Friday, January 21, 2022

Getting Away With Not Quite Murder: A Child Sexual Abuse Story Remembered


This is an all too common affair among the sons of Adam: when child sexual abuse allegations corroborated by witnesses of the depravity can be admitted to by the perpetrator in a court of law but still be dismissed, be ignored by the police and unadmitted to at Christian church where the abuse occurred at. It's all too common and it should be remembered how an escape from any apparent accountability there occurs. In the last days where evil is cloaked as good, this is to be expected and fulfills once again the cutting indictment of Scripture against such wrongdoing. 

What is singularly horrific is when the perpetrator is a school teacher who volunteers at Christian camps and is alone with children whom are groomed by them to accept the sexual abuse as a manifestation of "God's love." The church was the North Side Gospel Center in Chicago (now defunct) and Camp Awana in Fredonia, Wisconsin (in a bizarre twist of irony, the well known Awana children's church educational program was started in the basement of the church in Chicago). As far as we know, the teacher, one Cherie Carlson was not confronted by the middle school, nor law enforcement. Beyond a statement that the church would cooperate in the investigation, nothing else is know if Carlson received any punitive sanction whatsoever.

You can watch the 2013 investigative video produced by WMAQ in Chicago here about this grotesque incident where Carlson had been seen sexually fondling a girl in the 1990s by a third individual in the camp cabin it occurred. Later that year, the girl who is now a mother sought to sue her directly. Carlson was a middle school teacher at Cooper Middle School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois at the time of this controversy several years in the past but was able to walk back and deflect the accusations which surfaced in a civil but not a criminal court.

To underscore her confidence in her ability to move forward, she would go on and be reinstated back to her job at the school the following year in 2014, opening up a YouTube account (which is now devoid of video content but still is active) not long after the accusation of wrong doing surfaced to support her middle school activities. To this day, Carlson remains employed there.

And later in 2017 Carlson would wiggle completely out of accountability solely because of her appeal to the statute of limitations and not a litigated defensive denial of wrongdoing in that civil court. She didn't deny and all but admitted that the sexual abuse had occurred but she had failed to report it in time and this slipshod defense worked. The lawsuit was dismissed and the appeal affirmed it. You can read about the warped opinions offered by an appellate court in Illinois that allowed Carlson to move on with her life, leaving the victim Jane Due in the dust of injustice.

And if you think this is an isolated instance of a complete breakdown in the efforts to make such perpetrators accountable, meet some links that will beg to differ by the Net.

That's the American way. But Cherie, God saw it all. I hope you repented and made restitution to your victim .. or victims. 



 

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