3.25.2009

Back on the streets

I realize it has been a while since I have let you know about outreach on the streets - that is because we have taken a break for quite some time now. Someday I hope to fill you in on all that has been happening in these last few months - things have been crazy, but God has been working and He is faithful!

This last week though we went out on the streets of Hollywood again!! It felt so good to be back out there. We met up at 2:30am - the only people who were out at that time were street people, a few druggies and all the club goers on their way home. It was Laurie, a new guy named Andy and myself. We stopped at 7/11 to get coffee (obviously...although they did NOT have my blueberry!) and prayed in the car. Then we drove up and down the track for a while to scope things out and observe to see when the girls would start coming out. Once we saw a few we parked the car to get out and walk the strip.

A little after parking the car, a young lady came walking by. Laurie got out of the car with a gift bag and introduced myself. She asked her if she could give her a gift bag and she said "for what?" Laueir told her "because you are special" and she said, "who's this from?" and Laurie replied, "Jesus." The girl looked more than a little confused. She was also very wary of her surroundings checking over her shoulder looking all over the place so Laurie just told her that we didn't want her to get in trouble and to be careful out there.

In just a matter of minutes after that girls started coming out from the darkness. First we ran into two, then another two - then another five! We were only able to talk to two out of the five but were able to give both of them bags and a quick hello. There were probably at least 10-15 girls out - if not more. The last two girls we spoke with declined prayer but one ("BD") said laughingly, "Please pray that I make a million dollars so I don't have to do this no more..." The other one "C" said we had met before. For the life of me I don't remember - and I think I'd remember those EYES. But I'll remember from now on. So young, so beautiful.

Then a car pulled up and another girl got out, warning the other girls, "Five O! (Police) Five O down the street!" and the girls all scattered like cockroaches when a light turns on.

When we started walking back to the car we saw one black and white squad car and then an undercover officer talking in a parking lot. We knew that the night was over, at least for us. It is nice to be able to do ministry in Hollywood now rather than driving to Compton. Things are ever changing in this game and in this city...but the need for the commodity never changes. We will continue to build relationships with these girls - they were all unfamiliar "new" faces. Young faces.

3.18.2009

The father pleads guilty

My heart just hurts for the brokenness of humanity...

I don't know if any of you read up on this story when it came out in April - but here is the wrap up of the case. I have heard few things that have made me cringe more. But this verdict and the way this case closed just broke my heart.
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Josef Fritzl, the Austrian accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering seven children with her, has changed his pleas to guilty on all charges.

Fritzl said video testimony from his daughter, played in court on Tuesday, made him change his mind.

Josef Fritzl locked up his daughter for 24 years. The charges include rape, incest, murder and enslavement.

A court doctor has recommended that the 73-year-old be sent to a psychiatric facility for treatment.

At the start of his trial on Monday, Fritzl denied the charges of enslavement and murdering one of the children soon after its birth.

His surprise turnabout also altered his plea from "partial" to guilty on the charge of rape.

Fritzl's lawyer said watching his daughter's testimony had profoundly affected him, "destroying" his emotions.

Proceedings have ended for the day. A verdict and sentencing is expected on Thursday.

'Sorry'

Wearing a grey suit and a blue shirt, Fritzl did not hide his face on Wednesday, as he had done for the past two days, when he was led into the courtroom in St Poelten, west of Vienna.

As proceedings began, the judge asked Fritzl how he felt after watching the videotaped testimony of his daughter.

In a low voice he said: "I plead guilty."

"Your daughter told you the baby was suffering from breathing problems," the judge said. "You had time to get first aid."

Fritzl said: "I was hoping the little one would survive but I should have done something. I don't know why I didn't help. I just lost sight [of the issue]."

He then said he was "sorry".

Speaking later outside court, Fritzl's lawyer Rudolf Mayer said his daughter's testimony had allowed him to see for the first time the impact of his actions.

Describing his client, Mr Mayer said Fritzl was "a person who had only one idea - 'I must always be full of power'".

Mr Mayer said he was "very, very surprised" by Fritzl's plea reversal, but that Fritzl hoped his change of plea would help his victims.

The court later heard psychiatrist Dr Adelheid Kastner say there was a danger Fritzl would repeat his behavior if he was left untreated.

She recommended that he be sent to a psychiatric facility, although strictly speaking he was not insane.

"What I told the court was that Mr Fritzl has never been mentally ill," she told the BBC outside the courtroom, "and that he has always been sane in the legal sense of the word - that he was always able to discern between right and wrong, and that he always knew what he did was wrong."

She said Fritzl had an overwhelming need to dominate and control, which she said stemmed from his childhood.

She said he was an unwanted, unloved child, intelligent, who had grown up determined to have somebody who belonged to him alone.

He was emotionally deficient but that he knew what he was doing was wrong, she added.

Soundproofed chamber

The court viewed the testimony from Fritzl's daughter on Tuesday.

Austrian media reports said his daughter Elisabeth was in a private viewing chamber in the courthouse at the time. However, officials refused to confirm this, saying only that a number of unnamed people had been there.

Fritzl lured his 18-year-old daughter into a cellar with windowless, soundproofed chambers beneath their house in Amstetten in 1984.

He imprisoned her there and raped her repeatedly over a number of years.

The daughter and three of the children fathered by Fritzl were kept captive in the cellar until the case came to light in April last year, when one of the children became seriously ill and was taken to hospital.

He was accused of murdering one of newborn twin boys his daughter gave birth to in 1996, having failed to arrange medical care for the ailing infant.

3.12.2009

Castration of Czech sex offenders: Deterrent or torture?

This news story is CRAZY...and I don't even know how to sort out my thoughts yet. I will post reflections later. For now - read it for yourself so we can have a dialogue about it later.
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PRAGUE: Pavel remembers the violent night sweats two days before the murder. He went to see a family doctor, who said they would go away. But after viewing a Bruce Lee martial arts film, he said, he felt uncontrollable sexual desires. He invited a 12-year-old neighbor home. Then he stabbed the boy repeatedly.

His psychiatrist says Pavel derived sexual pleasure from the violence.

More than 20 years have passed. Pavel, then 18, spent seven years in prison and five years in a psychiatric institution. During his last year in prison, he asked to be surgically castrated. Having his testicles removed, he said, was like draining the gasoline from a car hard-wired to crash. A large, dough-faced man, he is sterile and has forsaken marriage, romantic relationships and sex, he said. His life revolves around a Catholic charity, where he is a gardener.

"I can finally live knowing that I am no harm to anybody," he said during an interview at a McDonald's here, as children played loudly nearby. "I am living a productive life. I want to tell people that there is help."

He would not give his last name for fear of being hounded.

Whether castration can help rehabilitate violent sex offenders has come under new scrutiny after the Council of Europe's anti-torture committee last month called surgical castration "invasive, irreversible and mutilating" and demanded the Czech Republic stop offering the procedure to violent sex offenders. Other critics said that castration threatened to lead society down a dangerous road toward eugenics.

The Czech Republic has allowed at least 94 prisoners to be surgically castrated over the past decade. It is the only country in Europe that uses the procedure for sex offenders. Czech psychiatrists supervising the treatment - a one-hour operation that involves removal of the tissue that produces testosterone - insist that it is the most foolproof way to tame sexual urges in dangerous predators.

Surgical castration has been a means of social control for centuries. In ancient China, eunuchs were trusted to serve the imperial family inside the palace grounds; in Italy several centuries ago, youthful male choir members were castrated to preserve their high singing voices.

These days it can also be used to treat testicular cancer and some advanced cases of prostate cancer.

Now, more countries in Europe are considering mandating or allowing chemical castration for violent sex offenders. There is intense debate over whose rights take precedence: those of violent sex offenders, who could be subjected to a punishment that many consider cruel, or those of society, which expects protection from sexual predators.

Poland is expected to become the first nation of the European Union to give judges the right to impose chemical castration on at least some convicted pedophiles, using hormonal drugs to curb sexual appetite; the impetus for the change was the arrest of a 45-year-old man in September who had fathered two children by his young daughter.

Spain is considering plans to offer chemical castration after a convicted pedophile killed a child.

Last year, the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, signed legislation requiring courts to order chemical castration for offenders convicted a second time of certain sex crimes against children.

In the Czech Republic, the issue was brought home last month when Antonin Novak, 43, was sentenced to life in prison for raping and killing Jakub Simanek, a 9-year-old boy who disappeared last May.

Novak, who had served four and a half years in prison for sexual offenses in Slovakia, had been undergoing outpatient treatment but had failed to show up several months before the killing. Advocates of surgical castration argued that had he been castrated, the tragedy could have been prevented.

Hynek Blasko, Jakub's father, expressed indignation that human rights groups were putting the rights of criminals ahead of those of victims. "My personal tragedy is that my son is in heaven, and he is never coming back, and all I have left of him is 1.5 kilograms of ashes," he said in an interview. "No one wants to touch the rights of the pedophiles, but what about the rights of a 9-year-old boy with his life ahead of him?"

Ales Butala, a Slovenian human rights lawyer who led the Council of Europe's delegation to the Czech Republic, argued that surgical castration was unethical, since it was not medically necessary and deprived castrated men of the right to reproduce. He also challenged its effectiveness, saying that the council's committee had discovered three cases of castrated Czech sex offenders who had gone on to commit violent crimes, including pedophilia and attempted murder.

In its report, the committee also said that it had found cases of first-time, nonviolent offenders who had been surgically castrated, including mentally retarded men and exhibitionists. Although the procedure is voluntary, Butala said that he believed some offenders feel they have no choice.

"Sex offenders are requesting castration in hope of getting released from a life of incarceration," he said. "Is that really free and informed consent?"

But government health officials and some Czech psychiatrists counter that castration can be effective and argue that, by seeking to outlaw the practice, the council is putting potential victims at risk.

Dr. Martin Holly, a leading sexologist and psychiatrist who is director of the Psychiatric Hospital Bohnice in Prague, said none of the nearly 100 sex offenders who had been physically castrated had committed further offenses.

A Danish study of 900 castrated sex offenders in the 1960s suggested the rate of repeat offenses dropped after surgical castration to 2.3 percent from 80 percent.

But human rights groups counter that such studies are inconclusive since they rely on self-reporting by sex offenders. Other psychiatric experts argue that sexual pathology is in the brain and cannot be cured by surgery.

Holly, who has counseled convicted sex offenders for four decades, stressed that the procedure was being allowed only for repeat violent offenders who suffered from severe sexual disorders. Moreover, he said, the procedure is undertaken only with the informed consent of the patient and with the approval of an independent committee of psychiatric and legal experts.

Jaroslav Novak, chief of urology at the Faculty Hospital Na Bulovce in Prague, said: "This is not a very common procedure. We carry it out maybe once every one to two years at most."

In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that involuntary surgical castration constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Several states, including Texas, Florida and California, now allow or mandate chemical castration for certain convicted sex offenders.

Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, argued that chemical castration was less physically harmful than surgery and that it provided a safeguard, because a psychiatrist could inform the courts or the police if the patient ordered to undergo treatment failed to show up. A surgically castrated patient, Berlin said, could order testosterone over the Internet.

For Hynek Blasko, the murdered boy's father, neither form of castration is the answer. "These people must be under permanent detention where they can be monitored," he said. "There has to be a difference between the rights of the victim and the perpetrator."