Even though the sexual abuse of children is a crime, such cases frequently end up in family courts and not criminal courts when the alleged perpetrator is a parent. Experts in child protection say this is a problem, but fixing it would require a broad investigation into how abuse allegations are handled criminally at every level of government.
In the United Kingdom, that’s exactly what is happening now.
The discovery of a decades-old pedophile ring catering to prominent British politicians and the elite going back as far as the 1960s has prompted Prime Minister David Cameron to order an unprecedented inquiry into all agencies charged with investigating child sexual abuse — including police, courts and child welfare agencies.
“In recent years we have seen appalling cases of organized and persistent child sex abuse,” Home Secretary Theresa May told Parliament.
If the United States needs a spark for the same kind of self-examination into how allegations of abuse have been tragically ignored, look no further than Omaha, Nebraska, in 1988.
Back then, horrific allegations similar to those in the U.K. surfaced during an investigation of a failed credit union. The case dubbed the Franklin Cover-Up involved claims that boys and girls from foster homes in Nebraska were flown around the country and sold for sex to politicians. The New York Times described a state investigative file with two years of incidents “including one instance reminiscent of slave auctions.”
Ironically, the most thorough investigation by a media organization into an alleged American cover-up of child sexual abuse was done in 1993 for a U.K. documentary by Yorkshire Television (now ITV Yorkshire). Though it never aired, a fairly polished edit has been available for years on the internet (the preceding link is that version).
The recent discovery of the U.K. pedophile ring has resulted in multiple arrests, including many well-known figures who are now awaiting trial. The only conviction so far has been of Rolf Harris, a former TV personality and musician who wrote “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” and has been sentenced to five years and nine months for assaults on young girls.
The contrast to what happened after child sex trafficking allegations surfaced in Omaha 26 years ago couldn’t be more stark. The only person ultimately jailed in connection with abuse was Alisha Owen, one of four youths who gave officials statements alleging they were forced into a sex ring.
Owen spent nearly five years in prison for perjury.
“For some reason they had to send a signal to every kid who was a potential witness, my opinion again, a signal so loud and clear — if you dare to come forward, if you dare to talk, watch what happens,” says John DeCamp, a former Nebraska state senator, during the hour-long documentary.
Owen, paroled in 2000, was described as an exemplary prisoner. At her parole hearing, officials congratulated her on taking college-level courses and helping to tutor other inmates working to get high school diplomas. “Parole Board Member Bob Boozer said that in his nearly four years on the board he had never seen any inmate with a better record of accomplishment than Owen,” according to an article in the Omaha World-Herald.
The child sexual abuse allegations were revealed during an investigation into the failed Franklin Community Federal Credit Union which centered around the actions of credit union’s manager, Lawrence E. King Jr., who ended up going to jail for financial crimes. King was well-connected in Nebraska Republican politics and sang the National Anthem at the 1984 Republican National Convention.
Nebraska State Sen. Loran Schmit, who headed the investigation into the credit union, turned over the information gathered about the child abuse to the FBI. “I was very disappointed with the way the FBI and law enforcement treated the victims,” Schmit says in the documentary. “They in fact turned them into the offenders, so to speak. And instead of taking the evidence that was delivered to them by the victims and interrogating the persons who the victims identified, they seemed to bear down and try to get the victims to change their story.”
Owen and another youth stood by their statements while two others recanted. One of the youths who recanted, Troy Boner, is interviewed extensively in the documentary. He says, “The FBI’s attitude was no, these kinds of things don’t happen. It’s not going to be believed, they said. It will not be believed. You will be found guilty of perjury. They weren’t telling me maybe, they were saying there is no way. ‘If you go on with this story you are going to jail’ — that was said to me direct. I came to recant the story out of fear.”
During the documentary DeCamp, an attorney who went on to represent two of the youths, played a March 9, 1990, phone call between Boner and Owen that he said was recorded by the FBI. The tape begins with an FBI agent stating his name and that the following is a consensually recorded telephone call. In it Boner asks Owen why she is lying and Owen responds she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The second youth who did not recant, Paul A. Bonacci, was also indicted for perjury but never jailed. He filed a 1991 civil suit against King and won a $1 million default judgment. Bonacci “alleged King and others forced him to take part in a child prostitution ring in Omaha in the 1980s,” according to a January 2000 AP article.
The Nebraska grand jury that indicted Owen and Bonacci for perjury concluded that the ring was a “carefully crafted hoax” without explaining its reasoning. Schmit told the New York Times in 1990 that the grand jury’s report was a strange document.
“That is the kindest thing I can say about it,” Schmit told the Times.
In the documentary he uses stronger language: “It has shaken my faith in the institutions of government. I used to be a firm believer that the system would work. And that people who did things wrong would be punished.
“We discovered victims who claimed to have been abused, and who the grand jury acknowledged had been abused. But they did not try to find out who had abused those individuals. Instead they convicted Alisha Owen of perjury. Indefensible, from my point of view.”
This is the ninth in a series of articles for Daily Kos about the treatment of abused children in the U.S. family court system. M.C. Moewe is a former criminal justice and investigative reporter for several newspapers with a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Texas. Email m AT moewe.com or use this link.