Rekha Basu avoided mentioning one of the major factors in sexual assault in her Feb. 18 column: the breakdown of the family.
Studies have shown that only 1 percent of child sexual assault cases are by a parent. A child living in a home without the biological father is 20 times more likely to be assaulted. If the mother has a live in boyfriend, the rate of sexual assault rises to 33 times. Even when a woman remarries, the risk to the children is still much higher. Although stepfathers are only 10 percent of the population, they account for 27 percent of the cases of assaults on children under 16.
Child abuse and sexual assault has been increasing as the divorce and single-parent-family rates have increased. We need efforts such as the covenant marriage act. Divorce for parents should not be as easy as that for childless couples. If many parents knew the damage they were doing to their children by their divorce they might think twice.
- David C. Hammel, Urbandale
And then there's this from the Cedar Rapids Gazette:
Richelle Bentley found a stack of pornographic pictures of 9-year-old Jetseta Gage and a baby girl in her husband's coat pocket.
She put them back and walked away.
She showed them to her aunt and a friend.
They put them back and walked away.
The next day, she confronted her husband, James Bentley, about the pictures. He told her he'd found them while packing for a move from Cedar Rapids to Arkansas.
Richelle Bentley told him to mail the pictures to Jetseta's mother, so she could take care of them. She never saw the pictures again.
That was nearly three years ago...
...``She was laying back on my bed. Some of them had her legs up in the air. Some of them had her legs up on the bed. She was, like, posing,'' Richelle Bentley said.
She was naked with her pubic area exposed. The then-9-year-old girl was looking right into the camera.
There was also a picture of a naked infant, Richelle Bentley said. And the hand holding the infant's legs apart was, she said, the long, skinny hand of her husband, James Bentley.
``I knew something was wrong. I didn't know what. I didn't know where the pictures had come from, how they ended up in the pocket. I forgot about my sister's camera. There was a lot going on at that time,'' Richelle Bentley testified.
The next day, she showed the pictures to her aunt, Tina
Hartson, and a friend, Stacy Lindsey. Hartson, who had dated James Bentley's brother Roger, recognized Jetseta in the photos.
``She was in sexual poses,'' Hartson testified.
A day or two later when Hartson asked James Bentley about the photos, he said he had found them under an air conditioner. Hartson had helped the Bentleys pack a couple of weeks earlier and had even moved the air conditioner, which had a lot of dust around it.
``And there was nothing underneath it,'' Hartson said.
Lindsey, who also saw the picture, discussed them with her husband, Roger Lindsey, James Bentley's longtime friend. Roger Lindsey testified James Bentley told him that he had found the pictures in the basement of the Cedar Rapids house they had lived in.
But jurors also were shown a videotaped interview with James Bentley at Cedar Rapids Police Department in November 2004, in which James Bentley denied knowing anything about pornographic Polaroid pictures. He did say that during the two years before, Jetseta, whose mother he had dated before his marriage, often stayed at his home overnight.
Sick.
These people make me want to vomit.
They all (except Roger Lindsey) see Polaroid photographs of a 9 year old and a baby being posed for sexual photographs and they don't go to the police. Instead, the wife confronts the monster and tells him to get rid of them. They are all, especially Richelle Bentley, just as liable for the ongoing sexual abuse of these children as is James Bentley.
Nothing short of being publicly whipped and thrown into an icy river is good enough justice for Richelle Bentley, Tina Hartson, Stacy Lindsey, and Roger Lindsey. Scumbags, all of them. They all knew about it. Where's a mob with baseball bats when you need them?
And the Bentley brothers? Both should executed. Tomorrow.
Don't forget that both of your 2006 candidates for governor in Iowa would keep the stupid and arbitrary 2000 foot sexual offender residency law. How would that have prevented the exploitation and death of Jetseta Gage? It wouldn't.
And as far as the death penalty is concerned, you haven't heard a peep out of Governor Culver so far, have you? No, you haven't. And you won't. He's too busy stuffing his face and bending over for the unions.
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