A retired Aurora police sergeant faces criminal charges for raping his daughter and continually sexually assaulting her and his two adopted daughters, but he remains free from custody while his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    37318 days ago

    Her trip to jail occurs as such therapy and its potential harms are increasingly coming under fire in Colorado.

    The treatment is used by family courts to settle custody fights. Services like those provided by Bassett use confrontation and exercises to deprogram a child’s rejection of a parent. In extreme cases, children have been sent across state lines to reunification camps with parents they reject, and they are barred from having contact with their protective parent.

    The fuck

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        23
        edit-2
        17 days ago

        The reunification therapy costs $1,500 a month. Pickrel-Hawkins said she struggles to pay for the therapy. She said she and the children already are stretched thin, surviving on the $2,680 her ex-husband pays her in court-ordered support, though the judge said during one hearing that he believed the mother actually was earning money that she wasn’t disclosing.

        That she has to pay for.

        the mother has custody of the couple’s minor children, and they are living in a domestic violence shelter. She said that she has arranged for family members to care for her children when she goes to jail.

        While living at a shelter.

        The mother said she lost legal representation in the custody dispute after accruing $85,000 in legal bills, which she couldn’t afford. She was sentenced to jail without any representation from a lawyer.

        Even when she doesn’t have enough for a lawyer.

        The 17-year-old daughter claims her father, Hawkins, raped her when she was almost six years old and continually molested her throughout her childhood despite her protestations that he stop, according to court documents. The two adopted daughters also claim they were sexually abused, those documents state.

        The oldest son also told a forensic interviewer he felt like his father tried to drown him in a pool in 2018 in Costa Rica, using police control tactics and holding him under water until he began to black out. The boy said he believed his father was vengeful because the boy woke up one night and confronted his father whose hand he claims he saw down the under garments of his sister.

        Trying to keep them away from a man who absurd their kids for two decades and attempted to kill.

        Absolutely nothing about this situation is justifiable, sane or decent. Fuck this cop, fuck this court, fuck this state, fuck this whole fucking country. Absolutely shameful in every regard.

    • finley
      link
      fedilink
      English
      116
      edit-2
      18 days ago

      Institutionalized, systemic gaslighting, a product of fascism

      Terrifying

      Edit: not even our most horrifying fiction has imagined such a thing, yet here we are, my god…

      Edit 2: no, maybe, briefly, on a smaller scale, there was Arkham Asylum and something similar in a Star Trek TOS episode, but nothing on quite this scale, nor with children…

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      10218 days ago

      Seriously. What the fuck. Institutionalized child abuse. And then they say trans people are somehow the real danger.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      5218 days ago

      Well that’s fucking horrifying… The only thing that got me through childhood alive was that the courts let me decide who I would live with. Why the fuck wouldn’t you listen to the kids? It’s there life on the line.

      • TheHarpyEagle
        link
        fedilink
        2517 days ago

        Seriously, the courts are heaping all of this blame on the mother when the kids repeatedly report physical and sexual abuse by their father.

        Though the divorce judge found there was evidence that Hawkins had physically abused the oldest son, the judge said in his ruling that was “one instance that does not involve either of the two children at issue.”

        Insane. The logic is nonexistent.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        217 days ago

        Kids sometimes want the “fun” but negligent parent rather than the responsible parent who enforces limitations. Some kids feel a strong emotional bond with a parent who is harmful to them.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          716 days ago

          From the perspective of the a former kid who was abused by a step parent, personality, preference, and love never came into it, I just wanted to be safe. Once that person was removed from there life, I had every desire to be around that parent again. Not trusting the kids who tell you THAT parent or their partner is an abuser, you’re fucking up.

    • RubberDuck
      link
      fedilink
      27
      edit-2
      17 days ago

      Ok dad, here is your court ordered hug.

      How does stuff like this not end in suicide or patricide?

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1417 days ago

        That’s the problem with abusers they never think thier murder is on the table. I bet they would be hell of lot nicer if they felt thier actions would have consequences.

      • Karyoplasma
        link
        fedilink
        1017 days ago

        You mean patricide. Fratricide is the killing of one’s sibling.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      1617 days ago

      ‘deprogram’…‘barred from having contact with their protective parent’.

      This will be decades of lawsuits and millions of dollars.