In defense of our children - an important message from Brasscheck TV‏

Lisbon
 
No video this time...just a very important
message. 
 
Please read and if you agree with me that it's
important, please share.
 
Thanks.
 
=========================================
 
=== It's sick - plain and simple ===
 
There's been little discussion about the 
euphemstically-named full-body "pat downs" taking 
place in US airports as they effect CHILDREN.
 
We've put up numerous videos now of very young children
being stripped searched in public, touched against their
will, and, in any other place and under any other 
circumstances, molested by TSA screeners.
 
Parents are counseled to tell their children that
these "screenings" are a game.  
 
The US news media's comment on this?
 
Deafening silence. 
 
Instead they ask us if we aren't being "too sensitive"
and tell us there needs to be a "balance between
security and privacy." 
 
Children are being taught that anyone in uniform
has free access to their bodies...that they can't
say "no"...and that their parents are unable to protect
them. 
 
In turn, parents are being taught that they
cannot protect their children.
 
The only word that comes to my mind to describe
this enterprise is "criminal."
 
Did not the TSA, Homeland Security, and the White
House (and the jackals in Congress that fund this
insanity) anticipate this as an outcome?
 
There are two possibilities here: either this is
official idiocy and arrogance of the highest order
or this outcome was anticipated and deemed acceptable.  
 
I don't know the answer...but I do know that as a
governmenty agency that works closely with the CIA
and FBI, Homeland Security and the TSA have access
to hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists,
in their employ, under contract, and available 
at the drop of a dime. 
 
I am not an expert in child abuse so I asked my
friend and colleague Kenneth Wooden for his comment. 
 
Wooden is a former journalist and author of the
chilling and important book "The Children of Jonestown."
 
His experience covering the Jonestown story and seeing
the hundreds of children's coffins that came back from
Guyana motivated him to create a training company that
teaches children how to identify and protect themselves
from predators. 
 
I asked him what he thinks of the TSA's policy of
commanding its employees to strip search and conduct
full body "pat downs" of small children.
 
I specifically asked him his opinion of the TSA
advising that young children be told that these officially 
sanctioned intrusions of their bodies are a game. 
 
Wooden's answer follows...
 
=== The TSA has crossed the line ===
 
As a national child personal safety expert, I submit the TSA 
crosses the line when it allows the patting down of children for 
security reasons, cloaked as a game.  
 
The most recent Gallup Poll on childhood abuse revealed that in just one
year, more than a million children were sexually and physically abused.
Along the same lines, the American Medical Association has referred to the
rape and sexual exploitation of women and children as a "violent and silent
epidemic."  Men increasingly reveal how they were sexually assaulted in
their youth, by a rainbow of sexual predators, usually someone they knew.
 
Given that background - and the number of survivors that have been sexually
abused and exploited - it is beyond comprehension how the Homeland Security
Agency's  TSA can conceive of such insensitive and invasive security checks
on our children and youth.  Even worse, they want to depict pat downs of
children as a game!  As an investigative researcher/reporter who has
interviewed well over a thousand sexual offenders, I can document that one
of the favorite ploys to lure children and youth into sexual abuse is to
disguise it as a "game."
 
How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and
misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a
game?!To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse
prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years.
Such policy could essentially desensitize children to inappropriate touch
and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children.
This policy is also incredibly insensitive to the countless victims who have
already been traumatized by unwanted touching in their lives and could be
re-traumatized by such pat-downs. 
 
In my judgment as a lifelong journalist and child advocate, such unapprised
actions by the TSA borders on criminal negligence and, legally speaking,
"deliberate indifference to the future emotional well being of millions of
victims and the potential for far too many more young victims." 
 
Ken Wooden
 
Child Lures Prevention