, 1998.
  • Organization: One Voice and ACAA merged.
  • Organization: The Awareness Center opens its doors in Chicago , IL (Rogers Park) as a holistic counseling - /educational center, specializing in sexual violence. In 1999 the co-operative begins to transform into a non-profit organization called  The Awareness Center, Inc. (the first international organization that addresses sexual violence in Jewish communities).
  • Case of Rabbi Louis Brenner (AKA: Rabbi Lipa Brenner); story originally breaks in the New York Law Journal. Brenner was convicted of child molestation. The original charges included 14 counts of sodomy, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child. He agreed to plead guilty to one count of sodomy in the third degree, a Class E felony, in exchange for a sentence of five years' probation.  Prosecutors said Brenner had sexual contact with a youth he met in the bathroom of the temple they both attended. The molestations allegedly took place over a three-year period that ended in 1995 when the victim was 15 years old.
  • Case of James A. Cohen, Counselor for a Jewish Youth Group Bus Trip Around the USA; story breaks - Chicago Tribune
  • Case of Rabbi Sidney Goldenberg; story breaks - Jewish Bulletin of Northern California.
  • Case of Cantor Stewart Friedman; story breaks - Canadian Press Newswire.
  • Case of Rabbi Don Well; story breaks - Daily News (New York)

 1998
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed which makes giving a person a "date rape drug" before sexually assaulting her/him an aggravating factor to the crime.
  • Article Published: A Paradoxical Legacy: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's Shadow Side, by Sara Blustain, Lilith, Spring 1998, 23(1), pp. 10-17,"
  • Article Published: Sex, Power and Our Rabbis: Readers Respond to 'Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's Shadow Side,  Lilith, Summer 1998, pp. 12-16.
  • Article Published: Sibling Incest, Madness and the 'Jews', by Sander L. Gilman. Jewish Social Studies. Winter 1998, 4(2): 157-179.
  • Case of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach; story breaks in Lilith Magazine.Allegations of sexual misconduct against Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach can be dated back to the 1960's. Spiritual leaders, psychotherapists, and others report numerous incidents, from playful propositions to actual sexual contact. Most of the allegations include middle-of-the-night, sexually charged phone calls and unwanted attention or propositions. Others, which have been slower to emerge, relate to sexual molestation.
  • Case of Rabbi Ze'ev Kopolevitch and Netiv Meir Yeshiva High School; story breaks - Jerusalem Post
  • Case of Rabbi Perry Ian Cohen; story breaks - Canadian Jewish News
  • Case of Rabbi Mark A. Golub; story breaks - Daily Press (Newport News, VA)
  • Case of Rabbi Yaakov Weiner breaks. (incident report)
  • Case of Rabbi Jeremy Hershy Worch; story breaks of questionable behavior (newer allegations were also made in 2004). - News-Gazette (Champaign, IL)
  • Case of Rabbi Max Zucker; story breaks - Dallas Morning News

1999
  • Legal: Illinois: Law is passed to extend the criminal statue of limitations in sexual assault cases of an adult victim to ten years past the time of the rape and ten years past the age of 18 for minor victims.
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed creating pilot Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner programs in four Illinois hospitals.
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed that allows a victim of sexual assault or sexual abuse to request that the State's Attorney file a petition to have the court records of the case sealed.
  • Organization: Concept of The Awareness Center, Inc. developes. Vicki Polin begins to transform her web page into The Awareness Center's current site, which addresses sexual abuse in Jewish communities.
  • Article Published: Israel's Miss World Speaks Out, Alleges She Was Raped, by Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 15, 1999, pp. A13-14.
  • Case of Simcha Adler, Counselor; story broke - New York Post
  • Case of Samuel S. Aster, Music Teacher/College Professor; story breaks - New York Times
  • Case of Rabbi Arthur Charles Shalman; story breaks - The Buffalo News

2000
  • Legal: Illinois - Law is passed permitting minor sexual assault victims 13 through 17 years to consent to the release of her or his evidence collection kit to be analyzed for evidence for prosecution.
  • Organization: One Voice merged with Justice For Children.
  • Case of Yisrael Abadi, Teacher; story breaks - Jerusalem Post
  • Case of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Brizel, story breaks originally breaks in Haaretz (Israel). Rabbi Brizel was accused of molesting several male children. Allegations were made of a cover up. Brizel family are the founders of the "Modesty Squad" also known as the "tznius patrol". A group of individuals who organized imposes their moral order on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel.
  • Case of Rabbi Solomon Hafner; story breaks - New York Post
  • Case of Rabbi Steven Kaplan; story breaks - The New Brunswick Telegraph Journal
  • Case of Rabbi Baruch Lanner; story breaks - New York Jewish Week
  • Case of Meyer Miller, kosher butcher; story breaks - Chicago Jewish News
  • Case of Ari Sorkin; youth director; story breaks - Jewish Exponent
  • Case of Rabbi Ze'ev Sultanovitch; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Rabbi Tzvi Wainhaus; story breaks - Jewish Image Magazine
2001

 2002

  • Article Published: "Schools Try To Prep For Sexual Abuse" in the Baltimore Jewish Times regarding the case of Adam Theodore Rubin, former teacher and coach
  • Book: Shine the Light: Sexual Abuse and Healing in the Jewish Community by Rachel Lev was published.
  • Book: I Thought We'd Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation, by Laura Davis.  New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
  • Case of David Carl Arndt, MD; story breaks - NBC News
  • Case of Jerrry Brauner; no story in the news media - NY State Sex Offender Registry
  • Case of Larry Cohen - Soccer Coach; story breaks - Oregonian
  • Case of Rabbi Richard Marcovitz; story breaks - KOCO-TV Oklahoma
  • Case of Rabbi Juda Mintz; story breaks - Newday
  • Case of Cantor Howard Nevison; story breaks - Philadelphia Inquirer
  • Case of Rabbi Mordecai Tendler; story breaks - Luke Ford's Blog
  • Case of Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Oratz; no story in the news media. Information from the state sex offender registry.
  • Case of Rabbi Michael Ozair; story breaks - Jewish Journal of Orange
  • Case of Cantor Michael Segelstein; story breaks - The Las Vegas Sun
  • Case of Robert Sternberg; no story written - State Sex Offender Registry
  • Case of Tel Aviv Arts School ; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Cantor Phillip Harold Wittlin; story breaks - Jewish Exponent

2003
  • History: Rabbi Ephraim Bryks was asked not to speak in Des Moines, IA after a Call To Action was created by The Awareness Center, Inc.  "Rabbi's visit canceled amid abuse allegations", Des Moines Register (11/14/2003)
  • Organization: The Awareness Center receives its federal non-profit status with the IRS.
  • Conference: Jewish Women International's First International Conference - Pursuing Truth, Justice and Righteousness.  Lost in the Shuffle: Jewish Survivors of Sexual Victimization. Vicki Polin and Michael Salamon
  • Article Published: Confronting Abuse In The Orthodox Community by Rabbi Yosef Blau, Nefesh News, 7:9, July 2003).
  • Article Published: Rabbi's Odyssey Reflects Struggle on Sexual Abuse by Alan Cooperman. Washington Post. Story about the case of Sidney I. Goldenberg.
  • Article Published: Legislators reject bill requiring priests to break seal of Confession. by Henrietta Gomes. Catholic Standard
  • Article Published: Clergy as Mandated Reporters by Vicki Polin.  Testimony was also provided in the senate hearing, Annapolis, MD.
  • Article Published: When a Family Member Molests: Reality, Conflict & the Need for Support, by Vicki Polin, Michael Salamon and Na'ama Yehuda.  Many Voices
  • Article Published: Soul Searching: Sexual Abuse, Cults, and Missionaries by Vicki Polin and Na'ama Yehuda. The Awareness Center
  • Case of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner; story breaks in Haaretz (Israel).  Two women accused the rabbi of creating emotionally intimate relationships with them. These relationships included his expressions of his love for them during regular late-night phone conversations, extracting details from them of their sexuality and promoting an unhealthy emotional dependence on him.
  • Case of Rabbi Aryeh Blaut (AKA: Louis Blaut, Louis Steven Blaut, Louis A. Blaut, Louis S. Blaut) - No article ever written regarding this convicted sex offender. Rabbi Blaut is the past principal of the Seattle Hebrew Academy.
  • Case of Rabbi Yitzchak Cohen; story breaks - New York Jewish Week
  • Case of Eric Dorfner, BBYO Volunteer; ; story breaks - Burlington County Times
  • Case: Washington Post article published on Rabbi Sidney Goldenberg
  • Case of Rabbi Ephraim Goldberg; story breaks - South Florida Sun-Sentinel
  • Case of the Jewish School in Manchester, England; story breaks - Totally Jewish
  • Case of Cantor Joel Gordon; story breaks - JTA
  • Case of Rabbi Israel Kestenbaum; story breaks - Associated Press
  • Case of Rabbi Yona Metzger; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Cantor Robert Shapiro; story breaks - The Patriot Ledger
  • Case of Rabbi Mordecai Tendler; story breaks - Luke Ford
  • Case of Howard Marc Watzman, MD; story breaks - Associated Press
  • Case of Rabbi Matis Weinberg; story breaks - Yeshiva University Commentator
  • Case of Yeedle Werdyger - Chassidic Singer; story breaks - Bambili
  • Case of Moshe Meshi Zahav; story breaks - Bambili News

2004
  • History
    • The Awareness Center issued a "call to action" against efforts to rename an Upper West Side street Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach Way.  The call for action was successful and the application for naming the street was withdrawn.
  • Conference: JOFA 's 5th Annual International Conference. Addresses sexual violence in Jewish communities.
    • "Shattering the Silence: Childhood Sexual Abuse," Vicki Polin and Michael Salamon.
    • "The Politics of Gender in Confronting an Abusive Rabbi," Judy Klitsner.
    • "When Authority Breaks Down: The Abuse of Power," Rabbis Yosef Blau and Mark Dratch.
  • Book: Victims No Longer (Second Edition) by Mike Lew. The Classic Guide for Men Recovering from Child Sexual Abuse
  • Article Published: Remembering To Exhale by Vicki Polin. Plain Views: A Publication of the HealthCare Chaplaincy.
  • Article Published: Facing A Mixed Legacy - First Carlebach conference to grapple with issue of abuse head on; opposition to street naming. New York Jewish Week. Regarding the Call To Action by The Awareness Center not to have a street named after alleged sex offender - Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.  
  • Article Published: Local Activists Hit Orthodox Feminist Conference. Baltimore Jewish Times.
  • Case of Harold Bloom, Humanities and English Professor at Yale Univeristy; story breaks - Yale Daily News
  • Case of Rami "Eli" Buchnik, Teacher Youth Instructor and Gym Coach; story broke - Haaretz
  • Case of Lieutenant Colonel Eli Bunbut, Israel Defense Force; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Rabbi Eliezer Eisgrau; story originally broke on a blog by Levi Ford. Rabbi Eisgrau has been accused of physically abusing and sexually assaulting one of his children. There have also been allegations that two families were "run out of Baltimore" because they wanted to go to secular legal authorities to deal with the accusations of child abuse)
  • Case of Rabbi Benyamin Yaakov Fleischman; court documents - No story ever written.
  • Case of Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg; story breaks - Star Tribune (St. Paul, MN)
  • Case of Rabbi Michael Mayersohn; story breaks - JTA
  • Case of Rabbi Eliyahu Tzabari; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Rabbi Nachman Weisfeld; story breaks - Haaretz
  • Case of Adam Wexler - Musician ; story breaks - MSN News (Hebrew)
  • Case of Rabbi Jeremy Hershy Worch; story breaks (past and current allegations) - Luke Ford

2005
  • Book: Sex Maniac by Sonia Pressman Fuentes published.
  • Article Published: Defrocked rabbi's Jerusalem lecture cancelled after threats, by Daphna Berman. Regarding the case of Rabbi Mordecai Tendler.
  • Article Published: No charges expected against rabbi - Dateline' reaction one of sadness, by Eric Fingerhut. Regarding the case of Rabbi David Kaye. Washington Jewish Week.
  • Article Published: Sexual Abuse in the Jewish Community by Carrie Devorah. The Jewish magazine.
  • Article Published: Bullying, Intimidation, Extortion Attempts: Advocating for Survivors of Sexual Violence by Vicki Polin. The Awareness Center, Inc.
  • Conference: Jewish Women International's Conference - Pursuing Truth, Justice and Righteousness. Rabbi Yosef Blau and Vicki Polin presented a workshop entitled, "Lost in the Shuffle: Jewish Survivors of Sexual Victimization".
  • Case of Errine Renata Acciaroli - Special Education Teacher; story broke - Toronto Sun
  • Case of Yossi Boker, Assistant Commander Police Investigative Department; story breaks - Jerusalem Post
  • Case of Nachman Borenstein, Teacher's Aide Talmud Torah; story breaks - Jerusalem Post
  • Case of Peter Braunstein, Playwright and Freelance Journalist; story breaks - WABC Eyewitness News
  • Case of Rabbi Asher Dann; story breaks - Haaretz and Jerusalem Post
  • Case of Rabbi David Kaye; story breaks - Dateline NBC
  • Case of Rabbi David Lipman; story breaks - Associated Press
  • Case of Rabbi Yaakov Menken; story breaks - Luke Ford
  • Case of Rabbi Gabriel Ohayon; story breaks - South Floridea Sun Sentinel
  • Case of Omer Yaish; story breaks - Jerusalem Post
  • Case of the 40-year-old man residing in an ultra-orthodox yeshiva; story broke - YNet News.
2006
  • Talk Radio Show: A Jewish Perspective on Child Sexual Abuse. Vicki Polin, executive director of The Awareness Center, Inc. appears on Ethicalife.com
  • Article Published: Orthodox Jew fights for her right to divorce. This article is regarding the case of Ephraim Ohana.  Baltimore Examiner.
  • Article Published: Nobody's Child: Surviving without a Family. by Vicki Polin, Michael Salamon and Na'ama Yehuda. BishopAccountability.org
  • Article Published: Rabbis Investigating Allegations of Sexual Offenses. by Vicki Polin. Abuse Tracker
  • Article Published: On the Rabbi's Knee: Do the Orthodox Jews have a Catholic-priest problem? by Robert Kolker. New York Magazine
  • Case of Gary Philip Dolovich, Attorney (AKA: Gary Dolovich); story breaks - Winnipeg Sun (Winnipeg, Canada)
  • Case of Rabbi Moshe Eisemann; story breaks on the blog Unorthodox Jew. Serious allegations made against Rabbi Moshe Eiseman over the last several years of molesting boys at Ner Israel of Baltimore, MD. These allegations have since been confirmed by various reliable rabbinic sources.  As a result of the allegations being made public, Rabbi Eiseman was forced into retirement.
  • Case of Cantor Philip Friedman; story breaks - Albany Times Union
  • Case: New Allegations made against Rabbi Mordechai Gafni; story breaks - New York Jewish Week
  • Case of Moshe Katsav - President of Israel,. story breaks - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
  • Case of Rabbi Yehuda Kolko; story breaks - Unorthodox Jew.  Rabbi Yudi Kolko and Yeshiva Torah Temimah were hit with a $20 million civil lawsuit on May 5, 2006, accusing him of molesting two students more than 25 years ago.  One of the alleged victims said Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, 60, sexually assaulted him when he was a seventh-grade student.  Rabbi Joel Kolko was arrested in New York City on December 7, 2006 following a long-term police investigation. He was charged with four counts of sexual abuse, including two felony counts, and endangering the welfare of a child. The most recent sexual abuse was allegedly against an 8-year-old boy, who says he was abused while he was in the first grade during the 2002-03 school year.
  • Case of Samuel Juravel (AKA: Shmuel Juravel)  story breaks - Savannah Morning News. (02/23/2007)  On September 25, 2006, Juravel pleads guilty and is sentenced to 22 years in federal prison. Juravel's arrest and prosecution is part of the FBI's Project Safe Childhood.
  • Case of Rabbi Avraham M. Leizerowitz , story breaks - New York Post (12/14/2007). A civil suit was filed against Rabbi Avraham Mordecai Leizerowitz of the Gerrer Mesivta High School in Borough Park Brooklyn. The charges include improperly touching a boy during a one-on-one help session in the rabbi's office in the Borough Park secondary school. Three other older boys have also come forward making similar allegations.
  • Case of Rabbi Edward Schlaeger; story breaks - Connecticut Post
  • Case of Rabbi Ben Zion Sobel; story first broke in 1985, yet was never published until 2006 - Luke Ford's Blog.
  • Case: Cantor Robert Shapiro is ordered by a judge to pay $8.4 million for sexually abusing an mentally retarded woman. 
  • Case of Rabbi Aron Boruch Tendler; story first broke in 1990 when he was replaced as principal of the girls Yeshiva University Los Angeles after allegations of molestation of students.There is no news media reporting of this case until 2006. - The Awareness Center.

2007
  • Series of Articles Published: Reining in Abuse: horror stories about sexual misdeeds perpetrated by rabbis and other vaunted communal figure. By Richard Greenberg and Eugene Meyer. Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA)  (01/10/2007)
  • Article Published:  The End Of Innocence: Confronting Sexual Abuse in the Orthodox Community. By Sholom Greenwald.  (02/14/2007)
  • Article Published: Jewish laws governing reporting to the authorities in cases of child abuse (Hebrew)  (03/09/2007)
  • Article Published: Passover Prayer On Behalf of Abused and Neglected Children (03/30/2007)
  • Legislative Hearing: Testimony Provided on Maryland Senate Bill 575 - SB 575: Civil Actions - Child Sexual Abuse - Statute of  Limitations. (03/01/2007)
  • Case of Samuel Juravel (AKA: Shmuel Juravel).  Survivor speaks out - Baltimore Jewish Times. (02/23/2007)
  • Case of Yosef Meystel (AKA: Joseph Meystel). Story breaks - Baltimore Jewish Times. (02/23/2007)
  • Case of Brad Hames.   Story breaks - Baltimore Jewish Times.(02/23/2007)

Brief History of Child Abuse, Neglect and Sexual Abuse/Assault Laws
© (2006) The Awareness Center, Inc.


Mary Ellen was a nine-year-old girl from New York, who was being severally abused and neglected by her foster parents. Mary Ellen might have died if it wasn't for a social worker by the name of Etta Angell Wheeler, who was working in her neighborhood. The reality of what happened is frightening, Back in 1874 there were NO laws on the books to protect children, yet there were laws on the books to protect animals.

The social worker who knew Mary Ellen did every thing in her power to help. If it wasn't for this nurses determination we might not have the laws on our books that we have today. Etta Angell Wheeler did NOT sit back and do nothing. She responded. She didn't take NO for an answer. The solution to Mary Ellen's plight came because it was determined that she was considered a member of the animal kingdom. The Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animal was then able to get involved and do something to protect Mary Ellen from any more harm.

When the Mary Ellen's story hit the news media there was a public outcry for there to be change in the way children were treated. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed, by 1900 there were 161 such groups in the U.S.

It's unbelieveable that it wasn't until 1968, when Dr. C. Henry Kempe and Ray E. Helfer's book The Battered Child was published, that people began to be aware of and believe that parents and caregivers truly could and did physically abuse their children. Please note that it wasn't until almost 20 years later that the world started to pay attention to the whole issue of sexual abuse/assault of children (and adults).
Be aware it wasn't until 1983-84, in Illinois the Confidentiality of Statements Made to Rape Crisis Personnel granted absolute privilege to sexual assault victims. This act was important because it meant that anything a rape victim said to a Rape Crisis Counselor or Legal advocate was absolutely confidential. This meant that no court could supena records of victims.


In 1984 several very important acts were also implemented. In Illinois, the Violent Crime Victims Assistance Act was signed into law.  This basically provided victims of all crimes, including survivors of sexual violence free counseling and advocacy.  This same year the federal governement, signed into law the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), it was at that time states received notice of future funding for victims services.


It's important to keep all of the relatively new history of how our society has dealt with criminal sexual acts.  It helps to understand why it is so important for organizations like The Awareness Center to exsist.
We all have to be thankful to social worker - Etta Angell Wheeler, who cared enough to do something about Mary Ellen, back in 1874.



The Real Story of Mary Ellen Wilson
American Humane Society
http://www.americanhumane.org/site/PageServer?pagename=wh_mission_maryellen

Mary Ellen Wilson
The sufferings of the little girl, Mary Ellen, led to the founding of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first organization of its kind, in 1874. In 1877, the New York SPCC and several Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from throughout the country joined together to form the American Humane Association.

The following is Mary Ellen's story, which marked the beginning of a world-wide crusade to save children. It is extracted from American Humane's Helping in Child Protective Services: A Competency-Based Casework Handbook.

Over the years, in the re-telling of Mary Ellen Wilson's story, myth has often been confused with fact. Some of the inaccuracies stem from colorful but erroneous journalism, others from simple misunderstanding of the facts, and still others from the complex history of the child protection movement in the United States and Great Britain and its link to the animal welfare movement. While it is true that Henry Bergh, president of the American Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), was instrumental in ensuring Mary Ellen's removal from an abusive home, it is not true that her attorney—who also worked for the ASPCA—argued that she deserved help because she was "a member of the animal kingdom."

The real story—which can be pieced together from court documents, newspaper articles, and personal accounts—is quite compelling, and it illustrates the impact that a caring and committed individual can have on the life of a child.

Mary Ellen Wilson was born in 1864 to Francis and Thomas Wilson of New York City. Soon thereafter, Thomas died, and his widow took a job. No longer able to stay at home and care for her infant daughter, Francis boarded Mary Ellen (a common practice at the time) with a woman named Mary Score. As Francis's economic situation deteriorated, she slipped further into poverty, falling behind in payments for and missing visits with her daughter. As a result, Mary Score turned two-year-old Mary Ellen over to the city's Department of Charities.

The Department made a decision that would have grave consequences for little Mary Ellen; it placed her illegally, without proper documentation of the relationship, and with inadequate oversight in the home of Mary and Thomas McCormack, who claimed to be the child's biological father. In an eerie repetition of events, Thomas died shortly thereafter. His widow married Francis Connolly, and the new family moved to a tenement on West 41st Street.

Mary McCormack Connolly badly mistreated Mary Ellen, and neighbors in the apartment building were aware of the child's plight. The Connollys soon moved to another tenement, but in 1874, one of their original neighbors asked Etta Angell Wheeler, a caring Methodist mission worker who visited the impoverished residents of the tenements regularly, to check on the child. At the new address, Etta encountered a chronically ill and homebound tenant, Mary Smitt, who confirmed that she often heard the cries of a child across the hall. Under the pretext of asking for help for Mrs. Smitt, Etta Wheeler introduced herself to Mary Connolly. She saw Mary Ellen's condition for herself. The 10-year-old appeared dirty and thin, was dressed in threadbare clothing, and had bruises and scars along her bare arms and legs. Ms. Wheeler began to explore how to seek legal redress and protection for Mary Ellen. Click here to read Etta Wheeler's account of Mary Ellen.

At that time, some jurisdictions in the United States had laws that prohibited excessive physical discipline of children. New York, in fact, had a law that permitted the state to remove children who were neglected by their caregivers. Based on their interpretation of the laws and Mary Ellen's circumstances, however, New York City authorities were reluctant to intervene. Etta Wheeler continued her efforts to rescue Mary Ellen and, after much deliberation, turned to Henry Bergh, a leader of the animal humane movement in the United States and founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). It was Ms. Wheeler's niece who convinced her to contact Mr. Bergh by stating, "You are so troubled over that abused child, why not go to Mr. Bergh? She is a little animal surely" (p. 3 Wheeler in Watkins).

Ms. Wheeler located several neighbors who were willing to testify to the mistreatment of the child and brought written documentation to Mr. Bergh. At a subsequent court hearing, Mr. Bergh stated that his action was "that of a human citizen," clarifying that he was not acting in his official capacity as president of the NYSPCA. He emphasized that he was "determined within the framework of the law to prevent the frequent cruelties practiced on children" (Mary Ellen, April 10, 1976, p. 8 in Watkins, 1990). After reviewing the documentation collected by Etta Wheeler, Mr. Bergh sent an NYSPCA investigator (who posed as a census worker to gain entrance to Mary Ellen's home) to verify the allegations. Elbridge T. Gerry, an ASPCA attorney, prepared a petition to remove Mary Ellen from her home so she could testify to her mistreatment before a judge. Mr. Bergh took action as a private citizen who was concerned about the humane treatment of a child. It was his role as president of the NYSPCA and his ties to the legal system and the press, however, that bring about Mary Ellen's rescue and the movement for a formalized child protection system.

Recognizing the value of public opinion and awareness in furthering the cause of the humane movement, Henry Bergh contacted New York Times reporters who took an interest in the case and attended the hearings. Thus, there were detailed newspaper accounts that described Mary Ellen's appalling physical condition. When she was taken before Judge Lawrence, she was dressed in ragged clothing, was bruised all over her body and had a gash over her left eye and on her cheek where Mary Connelly had struck her with a pair of scissors. On April 10, 1874, Mary Ellen testified:

"My father and mother are both dead. I don't know how old I am. I have no recollection of a time when I did not live with the Connollys. .... Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip—a raw hide. The whip always left a black and blue mark on my body. I have now the black and blue marks on my head which were made by mamma, and also a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors. She struck me with the scissors and cut me; I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by any one—have never been kissed by mamma. I have never been taken on my mamma's lap and caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.... I do not know for what I was whipped—mamma never said anything to me when she whipped me. I do not want to go back to live with mamma, because she beats me so. I have no recollection ever being on the street in my life" Mary Ellen, April 10, 1874 in Watkins, 1990).

In response, Judge Lawrence immediately issued a writ de homine replagiando, provided for by Section 65 of the Habeas Corpus Act, to bring Mary Ellen under court control.

Mary Ellen Wilson
The newspapers also provided extensive coverage of the caregiver Mary Connolly's trial, raising public awareness and helping to inspire various agencies and organizations to advocate for the enforcement of laws that would rescue and protect abused children (Watkins, 1990). On April 21, 1874, Mary Connolly was found guilty of felonious assault and was sentenced to one year of hard labor in the penitentiary (Watkins, 1990).

Less well known but as compelling as the details of her rescue, is the rest of Mary Ellen's story. Etta Wheeler continued to play an important role in the child's life. Family correspondence and other accounts reveal that the court placed Mary Ellen in an institutional shelter for adolescent girls. Believing this to be an inappropriate setting for the 10-year-old, Ms. Wheeler intervened. Judge Lawrence gave her permission to place the child with her own mother, Sally Angell, in northern New York. When Ms. Angell died, Etta Wheeler's youngest sister, Elizabeth, and her husband Darius Spencer, raised Mary Ellen. By all accounts, her life with the Spencer family was stable and nurturing.

At the age of 24, Mary Ellen married a widower and had two daughters—Etta, named after Etta Wheeler, and Florence. Later, she became a foster mother to a young girl named Eunice. Etta and Florence both became teachers; Eunice was a businesswoman. Mary Ellen's children and grandchildren described her as gentle and not much of a disciplinarian. Reportedly, she lived in relative anonymity and rarely spoke with her family about her early years of abuse. In 1913, however, she agreed to attend the American Humane Association's national conference in Rochester, NY, with Etta Wheeler, her long-time advocate. Ms. Wheeler was a guest speaker at the conference. Her keynote address, "The Story of Mary Ellen which started the Child Saving Crusade Throughout the World" was published by the American Humane Association. Mary Ellen died in 1956 at the age of 92.




History of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA)100 North 16th Street, Springfield, IL 62703
(217) 753-4117
http://www.icasa.org/icasaHistory.asp



In early 1977, women activists from nine community-based rape crisis centers in Illinois gathered to "form a mutual support group...adding strength to any issue such as legislative action, and giving our strength to each other." Searching for a name that reflected the profound social struggle necessary to end the degradation and rape of women, these activists named their group the Illinois Coalition of Women Against Rape (ICWAR).


As early as 1972, rape crisis workers in Illinois had established 24-hour crisis lines, conducted education and training programs, created thousands of brochures, offered self defense classes, organized and marched in "Take Back the Night" events and devoted thousands of hours to helping victims heal from the devastation of rape.


By linking their efforts through ICWAR, these early workers began their long journey to change the society. Like their sisters across the nation, coalition members advocated for legislative reform, insisted that police increase their arrest rates, demanded privacy for rape victims in emergency rooms and urged prosecutors to change plea negotiation procedures.


This monumental work, which forever changed the fundamental ways in which men related to women, was done primarily by volunteers. Rape crisis centers had very few resources other than dedicated activists. There was no formal education or professional training regarding how to do anti-rape work. However, once survivors broke the silence about the terror of rape, women devoted their minds, hearts, time and money to construct and sustain organizations that created the field of anti-rape work. These organizations changed practices in hospitals, police departments, the courts and within the field of psychiatry.


ICWAR received much support as it began its efforts. YWCAs, churches, synagogues, the National Organization for Women, women's studies programs, the American Association of University Women, United Ways and others pitched in with funds, space and staff time. Several state's attorneys and legal aid lawyers helped advocates sharpen their advocacy skills. And, the Illinois House Rape Study Committee forged political alliances to pass legislative proposals responsive to the needs of survivors.
Victims and their advocates created rape crisis centers to fill a void – with a definition and purpose different than traditional mental health or social services. With the goals of social change, equality between men and women, and the fundamental principle of victim-centered services, the anti-rape movement offered a new model for institutional change and individual healing. In Illinois, this model gained recognition and credibility with each new accomplishment.


ICWAR had multiple occasions to celebrate legislative victories. The Rape Victims Emergency Treatment Act standardized the collection of medical evidence. The Rape Shield Law made the victim's sexual history irrelevant in a trial. The Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act overhauled sex crime statutes. Federal and state statutes authorized new categories of victim service funds.


The first funding for sexual assault crisis centers, $148,889, was distributed by ICWAR to 12 centers in 1982.Later that year, four more centers were funded. Subsequent funds enabled centers to hire advocates, counselors and educators. Since 1982, centers have developed specialized services to meet the needs of children, adult survivors of child sexual abuse, teens and male victims. They have standardized volunteer training and developed curricula for conducting education and training programs. They have implemented protocols with hospitals and law enforcement agencies.


ICWAR changed its name to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA) in 1984 and, with its many colleagues and supporters, continued to change the way the state responded to rape. Also in 1984, passage of the Illinois Violent Crime Victims Assistance Act made funds available for increased counseling and advocacy with victims of sexual assault. On the federal level, the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) passed Congress, promising future funding for victim services. In 1986, ICASA received its first allocation of federal VOCA funds from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. Rape crisis centers hired full-time advocates and 16 centers established specialized counseling services for children.


Victim rights continued to receive a boost in 1994 when the Violence Against Women Act was passed by Congress and signed into law. Two years later, ICASA received its first VAWA funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority.


ICASA's funding increased from $6 million in 1996 to $13 million in 2000. The increase in funding has allowed ICASA member centers to greatly expand services to victims across the state. ICASA consists of 29 sexual assault crisis centers, which operate 26 full-time satellite offices. Member centers offer services in 73 of 102 counties in Illinois.


Throughthe coalition, the centers adopted standards for local centers and created a governance structure to allocate funds, track contract compliance, and provide technical assistance to help centers maintain services in their communities. ICASA continues to work on the cutting edge of legislative reform and to advocate for social change and the elimination of the oppressions that promote sexual violence.

  • 1975 Rape Victims Emergency Treatment Act passes the Illinois General Assembly and is signed into law.
  • 1977 Illinois Coalition of Women Against Rape (ICWAR) is formed.
  • 1978 Rape Shield Act becomes law for sexual assault victims in Illinois.
  • 1981 Federal Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant is signed into law. Illinois Department of Public Health receives allocation with designation for Rape Crisis and Rape Prevention.
  • 1982 ICWAR receives first Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant allocation of $148,889. ICWAR creates its first Contracts Review Committee and allocates funds to twelve centers.
  • 1983 Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act is signed into law, revising Illinois rape and incest statutes.
  • 1983-84 Confidentiality of Statements Made to Rape Crisis Personnel grants absolute privilege to sexual assault victims.
  • 1984 Illinois Violent Crime Victims Assistance Act is signed into law, making funds available for counseling and advocacy.
  • 1984 ICWAR changes its name to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA).
  • 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) passes Congress; states receive notice of future funding for victim services.
  • 1985 ICASA receives one-time grant from the Illinois Department of Public Aid for counseling services.
  • 1985 ICASA granted its first allocation of state General Revenue Funds.
  • 1986 ICASA receives its first allocation of federal VOCA funds from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
  • 1988 Law is passed prohibiting polygraph examination of sexual assault victims.
  • 1988 Hearsay Exception is granted to child sexual assault victims under the age of 13.
  • 1991 Civil Statute of Limitations for Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse becomes law.
  • 1992 Citizens vote "yes" for the Illinois Constitutional Amendment for Victims Rights.
  • 1994 ICASA receives allocation for the SACY Project from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
  • 1994 The Violence Against Women Act is passed by Congress and signed into law.
  • 1996 ICASA receives VAWA funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
  • 1997 Sex Offender Management Board created by Illinois General Assembly.
  • 1997 Law is passed allowing a defendant's previous victims to testify about defendant's "prior bad acts," whether reported or not.
  • 1997 ICASA celebrates its 20th Anniversary with friends and colleagues.
  • 1998 Law is passed which makes giving a person a "date rape drug" before sexually assaulting her/him an aggravating factor to the crime.
  • 1998 ICASA and DHS, using VAWA funds, develop a media campaign that includes television and radio spots directed at male responsibility for rape.
  • 1999 ICASA, with DHS, begins evaluation of its crisis intervention services.
  • 1999 Law is passed to extend the criminal statue of limitations in sexual assault cases of an adult victim to ten years past the time of the rape and ten years past the age of 18 for minor victims.
  • 1999 ICASA moves into a newly constructed administrative office building at 100 N. 16th Street in Springfield.
  • 1999 Law is passed creating pilot Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner programs in four Illinois hospitals.
  • 1999 ICASA, with VAWA funding, begins a two year evaluation of its prevention education programs in Illinois schools.
  • 1999 Law is passed that allows a victim of sexual assault or sexual abuse to request that the State's Attorney file a petition to have the court records of the case sealed.
  • 2000 Law is passed permitting minor sexual assault victims 13 through 17 years to consent to the release of her or his evidence collection kit to be analyzed for evidence for prosecution.









History of the terms Post-traumatic Stress, Rape Trauma Syndrome and Dissocation

Our Hearts and Our Hopes are Turned to Peace
By Sandra L. Bloom, MD
CommunityWorks - Philadelphia, Pa., USA
http://www.istss.org/What/history.htm

Published in the International Handbook of Human Response to Trauma (2000), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Edited by Arieh Y. Shalev, Rachel Yehuda and Alexander C. McFarlane.

Introduction
"Our hearts and our hopes are turned to peace as we assemble here in the East Room this morning", said President Johnson on the morning of November 1968. "All our efforts are being bent in its pursuit. But in this company we hear again, in our minds, the sound of distant battles".

President Johnson was addressing these words to those gathered for the Medal of Honor ceremony in honor of five heroes of the undeclared war in Vietnam. One of those heroes was a young African-American man from Detroit, Sgt. Dwight Johnson. Dwight, or "Skip" to his family and friends, had always been a good kid, an Explorer Scout and an altar boy, who could only recall losing control of his temper once in his life, when his little brother was being beaten by older boys.

But in Vietnam, when the men whose lives he had shared for eleven months, were burned to death before his eyes, he suddenly became a savage soldier, killing five to twenty enemy soldiers in the space of half an hour.

At one point, he came face to face with a Vietnamese soldier who squeezed the trigger on his weapon aimed point blank at Skip. The gun misfired and Skip killed him. But, according to the psychiatrist that saw him several years later, it was this soldier's face that continued to haunt him.

After receiving the Medal of Honor, Skip who had been unable to even get a job as a simple veteran, became a nationally celebrated hero. But his body and mind started to give way.

In September of 1970 he was sent to Valley Forge Army Hospital where the psychiatrist there diagnosed him with depression caused by post-Vietnam adjustment problems. "Since coming home from Vietnam the subject has had bad dreams", read the psychiatric report, "He didn't confide in his mother or wife, but entertained a lot of moral judgement as to what had happened at Dakto. Why had he been ordered to switch tanks the night before? Why was he spared and not the others? He experienced guilt about his survival. He wondered if he was sane" (Nordheimer, 1971).

On April 30, 1971, Dwight Johnson, now married and the father of a little boy, was shot and killed while attempting an armed robbery of a Detroit grocery store. The store owner told the police, "I first hit him with two bullets but he just stood there, with the gun in his hand, and said, 'I'm going to kill you . . .' I kept pulling the trigger until my gun was empty".

In the exchange, Dwight Johnson, an experienced combat soldier, never fired a shot. His mother's words echo down to us, twenty-seven years later, "Sometimes I wonder if Skip tired of this life and needed someone else to pull the trigger" (Nordheimer, 1971).

It is with this dramatic behavioral reenactment of one young, despairing African-American soldier that the curtain opens on the first act of the story of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The ISTSS is one organizational part of a late twentieth century social movement aimed at raising consciousness about the roots of violence by enacting and reacting to that violence everywhere.
The ISTSS was born out of the clashing ideologies that became so well articulated in the 1960's and 1970's. War crimes, war protests and war babies; child abuse, incest and women's liberation; burning monks, burning draft cards, and burning crosses; murdered college kids and show trials of accused radicals; kidnappings, terrorism and bombings; a citizenry betrayed by its government and mass protests in front of the Capitol in Washington - all play a role in the backgrounds of the people who founded the organization and in the evolution of the organization itself.

If I have learned anything from my contact with victims of violence, I have learned that it is vitally important to remember - and honor - the lessons of the past. We have to know where we came from if we are to know who we are now.

But it is extremely difficult to write history as history is being made. Since this chapter can only serve as a marker along the way, I have chosen to concentrate my attention on the origins of the Society, before those roots become even more lost in the darkness that envelopes those who move offstage. There are two fundamental aspects of the growth of this group.

First, there are the individuals who provided the action - both the victims and their advocates. One remarkable aspect of our history is the extent to which the founding mothers and fathers have had personal experience with trauma, as pointed out by van der Kolk, Weisaeth, and Van der Hart (1996).
It may be that it was this close brush with the Angel of Death that has given the growing field such a continuing sense of passion, devotion and commitment. Whatever the case, there are a multitude of stories begging to be told, severely limited here by time and space. The second aspect of organizational growth is the group-as-a-whole growth that I hope will emerge in the structure of the chapter.

The origins can not be placed at the foot of one powerful individual and did not derive from a clearly thought-out, hierarchical, managerial demand. Instead, it has grown organically, from the grassroots, and has remained multidisciplinary, multinational and multi-opinioned.

War Takes Center Stage
Dr. Chaim Shatan was familiar with the symptoms of war. His father had fought in three - the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War before moving from Poland to Canada. His father wrote short stories about his war experiences and the son translated them from Yiddish to English.
Shatan had gone to medical school during World War II, when physicians still received training in combat-related disorders and had evaluated men suffering from the traumatic neuroses of war (Scott, 1993). A New Yorker, Shatan read the New York Times routinely and when he read the story about Dwight Johnson, he felt compelled to respond. And, as co-director of the postdoctoral psychoanalytic training clinic at New York University, he could even harbor hope that it would get published.

His op-ed piece to the New York Times was published in May, 1972 and titled, Post-Vietnam Syndrome. In his editorial, Shatan described what came to be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and told how he had noticed these symptoms in the Vietnam veterans he and his colleagues had been seeing in "group rap" sessions (Shatan, 1972; 1978a).

One of these colleagues that Shatan referred to was Robert Lifton. Lifton was an ardent antiwar activist who had served in Korea as a military psychiatrist and had already studied and written about the survivors of Hiroshima (Lifton, 1967). Lifton met Sarah Haley through the New York and Boston chapters of the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (V.V.A.W.).

Sarah Haley was a social worker at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. Unlike most of her colleagues at the time, Haley recognized that many of her patients who had served in Vietnam, were being misdiagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics or character disorders because mental health professionals were failing to recognize the symptoms related to combat. But she knew them.
She had grown up with a father who was a veteran of World War II, a special agent for the O.S.S. and an alcoholic. She had heard stories of trauma and wartime atrocities from the time she was a little girl and she had personally experienced the long-term impact of war on her father's behavior. What other colleagues found unbelievable, she found entirely realistic.

When she met a Vietnam veteran who claimed to have been involved in the massacre of a village called My Lai, she believed him. It was through Haley that Lifton met and interviewed that soldier (Scott, 1993).

In January 1970, Lifton testified to a Senate subcommittee about the brutalization of GIs in Vietnam, a brutalization that he believed "made massacres like My Lai inevitable" (Lifton, 1973, p.17). In April 1970, the U.S. invaded Cambodia and students across the country rose up in protest.
Within days, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine others. Chaim Shatan had previously arranged for Lifton to speak at N.Y.U. but they decided to change the topic to address the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State killings, and advertised it widely around New York City.

Many people came who were not students, including some Vietnam veterans who were members of the V.V.A.W. (Scott, 1993). The rap groups in New York evolved from this meeting and from correspondence and phone calls between Jan Crumb, then president of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Lifton, beginning in November, 1970 (Lifton, 1973).

When the clinicians sat down with Jan Crumb and several others from V.V.A.W., the vets described the way the members "rapped" with each other about the war, American society and their own lives and how they felt they would like some people around with greater psychological knowledge.

Lifton suggested they form more regular rap groups with some professional involvement. With the support of the chairman of the psychoanalytic training program at N.Y.U., Shatan circulated over three hundred memos asking for professional volunteers to join in their efforts. He urged them to help, telling them that "this is an opportunity to apply our professional expertise and anti-war sentiments to help some of those Americans who have suffered most from the war (Shatan, 1971).

He outlined for them three theoretical questions that he believed needed to be answered. What are the differences between Vietnam veterans and World War II veterans? Can we clarify the psychodynamics of war atrocities and demonstrate how they grow organically out of modern combat training? What is happening in the group process experience between veterans and professionals?

The enticements worked. Within five days, his memo had drawn forty volunteers. A panel of professional psychological and psychiatric colleagues in the New York area was formed. Most came from the New York University Postdoctoral Psychoanalytic Program, others from prestigious programs like the W. A. White Institute for Psychoanalysis and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

These clinicians participated in the groups until at least 1976 (Shatan, 1987). They called themselves "professionals" rather than "therapists" because they "had a sense of groping toward, or perhaps being caught up in, a new group form. Though far from clear about exactly what that form would be, we found ourselves responding to the general atmosphere by stressing informality and avoiding a medical model" (Lifton, 1973, p.77).

Word got out to the Vietnam vets through word of mouth, churches, and some media coverage and they started to come. Jack Smith and Arthur Egendorf, both veterans, were early members of the rap groups in New York.

In 1971, Shatan and Peter Bourne testified at the court martial of a Marine POW who was being charged with desertion, though he clearly suffered from traumatic stress. The papers written by Bourne and published in 1969 and 1971 about war neurosis were ignored.

The refusal to see the damage that had been done to these men motivated Shatan even further. The response to Shatan's op-ed article was overwhelming. He heard from over 1,250 rap groups from around the country as well as student health and financial aid offices on many campuses, and even veterans in prison.

Groups had already been meeting informally with psychiatrists in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Boston (Shatan, 1987). All were functioning outside of the established VA services either because they were past the two-year limit for service-connected disabilities or because they found the traditional service, geared to World War II veterans, hostile to them and unwilling to meet their needs (Scott, 1993).

There was at this time, tremendous hostility towards the returning Vietnam veterans, particularly those who had become disillusioned with the war. And the hostility came from the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. John Kerry (now Senator John Kerry) was a founder of the V.V.A.W. and holder of three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star for his service in Vietnam.

He reported that a Minnesota American Legion post excluded Vietnam vets because they had lost the war. Meanwhile, there were antiwar activists and pacifists calling the veterans "baby-killers" (Shatan, 1987).

Even the military victimized the vets as they were leaving the war through the practice of giving "bad discharge numbers". According to a discreet coding system, numbers were entered on discharge papers that identified veterans who had been seen as "troublemakers" while in the service, and then these codes were distributed to employers and personnel officers.

In the media, especially television, the stigmatization was furthered by the portrayal of Vietnam veterans as dangerous and psychotic freaks, murderers and rapists (Leventman, 1978). In 1978, Leventman, citing an earlier article of his own said, "nothing reflects so much of what is wrong with American society as its treatment of Vietnam veterans . . . one can only reiterate that the negative legacy of Vietnam lies more in civilian society than in the psyches of veterans" (p. 295).

In response to this discrimination, the veterans and their supporters organized a counter-VA consisting of therapeutic communes, storefront clinics, vet centers, and bars. They organized social and political protests. They conducted street theater with mock pacification operations in New Jersey villages.

In January of 1971, they organized war crime hearings called the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit, sponsored by Jane Fonda, among others. One hundred and fifteen veterans, as well as Robert Lifton, presented testimony about atrocities committed in Vietnam, while Fonda, and antiwar activist, Mark Lane, filmed the testimony and arranged for distribution.

Except for Life magazine, however, the event got very little national media coverage. In April 1971, the V.V.A.W. organized a march on Washington. The military had called the invasion of Cambodia and Laos, "Operation Dewey Canyon II, and the V.V.A.W. named their action "Operation Dewey Canyon III", designating it as a "limited incursion into the country of Congress". Their weeklong occupation of Washington culminated in a ceremony on the Capitol steps, a "medal turn-in" ceremony.

Jack Smith recalls, "I can still hear the dings of those medals, the Bronze Stars and the Silver Stars bouncing off the statue of John Marshall, and the Purple Hearts, behind the barricades" (Scott, 1993, p.23). They published an anthology of war poems and used the money to help a Quaker rehabilitation center in South Vietnam and to help rebuild Hanoi's foremost hospital, destroyed in the carpet-bombing.
They founded free clinics in poverty areas and staffed them with former nurses and medics. They offered legal aid and regular visits to vets in prison. And mental health professionals, moving beyond therapy and detachment to advocacy participated, "we went, with the vets, wherever we could be heard: to conventions, war crimes hearings, churches, Congress, the media, and abroad. We, too, suffered insomnia and had combat nightmares (Shatan, 1987, p.8).

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, Dr. Philip May, a schizophrenia expert, was director of psychological services for the Brentwood Veterans Administration Hospital. in 1971. He recognized that Vietnam veterans were not getting the services they needed, so he hired Shad Meshad, a social worker and Vietnam vet himself, to evaluate the situation.
Meshad had already started one of the first rap groups in the country, in the Los Angeles area and was highly critical of the VA services. He had been a medic in Vietnam, was seriously wounded, and had endured several painful operations in the States. He knew what veterans were contending with from a first hand perspective (Meshad, 1997; Scott, 1993).
So did William Mahedy, who had served as a chaplain in Vietnam and was working as a social worker at Brentwood, "Most Brentwood psychiatrists that I met during this period had not the slightest clue how to deal with Vietnam veterans . . . they didn't know how to treat combat-related stress. Nor could they provide any guidance to the kind of total reintegration into society that we knew was necessary" (Mahedy, 1986, p.56).
In response, Meshad created the highly unconventional Vietnam Veteran Resocialization Unit within the Brentwood VA hospital, with the support of the director at Brentwood and set up storefront clinics where rap groups were held.
By 1973, Robert Lifton's book Home from the War was published, the first widely read book about the plight of the Vietnam veterans. He and Shatan had made strong and supportive connections with the American Orthopsychiatric Association and several universities. Both were impressed by the growing grassroots movement and believed that it could be strengthened even further.

In 1970, the National Council of Churches (NCC) had established an office under Reverend Richard Kilmer, an ordained Presbyterian minister, in order to help those hurt by the war in Vietnam. At first the NCC focused efforts on draft resisters and antiwar protestors, but in 1973, at the urging of Shatan and Lifton, the NCC began laying plans for the First National Conference on the Emotional Needs of Vietnam-Era Veterans.

According to Jack Smith, the veterans had pointed out to Reverend Kilmer that they had an obligation to minister to people who were in the war as well as out of it and the churches began to listen. The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church put up $80,000 for expenses and agreed to host the meeting at its seminary in St. Louis, appropriately situated right in the middle of the country.

Arthur Egendorf developed a list of veterans, psychiatrists and others who were actively involved in helping Vietnam veterans around the country. According to Shatan, about one hundred and thirty people attended the conference, "60 vets, 30 shrinks, 30 chaplains, and 10 central office people [VA] who came on at the last minute (Scott, 1993, p.45). At the conference, Lifton and Shatan spent time with reporters talking about the problems of Vietnam veterans.

The conference lasted for three days, April 26-28, 1973, and out of the conference the National Vietnam Veterans Resource project (N.V.R.P.) was created with a governing council of 16 people co-directed by Chaim Shatan and Jack Smith, with representatives from all three groups - veterans, chaplains, and mental health professionals. The project was to have several functions: to search and gather data on the effects of combat stress and to help coordinate a self-help movement of veterans groups (Shatan, 1987; 1997a).

There were direct consequences for this kind of advocacy. Beginning in 1970, Shatan came under government surveillance. Returning from a meeting at the Pentagon in June of 1973, he found his phone had been tapped. After a visit to Washington to offer assistance to American POW's returning from Hanoi, he discovered that someone had tampered with his mail.

In July of 1973, Shatan had been contacted by William Kunstler's Center for Constitutional Rights for help in preparing a "post-Vietnam syndrome" defense for the " Gainesville", eight veterans who had been charged with planning to blow up the 1972 Democratic and Republican conventions. After this, the interference with his mail was stepped up so that if mail came from veterans' organizations, people who worked with Vietnam vets, or Robert Lifton, it was bound to be searched (Scott, 1993).

The FBI tried to infiltrate the rap groups by sending in informers posing as veterans seeking help (Lifton, 1978). Through the Freedom of Information act, Shatan found that plans were even afoot to entrap him with blueprints of government munitions plants (Shatan, 1987). His response was to talk longer, louder, and more frequently in order to bring attention to the readjustment problems of the veterans and to make their cause more publicly visible and therefore less vulnerable to government sabotage.

The VA Central Office attacked Lifton and Shatan in the press when they made a guess that 20% of men who had served in Vietnam were paying a heavy psychological price, when the VA claimed that only 5% of the men had combat-related psychological symptoms. Both were labeled as being "hung up on the war" and accused of "dishonoring brave men" (Shatan, 1985).

Both Shatan and Lifton knew that it was impossible to separate the professional work they were doing with these men from their political activism. As Lifton recalls, "I believe that we always function within this dialectic between ethical involvement and intellectual rigor, and that bringing our advocacy "out front" and articulating it makes us more, rather than less scientific . . . From the beginning the therapeutic and political aspects of our work developed simultaneously" (Lifton, 1978, pp. 211 & 212).
It was difficult for Vietnam veterans to get the services they needed from the VA for several reasons, besides the existing, sometimes virulent, prejudice against the men who had fought in Vietnam and were suffering from the delayed effects of combat stress. First, there was no diagnostic code for combat stress in DSM-II. This latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual for Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, had been published in 1968.

As Art Blank, points out, "As the return of troops from Viet Nam was reaching a crescendo, the psychiatric profession's official diagnostic guide backed away from stress disorder even further, and the condition vanished into the interstices of "adjustment reaction of adult life" (Blank, 1985, p.73).

But even under DSM-I there had been no classification for delayed stress reactions. So, if the symptoms presented more than a year after discharge from active duty, the VA did not consider them to be service-related problems. If veterans presented with post-traumatic psychiatric symptoms, they were misdiagnosed as suffering from depression, paranoid schizophrenia, character disorders, or behavior disorders (Blank, 1985; Wilson, 1988).

Senator Alan Cranston, a World War II veteran and a member of the Senate's Committee on Veterans Affairs, became convinced that the psychological needs of Vietnam veterans were different from those of older veterans. Starting in 1971 he tried to bring about changes in the VA system by seeking better funding for the Vietnam veterans to obtain drug and alcohol rehabilitation as well as the initiation of readjustment counseling services.

The bill he proposed passed the Senate in 1973 and 1975, but the House refused to pass it. The House was dominated by World War II veterans, who had an unwillingness to concede that the Vietnam War had produced different problems than had been previously recognized. In addition, the American Legion as well as the Veterans of Foreign Wars lobbied against the bill. Taking a more long-term approach, Cranston appointed Max Cleland as a member of his staff to review the VA hospitals.

Max Cleland was a Vietnam veteran who had lost an arm and both legs in the war and had testified for Cranston at the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs in 1971. In his new position, Cleland visited Shad Meshad's storefront operations at Brentwood. Both Cleland and Meshad testified in 1975 before Senator Cranston's Subcommittee on Health and Hospitals, providing clear evidence that the VA hospitals were not meeting the needs of Vietnam veterans (Scott, 1993).

Besides the problems with the psychiatric diagnostic schemas, there was no organized Vietnam veterans' pressure group advocating for a change in benefits (Scott, 1993). The work of the National Vietnam Veterans Resource Project (N.V.R.P.), created during the First National Conference on the Emotional Needs of Vietnam-Era Veterans, began immediately after the conference. By 1974, the N.V.R.P. had catalogued 2,700 diverse veterans' self-help programs, 2,000 of them on college campuses, some out in the community and others in prisons (Lifton, 1973; Shatan, 1974).

Jack Smith sought funding for an empirical study and called it the Vietnam Generation Study, since the intention was to study both veterans and draft resisters. He and a colleague obtained funding from the National Council of Churches, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Edward F. Hazen Foundation to begin a pilot study (Scott, 1993). In 1975, the Senate Committee for Veterans Affairs initiated a bill, approved by Congress, mandating the VA to conduct a study to assess the needs of Vietnam veterans. As a result, the VA provided funds to Arthur Egendorf and the NVRP to complete the Vietnam Generation Study, which eventually culminated in Legacies of Vietnam (Egendorf et al., 1979; 1981; Laufer, 1985).

The Mysterious Disappearance of Combat Stress
The first version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual formulated by the American Psychiatric Association was published in 1952, while American psychiatrists were actively treating veterans of World War II and Korea. "Gross stress reaction" was used to describe the aftereffects of previously normal persons who began having symptoms related to intolerable stress.

DSM-II was published in 1968, at the height of the TET offensive in Vietnam and "gross stress reaction" was replaced with "(transient) adjustment disorder of adult life". The only mention of combat -- as "fear associated with military combat and manifested by trembling, running, and hiding" -- was put in the same category as an "unwanted pregnancy" (Shatan, 1985).

As Chaim Shatan wrote many years later, The disappearance of stress reactions from DSM-II remains a mystery. Its causes have not been established. I have not been able to find a soul who will say they know how or why it happened . . . [but] we can say that the diagnostic lacuna in DSM-II had great political value during the Vietnam war . . . every diagnosis is a potential political act (1985, p.2-3).

For Figley, the absence in DSM-II of a diagnostic category specific to combat trauma can be attributed to the lack of American involvement in a war during that period, as WWII and Korean veterans became integrated into the community (Figley, 1978a). But Blank also believed that the elimination of "gross stress reaction" had been politically motivated, if not consciously, then unconsciously.

On looking back he concurs with Shatan, "These dramatic shifts from DSM-I to DSM-III suggest the
hypothesis that - as part of a highly complex social and intellectual phenomenon - irrational influences have deeply affected the recognition and appreciation of accurate guidance by organized psychiatry" (Blank, 1985, p. 74).

Wilson has puzzled over this mystery as well, pointing out that after the death of Freud the collective knowledge about psychological trauma seemed to go underground and by the time of DMS-II had all but evaporated. "What makes this so peculiar is that by 1968, the cumulative historical events involving war, civil violence, nuclear warfare, etc., produced more trauma, killing, mass destruction, and death in a limited time frame than at any prior time in recorded history" (Wilson, 1995, p.15).

Blank even now predicts that, for similar reasons, there will be a move to exclude PTSD as a diagnostic category when the DSM-V is formulated in the future (Blank, 1997a).

Whatever the reasons - and there probably were many - as early as 1969, John Talbott recommended that the future editors of DSM-III re-introduce the gross stress reaction listing. Talbott, later to become President of the American Psychiatric Association, had served in Vietnam as a psychiatrist. He conducted some of the initial interviews for the Vietnam Generation Study and was stunned by how much of this "post-Vietnam syndrome" he had been failing to diagnose in part because there was no way to make the diagnosis under DSM-II (Scott, 1990; 1993).



The Lost is Found: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
By Sandra L. Bloom, MD
CommunityWorks - Philadelphia, PA., USA
http://www.istss.org/what/history2.htm
Published in the International Handbook of Human Response to Trauma (2000), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Edited by Arieh Y. Shalev, Rachel Yehuda and Alexander C. McFarlane.


Shatan says that he first heard that traumatic war neurosis had disappeared in 1974 as a result of a phone call from an Asbury Park, New Jersey public defender. A Vietnam veteran had been charged with violence against property and had amnesia for his behavior.

The public defender entered a plea of not guilty based on traumatic war neurosis and the judge rejected the defense because there was no longer such a diagnosis. Shatan recommended that the public defender contact the DSM-III Task Force headed by Robert Spitzer. He did so and was told that there were no plans to reinsert any form of traumatic war neurosis in the DSM-III. A reporter from the Village Voice got this word back to Shatan and he was shocked. He got together with Lifton to decide what to do. They realized they had to mobilize, and mobilize quickly (Shatan, 1985).

Their response was to form the Vietnam Veterans Working Group (V.V.W.G.), supported, in part, by the American Orthopsychiatric Association and the Emergency Ministry of the United Presbyterian Church (Shatan, Haley & Smith, 1979).

The National Council of Churches did any xeroxing that needed to be done. Amitai Etzioni provided some office space for them at his Center for Policy Research at Columbia University (Shatan, 1997a; Scott, 1993). In 1974, Sarah Haley published her landmark paper, "When the patient reports atrocities" in the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the publications of the American Psychiatric Association, and it was widely read.

John Talbott had easy access to the American Psychiatric Association. He sponsored meetings at the New York chapter of the APA, inviting Shatan, Haley, Arthur Egendorf and others to present on "Post-Vietnam syndrome". He also helped them get access to Robert Spitzer at the 1975 American Psychiatric Association convention.

Jack Smith developed a questionnaire as part of his doctoral thesis, "American War Neurosis, 1860-1970" and Shatan sent the questionnaire to 35 members of the VVWG in 1975, many of whom had been working closely with the veterans in rap groups and individual sessions, some as far back as 1970 (Shatan, Haley & Smith, 1979). He asked them to go through their caseload with the questionnaires.
Shatan and Lifton, joined by Jack Smith and Sarah Haley, tabulated the results on 724 veterans and arrived at a classification system very close to the one Kardiner had proposed in 1941 (Shatan, 1997b, Shatan, Haley & Smith, 1979; Van der Kolk, Herron & Hostetler, 1994).

While this was going on in the psychiatric establishment, Charles Figley organized panels in 1975 at the American Sociological Association and the 1976 meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. He met with Chaim Shatan, Robert Lifton, and others, while beginning to work on an edited volume which, in 1978, would become a landmark book on Vietnam. Figley, a psychologist, had served in Vietnam in 1965 with the Marines and was one of the first Vietnam veterans to return home.

He completed graduate studies and participated in Dewey Canyon III. On campus, he met other Vietnam veterans and became aware of the widespread nature of their adjustment problems. After obtaining his degree, he took a position at Purdue University where he founded and directed the Consortium on Veteran Studies and started studying the post-Vietnam effects intensively. He developed a bibliography about combat trauma and began corresponding with other people interested in similar studies (Scott, 1993).

Meanwhile, John Wilson, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, began working on the Forgotten Warrior project. Wilson had completed his Ph.D. in 1973 and performed three years of alternative service in a crisis intervention center. When two close friends returned from Vietnam as radically changed people, a seed was planted in his mind. His first academic position was in Cleveland where a student of his presented a report on some Vietnam veterans he had interviewed on campus.
John was intrigued. He sent out letters to the veterans on campus and more than 100 responded. He and his student, Chris Doyle, recorded narratives of their lives before, during and after Vietnam and the work became consuming. His department chairman threatened to block his tenure or promotion if he continued this work, but John was undeterred. He set up rap groups at the university and requested funding from various organizations for a study.

But only in 1976 was he able, through the assistance of a disabled veteran, to get the Disabled American Veterans to provided the money he needed to complete the study (Scott, 1993). Out of over 450 interviews he and an associate, Chris Doyle wrote The Forgotten Warrior Project (Wilson, 1977).

In 1977, Figley chaired a research symposium at the American Psychological Association conference where he was able to arrange for the presentation of three papers: Egendorf and his colleagues' first version of what would ultimately become the Legacies of Vietnam study, (Egendorf et al., 1977), his own work from the Consortium (Figley & Southerly, 1977), and Wilson and Doyle's, Forgotten Warrior Project (Wilson & Doyle, 1977).

Each separate study supported and extended the other (Figley, 1978b) and provided even more support for the efforts of the V.V.W.G. in their attempt to change DSM-III.

Ironically, the decision to alter the DSM-III in relation to homosexuality may have had something to do with subsequent changes in the DSM allowing PTSD to enter the lexicon. The argument over whether or not homosexuality was a disease entity was so heated and politically loaded, that Spitzer decided it should be put to a vote. This indicated that the DSM-II could end up being completely redone, opening up negotiating room for those who wanted to reintroduce stress reactions into the classification schema.
In the summer of 1975, the V.V.W.G. invited Spitzer to lunch at Columbia Presbyterian in New York City. The group filled him on their activities and he was willing to appoint a formal committee, the Committee on Reactive Disorders, to proceed with the inquiry. He appointed himself, Dr. Lyman Wynne and Dr. Nancy Andreason to be the representatives on the committee with Andreason as chair.

She had previously worked with burn victims and knew about the long-term psychological as well as physical suffering that was involved in recovery from severe trauma. Spitzer instructed Andreason to work with Shatan, Lifton, and Smith. The appointment of Jack Smith, a non-M.D., was a highly unusual move. But the burden of proof still remained with the V.V.W.G. (Scott, 1993).

Convincing Andreason of the validity of the long-term reactions to overwhelming stress was key to the success of the venture. The Working Group reckoned that persuasion would be easier if they could show the similarities between combat stress and other forms of traumatic experience. So they recruited Harley Shands who had experience working with job-related trauma, Mardi Horowitz who was working on the physiology of stress, combined this with the research related to concentration camp victims that Niederland and Krystal had been doing, and contacted researchers working with other survivor groups to join in their mission.

Sarah Haley pointed out to Andreason that in reviewing the charts of the Vietnam veterans in the VA hospital, she had discovered that many of the clinicians were treating the patients as if there was a diagnosis of traumatic war neurosis available. This practical reality had a particularly strong impact on the discussions (Scott, 1993; Shatan, 1997a). Shatan, Haley and Smith presented their position paper at the 1977 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, representing the accumulated work of the V.V.W.G. and making specific recommendations to the DSM-III Task Force for changes in the categorization system (Figley, 1978a; Shatan, Haley & Smith, 1977).

Early in 1978, Spitzer called the Working Group together to present their findings to the Committee of Reactive Disorders. Lifton, Smith and Shatan presented their evidence in a meeting with Spitzer, Andreason, and Wynne. They emphasized a wide circle of war zone victims, and the similarity between them and other victim groups. Later that month, the Committee released its decision, recommending a diagnosis of "post-traumatic stress disorder".

The DSM-III was completed and published two years later, having incorporated most of the recommendations made by the V.V.W.G., which were very similar to the observations made by Kardiner in the 1940's (Kardiner, 1941; Scott, 1993; Shatan, 1978b). Interestingly, at the same time as the V.V.W.G. were endeavoring to establish criteria for the DMS-III, another group of mental health professionals were working on a diagnostic system for dissociative disorders.

There was no communication between them and the PTSD working group, largely because very little academic conversation had yet occurred about the relationship between dissociation and trauma. As a result, a separate classification for the dissociative disorders was also entered into DSM-III and separate organizations subsequently developed to study these two related fields (Van der Kolk, Herron, & Hostetler, 1994).

In the meantime, President Carter had appointed Max Cleland as Director of the Veterans Administration and Alan Cranston assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. Cleland called a meeting with Art Blank, Charles Figley, Shad Meshad, John Wilson, William Mahedy and others to make specific recommendations for a VA readjustment counseling program.

Art Blank, a psychiatrist, had been drafted to serve in Vietnam in 1965. When he returned and got a position at Yale, one of his clinical positions was at the West Haven VA Hospital treating Vietnam vets. As a result of his own experience, he began diagnosing traumatic war neurosis in 1972, long before his colleagues were willing to see the effects of war on the returning veterans.

He made contact with Sarah Haley after reading her 1974 paper and through her, had met Figley and Shatan (Blank, 1998). Once the Vet Centers became a reality, he became the VA's Chief of Psychiatric Services. As a result of the changed political climate, at the same time as the APA was changing the DSM-III, Congress directed the Veterans Administration to create a nationwide system of specialized counseling centers (Vet Centers) for a wide range of readjustment problems in Vietnam veterans, including PTSD (Blank, 1985). The first Vet Center opened in 1979 and by 1990 there were almost two hundred around the country (Blank, 1993).

The Legacies of Vietnam study was published in 1981. In that year, Robert Laufer, the principle investigator of the study, testified before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. Senator Alan Simpson wrote the Senate report summarizing the testimony and in it he said, "It does appear clear from the report that there is a continuing need for the Vet Center program and, as the findings of that study become more widely known, that need may become greater as veterans and their families come to realize that service during the Vietnam-era may have had an impact on an individual's ability later in life to adjust satisfactorily to his or her social environment" (United States Senate, 1981, p.16).

Convergence Creates a Social Movement Although the Vietnam War provided the "general tendency to change which is apparent in many spheres during wartime" (Jones, 1953), other converging and significant social forces played a role in bringing the recognition of the effects of trauma into the public consciousness in the United States and around the world.

The two most significant, and war-related events, of course, were the Nazi Holocaust and Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Robert Lifton had published an extensive study of Hiroshima victims (1967) a subject few people wanted to address, no more than they really wanted to confront the problems of Vietnam veterans or Holocaust survivors, all "politically incorrect survivors of atrocities" (Milgram, 1998).

William Niederland (1968) had already devoted twenty-five years to working with concentration camp survivors, noting that the same delay preceded their "survivor syndrome" as was being recognized in the work with Vietnam veterans. (Shatan, 1974).

Niederland, who Shatan had known for a long time, and Henry Krystal, who had also studied concentration camp survivors (Krystal, 1968), organized a conference on victimization at Yeshiva University in 1975 and joined the V.V.W.G. (Scott, 1993). Shatan, Lifton, and others working with the Vietnam veterans had already made international contacts as early as 1974 with other professionals working with veterans - in Canada, Switzerland, and Australia as well as Israel (Shatan, 1974).

In the early 70's, Shatan traveled to Israel and met with military psychiatrists there (Scott, 1993). In a letter to the director of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1978, Shatan reported that a liaison had been established with the National Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences of Israel (1978b). There, Dr. Rappaport and an American consultant, Dr. Israel Charny, were working on a project called the "Genocide Early Warning System", hoping to isolate and identify features in a society which prefigure the later development of genocide (1978b).

Studies also began to be published and conferences held in Israel on the effects of war stress there, a logical occurrence given the unremitting nature of warfare in the region (Benyakar & Noy, 1975; Milgram, 1978; Moses et al., 1975; Noy, 1978; Sohlberg, 1975; Steiner & Neumann, 1978). Noach Milgram organized the first of four international conferences on psychological stress and coping in time of war and peace in January, 1975 in Tel-Aviv, a year after the Yom Kippur War, and the second in June, 1978 in Jerusalem.

Both were attended by Israeli and U.S. participants (Milgram, 1998). Israel was naturally the home for a large number of Holocaust survivors, yet there was a "conspiracy of silence" in Israel about listening to their stories (Danieli, 1981), similar to the phenomenon Neff had described in reference to the Vietnam veterans with his observation that Vietnam veterans were invisible patients with an invisible (nonexistent) illness (1975).

Danieli and Solomon have both provided a framework for understanding the gradual transformation of Israeli society towards a willingness to comprehend the magnitude of post-traumatic problems (Danieli, 1981; Solomon, 1995a; b, c, d).

Yael Danieli had served in the Israeli Defense Forces before emigrating to the United States, where she founded the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children. During this period she had already begun her life work, exploring the intergenerational transmission of victimization, styles of adaptation to victimization, survivor guilt, and the attitudes and difficulties of mental health professionals working with survivors and children of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust (Ochberg, 1988b).

She would later go on to establish strong connections with the United Nations and become instrumental in bringing the concepts of traumatic stress to a wider international audience (Danieli, Rodley, & Weisaeth (1996). Ellen Frey-Wouters, a specialist in international law, and originally from the Netherlands, co-authored, with her husband, Robert Laufer, the third volume of the Legacies of Vietnam study while also writing about survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and working on social policy issues around the area of traumatic stress.

Many studies of concentration camp survivors were being conducted in Europe as well, including comprehensive long-term follow-up studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway (Bastiaans, 1974; Eitinger 1961, 1964; Thygesen et al, 1970). Meanwhile, also in Norway, Askevold studied the effects of prolonged stress on men who had served in the Merchant Marine in World War II (1976).
For the European community, Nazi occupations and the terrorism perpetrated by the Gestapo played a significant role in sensitizing them to the long-term consequences of excessive stress (Malt, Schnyder & Weisaeth, 1996).

Another effect of World War II was the vast movement of refugees. Eitinger began studies of refugees in Norway as well as studying concentration camp survivors (1960). The Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon in 1975 brought a flood of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees to the United States. As early as 1979 reports began to be published about the adjustment problems they were having (Lin, Tozuma, & Masuda, 1979), opening up a discourse on how Westerners could most effectively intervene and help refugees from the East (Kinzie, 1978).

Independent of the DSM-III process and the effects of war, a number of other significant developments took place during the 1970s. One was Mardi Horowitz' Stress Response Syndromes (1976), which, building on Selye's earlier work (1956), began to provide a psychophysiological basis for understanding the body's responses to overwhelming experience and how that response connected to psychological processes.

Charles Figley (1978), edited the first significant collaborative book on Vietnam War veterans, and in doing so, introduced a new psychosocial series for Brunner/Mazel that by 1990 would grow to eighteen volumes of literature spanning every victimization category.

Crime rates in the United States rose rapidly in the 1960's and attention was also brought to bear on crime against women and children, probably for the first time in history.

The women's movement was instrumental in bringing attention to the incidence of rape and domestic violence that was being perpetrated against women. The first public speak-out on rape was organized by the New York Radical Feminists in 1971 and the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women was held in Brussels in 1976 (Herman, 1992).

In 1974, Ann Burgess and Linda Holstrom at Boston City Hospital described the "rape trauma syndrome" noting that the terrifying flashbacks and nightmares seen in these women resembled the traumatic neuroses of war. Susan Brownmiller and other feminist writers and thinkers redefined rape as an act of violence directed at maintaining dominance. In doing so, they placed the act of rape squarely in a political framework of power relationships, laying the groundwork for cross-fertilization with colleagues working with other survivor groups (Herman, 1992).

The feminist politicization of violence led to a deepening understanding of the abuse of power within the family, leading to the "discovery" of domestic battering and sexual abuse. As in the cases of delayed combat stress and rape trauma, domestic violence and sexual abuse awareness began at the grassroots, emerging out of feminist consciousness raising groups.

Lenore Walker published her landmark study on victims of domestic violence (1979), while Gelles and Straus released the results of major studies on family violence (Straus, 1977; Gelles and Straus, 1979). Around the same time, Judith Herman and her colleagues in Boston began to document the effects in adult women of having been sexually abused as children (1981). Rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters began to spring up in various communities around the country, outside of the traditional mental health systems.

Finkelhor has described the increasing professional concern about child abuse over the last several decades as being the "result of a broad social movement and a historic moral transformation" (1996, p.ix). C. Henry Kempe, pediatrician at the University of Colorado first described the "battered child syndrome" in 1962 (Kempe et al, 1962; Kempe, 1978). This conceptualization of child abuse brought the medical profession into this social movement with all the authority, prestige, and legitimacy necessary to bring about legislative change.

At first, clinicians and researchers like Green focused on the physical abuse of children (1978a, b). The 1970's saw the establishment of mandatory child abuse reporting laws and a widened system of child protection that was furthered and supported by the growing feminist movement (Finkelhor, 1996). But then Susan Sgroi (1975), David Finkelhor (1979), and others began to document the widespread incidence of the sexual abuse of children and the harm it was doing to them.

In 1973, the Children's Division of the American Humane Association testified before a Senate Committee, estimating that 100,00 children were sexually abused each year. Burgess and her colleagues noted in 1978 that "concern for the victims of sexual assault has become a national priority only during the past five years. In that time, both public awareness of and knowledge about sexual assault and its victims have grown immeasurably" (Burgess et al., 1978, p.ix).

As early as 1975, Shatan was studying the effects of other kinds of trauma on children. In 1972, he chaired a roundtable discussion at the IV International Psychoanalytic Forum in New York, comparing delayed survivor reactions in two parent groups: Vietnam veterans and concentration camp inmates, having noted significant symptoms of unresolved mourning in young adults who were children of World War II veterans from 1965-1970.

He presented a paper at the 1975 meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (1975) looking at the delayed impact of war-making, persecution and disaster on children. But there was a great deal of professional resistance to recognizing that previously normal and healthy children could be severely damaged by exposure to psychologically traumatizing events. In 1979, Lenore Terr published the first of her series of papers and a book on the children of the Chowchilla, California kidnapping which introduced a developmental focus on the effects of trauma.

Elissa Benedek recalls hearing Terr present her data before a mocking and hostile professional audience who were determined to deny the effects of trauma and disaster on previously healthy children. As she puzzled over this seemingly irrational response on the part of a professional group she knew well, she concluded that 'this meeting was but another form or manifestation of a long tradition of denying psychological and psychiatric sequelae in the child victim of trauma.

The audience's response of disbelief in the face of carefully collected documentation, might have been so intense because it was difficult for professionals to accept that traumatic events, caused by fellow humans, in the lives of children might color and shape their lives for years to come" (Benedek, 1985, p.4).

Crime victimization surveys in the U.S. led to the development of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a federal agency designated to provide victim service programs in the 1970's. While new services were starting, researchers were gathering data about the consequences of victimization to the individual and to the entire society.

In 1975, the National Organization of Victim Assistance (NOVA) was founded and other victim-centered groups emerged, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Parents of Murdered Children (Young, 1988). Morton Bard became involved in the crime victim movement in the 1970's when he consulted with law enforcement agencies in New York City and later the National Institute of Justice (Bard & Sangrey, 1979; Bard & Shellow, 1976). He and Dawn Sangrey published a volume for crime victims in Figley's psychosocial series for Brunner/Mazel in 1979.

Both Robert Rich and Susan Salasin became involved in developing mental health programs and social policies to meet the needs of victims (Rich, 1981; Salasin, 1981).

On February 26, 1972, a dam burst in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, destroying houses, a community, and many lives. K. Erickson wrote a book about the survivors of the Buffalo Creek disaster (1976) and other researchers, including Bonnie Green, and later, Jacob Lindy, followed up on the long-term effects of this disaster on the survivors (Gleser, Green & Winget, 1981; Lifton & Olson, 1976; Titchner & Kapp, 1976).

On March 28, 1979, a sizeable portion of the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island experienced a meltdown, outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the most serious U. S. commercial reactor accident to date. Some gaseous, but inert material was released, and no serious health consequences were expected. The population, however, had to be evacuated and a Task Force was rapidly set up to evaluate the highly publicized effects of this event on the affected populations (Dohrenwend, et al., 1981).

Other disaster studies began to emerge in the literature throughout this time period as well (Boman, 1979; Quarantelli & Dynes, 1977; Parker, 1977), building on a knowledge base that dated back to Lindemann's landmark paper on the Cocoanut Grove fire (Lindemann, 1944; Leopold & Dillon, 1963). Manuals on helping disaster victims began to be developed and published (Tierney & Baisden, 1979).
Beverly Raphael from Australia, began publishing her work around disasters and bereavement and she and John Wilson made early contacts with each other, thereby establishing a firm connection with Australia (Raphael, 1977; Raphael & Maddison, 1976; Wilson, 1997).

This growing body of literature on the psychological effects of disaster indicated that there could be long-term consequences of overwhelming stress in populations generally considered by the public to be free from any culpability in their experienced victimization. The high level of publicity given to disasters helped to increase the general level of consciousness about the consequences of trauma.

In 1974, a bank robber in Stockholm, Sweden took a bank teller hostage. They fell in love and had sex during a long siege in the bank vault (Ochberg, 1996). In the same year, the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst and heiress to the Hearst fortune, Patty Hearst, age 19, was kidnapped by a terrorist group, while sitting at home with her boyfriend.

Until September of 1975, she was a captive of the group and was physically, sexually, and emotionally tortured. She developed a new persona and a new name, "Tanya" and was caught by the FBI while participating in a bank robbery with the group. In 1976 she was convicted and sentenced to seven years in jail, three of which she served (Hearst, 1981). This odd form of bonding between kidnapper and victim was later recognized in other types of captivity situations and came to be known as the "Stockholm Syndrome" (Strenz, 1982).

Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist whose career decisions had been in part shaped by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, co-authored a book on violence even as a psychiatric resident (Daniels, Gilula and Ochberg, 1970). He went to work for the National Institute of Mental Health and became the NIMH representative when the U.S. Department of Justice commissioned an inquiry into terrorism in 1975. As a result, he began to focus on victims of terrorism and hostage negotiations.

He served as Associate Director for Crisis Management at NIMH in the late 1970's, consulted to the U.S. Secret Service, and trained Air Force personnel about terrorism and sabotage (Ochberg, 1988a). He published an article on terrorism as early as 1978 in a new journal devoted to the study of terrorism and in 1982 he co-edited one of the first books on terrorism (Ochberg & Soskis, 1982).

In England, an article came out with the seemingly surprising finding that people not seriously harmed in a terrorist bombing were more incapacitated than would have been expected and they termed this an "aftermath neurosis" (Sims, White & Murphy, 1979) Across the nation and around the world, the growing global communication network was tuning us in to tragedy everyday. Trauma was in the air and a budding awareness began to emerge that the various forms of traumatic experience might be similar and even interconnected.

As early as a 1979 paper, Shatan, Haley, and Smith were already comparing the catastrophic stress of natural disasters, man-made disasters, combat trauma, incarceration, Buffalo Creek, Hiroshima, and internment in the death camps. The time was ripe for a convergence, for people to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and sorrow.
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