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Graham Cleghorn….victim
of injustice in |
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Tales of When I was a young cadet
journalist in the late 1980's, I was given the opportunity to sit in on a
court case, which became known as the Mr Bubbles case, under the guidance of
one of To me, the testimonial evidence
seemed overwhelming. There were more than 50 counts of sexual abuse to be
answered. Details were leaked to the press, including the fact that Deren had
been investigated on similar charges when the couple lived in But the case was thrown out at the
committal stage for a very simple reason. The judge ruled that well meaning
social workers and inexperienced police, convinced that Deren, his wife and
two childcare workers were guilty, had coerced stories from the children and
potentially imbued them with memories of things that had never happened. He
also accepted expert witness opinion that parents had formed panic-stricken
groups and swapped ever escalating details of ever more bizarre sexual
assaults on their children. The testimonies were so contaminated that they
were inadmissible. The Derens walked free, but their
life was in tatters. And, even more sadly, a number of children were sent
back into the world believing they had been abused and their attacker had
gone unpunished. Spin the clock forward to Both men refused a television
interview. But Betterridge, in particular, interested me. I have interviewed
numerous pedophiles in my time here. To say pedophilia does not exist here in
Back in Siem Reap, I walked into a
local restaurant fresh from the jail and met another man, Graham Cleghorn. I
got to talking, and he told me he would be the next to be arrested. He
claimed child protection groups were operating with impunity, taking
advantage of an unassailable cause and a free reign from donors anxious to
earn headlines to justify their expenditure. He said one group had singled
him out as a child molester, and now it was trying to manufacture evidence to
make the theory fit. He too gave me names and addresses. He too urged me to
investigate. In a remote part of the province,
a little girl called Sok told my translator her story. She and her mother
claimed she had been abducted by a non-government organization without her
mother's consent, held against her will in a center and told that the group
already knew she had been abused by Cleghorn, that others had already
confessed, that she should confess, that she would not see her mother again
unless she told the truth.\ This was a full year before
Cleghorn's arrest. Sok denied she had been molested. Her mother finally found
out where she was and says a court order helped her release her nine-year-old
girl. The same little girl was later to be taken again by the same group
under the same circumstances, this time for two weeks, this time after
Cleghorn's arrest. She says this time she was subjected to a virginity test
by a male doctor without her mother's knowledge or presence. She was only
released after that test (a cursory but invasive test which would not be
considered conclusive in a Western court) said she was a virgin and she
refused to say she had been fondled or molested in any other way. Her mother
says she was promised compensation money from the court if she coerced her
daughter to admit she had been abused by the foreigner. Other mothers in a
village more that 40 kilometers away told the same story. The stories told by families of
girls and women against Lauwaert and Betterridge told similar stories,
although in their case, initially at least, they had agreed they had been raped.
The police and the non-government organization had brought one girl back to
the village after she filed a complaint. The rest of the village was told
that she was going to court and would win the case the equivalent of
offering money in the compensation-orientated Cambodian court system.
Families said others were then offered the same opportunity if they put their
daughters forward. No one questioned whether the
foreigners would cough up. In When the girls later recanted at
appeal, one girl was arrested. Another fled before police, which the
villagers claim were accompanied by officials from the CWCC, could detain
her. The CWCC and police deny the organization prompted the arrest. They did
not deny arresting the girl, a day before the court announced it had turned
down the appeal. The same day as the court made its announcement, the
Australian government declared it would not extradite Betterridge, who had
spent years in custody in Cleghorn was convicted of rape in
2004 and sentenced to 20 years, largely on the testimonial evidence of five adult
maids, two of whom he had sacked prior to their complaint. The girls who
claimed they had been abducted by the non-government organization but had
refused to press charges despite a mixture of promises of money and threats
against their family were not allowed to testify. Cleghorn claimed the women
he sacked had also been having affairs with soldiers in a nearby military
camp. He claimed they had been approached on numerous occasions prior to his
arrest by the women's organization, which had promised them the equivalent of
40 years wages in compensation and free legal support if they testified they
had been raped. One of the women appeared in court obviously pregnant (to her
Khmer husband) claiming she was single and would never find a partner because
of the damage to her reputation Cleghorn's rapes had done. In March 2004 I published a story
in the Dow Jones publication entitled "Madness In Their Methods",
detailing what I felt to be flaws in the way some organizations were pursuing
sex cases, and using the cases in Siem Reap, all brought by the one
organization the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center (CWCC) to illustrate what I believed to be the
problems. The CWCC held a press conference in Many of the people they convict
are indeed guilty. No one is denying this. But my point, and one that gets
lost in the emotive hype these organizations use to cover up technically
unethical methods, is two-fold; some men who are convicted might be innocent,
and the methods being used to catch these people, guilty or innocent, border
on illegal, certainly would not stand up in a developed court system, and are
detrimental to the children. "A child who is the victim of prolonged sexual abuse
usually develops low self-esteem, a feeling of worthlessness and an abnormal
or distorted view of sex. The child may become withdrawn and mistrustful of
adults, and can become suicidal. Some children who have been sexually abused
have difficulty relating to others except on sexual terms. Some sexually
abused children become child abusers or prostitutes, or have other serious
problems when they reach adulthood." - Flash forward to the riverfront in
My translator asks him how old he
is. "I'm 16, but tell the foreigner I am 14," he says in Khmer. The
age of consent in Another boy is boasting about how
he put a foreigner behind bars. "I waited until he was out, and then let
myself into his hotel room with some young kids and we took a bunch of
photos," he says. "He promised me money, and then he didn't give me
any. He deserved it." This boy is addicted to methamphetamines. He lost
his virginity long before he started using drugs. He is 18 now and has been
prostituting himself for at least four years. "The Angkar (the Cambodian
word for the organization) pays us to go to court," he claims. A third riverfront boy has heard
that one foreigner is paying tuition fees for a number of his piers, but not
him. "Pay for me to go to school or I will tell the Angkar you rape
me," he threatens. He might be as old as 14. He looks perhaps 12. "Persons doing evaluations must be professionals with
special skills and experience in child and adolescent sexual abuse and
trained in diagnostic evaluation of both children and adults. And
ideally evaluations should be performed under the direction of an experienced
child and adolescent psychiatrist or psychologist." - Barbara C.
Johnson, a member of the Bars of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the
First U.S. Circuit District Court and Court of Appeals. Back in Siem Reap, I ask the CWCC
who their child psychologist is. We have finished a long interview during
which an official has admitted to giving police gifts, holding suspected
victims together for long periods pretrial to help them with their stories
and "for their own protection" and occasionally taking children
without their parent's knowledge or consent if they believe the parent might
be obstructive or acting with someone they believe to be an abuser. They are
the guardians, they say. Their intentions are good. And how else, they ask, are
they meant to operate in a corrupt system? But despite their good intentions
and their long record of assisting women and children in difficulties, they
admit they do not have a child psychologist. They do not even employ a
psychologist. One woman there has done some workshops, they say. This, too,
is not a fault common to just the CWCC. Despite the number of children
organizations say are abused in "Children who have been sexually abused should have
an evaluation by a child and adolescent psychiatrist or other qualified
mental health professional to find out how the sexual abuse has affected
them, and to determine whether ongoing professional help is necessary for the
child to deal with the trauma of the abuse. The child and adolescent
psychiatrist can also provide support to other family members who may be
upset by the abuse." - Srei Mon was the first to bring
the case against Lauwaert and Betterridge. She would be almost 17 now. At the
same time she made allegations against the two foreigners, she also accused a
relative of molesting her since the age of around eight. Her father was
certified mentally ill many years before she went to work for foreigners.
After the convictions, she, like the others, found herself unemployed. No
foreigner wants to employ a girl who has just testified against her former
employers. And the compensation never came. The CWCC did not act on these
allegations. After Srei Mon testified, she was returned to her family. Soon
after it became apparent that no compensation would be forthcoming, her
father burned down the family home. The second to last time I asked
after her, her brother said she had run away and was working at a karaoke
parlor a common front for prostitution. Ironically, according to her
brother, the karaoke parlor was located on the doorstep of another child
protection agency. The last time I asked after Srei Mon, she had disappeared.
Her brother said some of the family believed she was dead. Others hoped she
had found work, perhaps even as a prostitute, in Poi Pet, the border crossing
notorious as a human trafficking port. Not because they wanted her to be
a prostitute, he stressed, but because they would rather face that reality
than the prospect she was dead. The family claimed the CWCC had not continued
support after the guilty verdict against the two foreigners. The CWCC said
the family had not asked. "Through suggestive interviewing techniques and
repeated questioning, children can be led to get wrong not only peripheral details,
but the central gist of events they experienced, even events affecting their
bodies that could have sexual implications. There is no 'Pinocchio Test'
(scientifically acceptable test or procedure analogous to Pinocchio's nose
growing longer when he didn't tell the truth) to determine whether
allegations that emerge after repeated interviews using suggestive techniques
are accurate or merely the product of the suggestive interview procedures.
Whenever possible (and as soon as possible) interviews with children in cases
where sexual abuse is suspected should be electronically preserved (audio or
videotaped), ideally from the first interview on -- not just transcripts or
notes and not just from the point when a child begins to disclose." -
Drs. Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck "Videotaping of interviews
with children is also recommended for the sake of the child. Videotaping can
reduce the number of interviews to which the child is subjected, with each
interview likely to produce some stress to the child (Lamb, 1994). Therefore,
videotaping should be viewed as advisable by child advocates who are
interested in protecting the child from the trauma of repeated, confusing,
and possibly suggesting or coercive questioning." - http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume9/j9_1_4.htm At trial, Lauwaert denied knowing
four of the women and girls who testified against him. "I have met six
of them before why would I lie about never having seen the other
four?" he said. Before he left town, Betterridge also claimed not to
know at least one legal-aged woman against him who had initially claimed rape
but later changed to say she had been forced to perform oral sex on him after
tests indicated she was still a virgin. I spoke to her shortly after the
conviction. "Did Betterridge do something bad you?" I asked. She
said she thought so. Her mother said she knew so. And then, while her mother
railed against Betterridge, the teen began to cry. "I just don't know
anymore," she sobbed. Her mother spoke about how the girl had become an
outcast in the village, how she would never now marry in a society where
chastity is more than a virtue for a female it is a requirement. Some months after that, when the
compensation never came, the girl changed her mind. She now says Betterridge
never touched her and blames herself for bad luck which came to the village
after the convictions bad luck like the father of Srei Mon torching the
family home, like the parent of another alleged victim dying, like the fact
that the compensation never came, and some of the families who had bought
things they could never have afforded before were subjected to the indignity
of these things being repossessed, and the indignity of debt. I ask the CWCC
if it has tapes of the interviews with the witnesses. That cost, it says, is
not in the budget, and police in Respected child psychologist
Stephen Ceci answers an email I send. He stresses that he is not speculating
on the guilt or innocence of the men involved in any cases, and that his
focus is on the children and young adults. In his work and that of colleague
Maggie Bruck, most prominently in the book, 'Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A
Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony', he has outlined a number of
factors which will taint young people's testimony. All of them are interview
techniques the CWCC has freely admitted to using in the interests of
extracting testimony - in the interests, it says, of putting perpetrators
behind bars. They include interviewer bias --
when the interviewer (parent, therapist, investigator) believes he or she
knows what happened and attempts to get the child to confirm it, ignoring
anything the child says that does not conform with the interviewer's bias and
encouraging anything that does. The CWCC freely admits it believed the men to
be guilty before it interviewed the children and women. Another risk factor to both the
children and the truth of their testimony Ceci outlines is repeated questions
- "children, especially younger children, are more likely to change
their answers when asked the same yes or no question repeated during a single
interview. Answers from children to yes or no questions repeated over several
interviews are likely to become more firm and confident, regardless of
whether they are correct". I can still hear the girl against Betterridge
crying. The organization says it often keeps the witnesses together in
isolation pre-trial and questions them repeatedly to make sure they are
primed for the rather brutal Cambodian court system, where they will stand
beside the man they are accusing. And the little girl, Sok, says; "They
asked me over and over where did he
touch you. I said he didn't touch me. They didn't believe me." Peer pressure -- children's
reports can be influenced by the application of peer pressure ('Johnny told
me all about it, and he said you were there, too.') Studies also show that
children can incorporate into their own memories experiences that their peers
told them about, but which they did not witness themselves. Another girl who says she was
taken to testify against Cleghorn echoes Sok "They told us all the
others had already confessed. They told us we should confess too," she
says. The mothers claim they were told to pressure the girls to
"confess" or face prosecution themselves for protecting Cleghorn.
Both girls refused to testify. Others, however, did. "Based on the information you
sent me," Ceci writes in a 2003 email, "it is my opinion that the
children who are subjected to such strong familial pressures and
institutional prepping are at risk for providing inaccurate testimony about
their alleged abuse. Note that I am not saying that the children were never
molested by the defendants -- that is clearly something I cannot know.
Rather, I am saying that the sort of strong pressures you described are known
to create significant risks of tainted testimony. I suspect that in American
jurisdictions that have so-called "taint hearings" to determine the
reliability of children's statements before they are considered to be
admissable, such children would often be excluded from testifying unless
there were…independent evidence to back up their statements. Sadly, we know
from research that if you pursue children as relentlessly and urgently as
these children appear to be pursued, some of them can even end up believing
statements that they originally realized were untrue." At the end of the day, I cannot
make a judgment on the guilt or innocence of any of these men. Not even a
judge could, given the pressure these children and adolescence have been put
under to extract the testimony - testimony that must be seen as tainted. Add
to that the trauma many of these kids went through before they even made the
allegations, and the continuing hell many of their lives are long after the
people they accuse are behind bars and the scene is a desolate one of
repeated abuse, lost lives, children damaged by the system saving them as
much as the men accused of molesting them. Some governments, such as the Yes, pedophilia and abuse happen
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