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.
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
Forced Stockholm syndrome as therapy.
I don’t know why people are against it. You get used to it after a while.
/s
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.
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…
Seriously. What the fuck. Institutionalized child abuse. And then they say trans people are somehow the real danger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok dad, here is your court ordered hug.
How does stuff like this not end in suicide or patricide?
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.
You mean patricide. Fratricide is the killing of one’s sibling.
Yes… updated
‘deprogram’…‘barred from having contact with their protective parent’.
This will be decades of lawsuits and millions of dollars.
This makes me genuinely feel unwell. Some people are just horrific.
I really recommend everyone to read the article. Shit somehow only gets worse
Not only is the asshole a rapist, he also tried to drown one of his sons because said son confronted him after catching mr “model citizen” with his hands on one of the daughters’ private parts.
Those reunification therapy sessions? The mother has to pay the $370 per week alone when it’s just her 2 sons attending. There was also one session:
She said she checked on her children during the session and found one of her sons curled in a fetal position on the ground in Bassett’s office, but Bassett ordered her to stop addressing what the mother termed the serious needs of her children.
She said she fears the reunification therapy is harming her boys, whom she described as crying uncontrollably, having explosive outbursts and expressing thoughts of self-harm after attending Bassett’s reunification sessions with their father.
Ms. Basset, the “reunification therapist”, deserves some jail time as well
The “faith based therapy” thing make everything make a whole lot more sense…
I don’t understand how it’s legal for a court to order religion-based therapy that costs $1500 per month. That’s absolutely insane from every possible angle.
We’re now far beyond most people’s perception of “sure, but that couldn’t happen here” in many parts of the country. They are clinging to what they think is true instead of seeing what is because confronting the reality is difficult - it challenges the fundamental truths we believed would be there no matter what, but that’s not true now and it’s only getting worse.
As society evolved for the better on the whole, around 2010 the gop had a choice to die in irrelevancy and shame or to break society to a point where their shame wasn’t a disqualifying factor anymore. They choose to break shit (watch a doc called “slaying the dragon” for a good summary of this). That set the stage for trump and gave the heritage foundation access needed to start cutting important wires and pouring gasoline on critical infrastructure of democracy. They’ll risk sinking the ship with all of us on board rather than no longer have a chance at being Captain.
The story reads like a super villain origin story, it just … it boggles the mind that reality could be this fucked
his ex-wife is in jail for objecting to court-ordered reunification therapy meant to repair his relationship with two of his sons.
Yeah, because top priority when encountering a piece of shit incestual paedophilic rapist, is to reunite him with the children he set aside while he preyed on the others. 🤯🤬
Be it a system or an individual - abusers defend abusers. It’s always projection in self defence, it’s why they’ve constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory about secret paedophile rings run by the rich and powerful, yet when someone rich and powerful (and white and straight), and those who serve them, acts in direct defence of a paedophile, they look the other way.
The judge who made this ruling, along with everyone who enabled it, need to have their hard drives searched and the children in their lives questioned and potentially removed for their safety. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that if they did this, they would find at least one more paedophile.
As for the mother and kids, I hope they sue the state or the court or whoever it is they can, and win millions to pay for the new life they’re going to need to build for themselves and therapy they’re going to need for the rest of their lives (never mind compensation for the obscene miscarriage of justice of locking her up).
piece of shit incestual paedophilic rapist
Pro tip for concise writing: this can be simplified to the word “cop”.
I mean, ACAB, but there are plenty of piece of shit incestual paedophilic rapists who aren’t cops, and I don’t see why they should be excluded.
From personal experience, they tend to be authoritarians with an inflated sense of self-esteem which means they enjoy blaming victims. Which is not an uncommon set of traits for a cop.
The judge who made this ruling, along with everyone who enabled it, need to have their hard drives searched and the children in their lives questioned and potentially removed for their safety. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that if they did this, they would find at least one more paedophile.
I think it’s just the legal system protecting cops, like it always does.
Sure, there’s that, but it’s only part of a much bigger problem (that is why society at large allows cops, and other figures of authority, to get away with shit to the point where it’s a cliche. The problem is the patriarchy and the rape culture it cultivates).
Fair point!
A guilty system recognises no innocents.
There is absolutely no place in a modern culture for oppressive ideologies like conservatism. Conservative judges protect oppressive (abusive) fathers while oppressing (abusing) the women and children.
This has always been the way of conservatism. Always.
This has always been the way of conservatism. Always.
I have relatives in a rather conservative setting where swearing in presence of women is very bad, swearing at women is just dangerous, beating women is, well, not acceptable. Rape (with people knowing about it) means surrendering to the law is the rapist’s best option.
Christianity differs in various places of our planet and so on.
It’s still annoying to explain to my aunt that a single F-word in an article doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading further. I have not been successful in that, too.
I hear you. I used to
resentdespise religion. But then I spent time around progressives who happened to be Christian. They behaved in exactly the opposite ways conservative religious people are known to behave. I’m from the south. We just don’t see that down here. It really caused me to think about the effect of conservatism on religion.I think the more conservative a person is, with or without religion, the more cruel, inhumane or sociopathic that person is. One can accurately determine a person’s level of conservatism just by observing the severity of these traits. Religion seems to amplify these conservative traits, but it doesn’t always predict them in my experience.
Immoral people try to coerce any ideology to support them. As in “throwing something at the wall and hoping it sticks”. As in “many statements contradictory between themselves”.
That’s how Israelis play conservatism, for example. If most people interested in conservatism and Christianity are that, then the most visible conservatives/Christians will be such people.
I think conservatism just doesn’t have much to attract sincere people in most settings.
The issue often is that, just because it’s outwardly frowned upon, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen behind closed doors.
Which isn’t to say any of your relatives are bad people, but a culture where speaking up is frowned upon encourages victims to hide their abuse.
but a culture where speaking up is frowned upon encourages victims to hide their abuse.
It’s not. It’s a different part of the world with a different kind of conservatism.
I wrote and deleted an anecdote, point is - it’s not a Western atomized society, extended family and friends and various other social ties play a bigger role and all of those help the victim more than the abuser in such an event. Unless we are talking about some hopelessly poor village.
Frankly if those ties would work the same in Western “conservative” settings, those would probably improve over time.
I think another part of the problem is who is attracted to positions of power and why they are attracted to those positions.
If someone wants power to fix things, they’ll tend to have other motivations that will conflict with the pursuit of power because they don’t intend to use that power for their own gains.
But if someone wants power to abuse it, then their personal motivations and pursuit of power line up. Not to mention how much easier it is to sell an idea when you don’t care what the truth is.
The state and congressional districts seem somewhat blue, FWIW.
Aurora’s city council and mayor are conservatives, as is the judge in this case and the Christian “therapist” that is abusing the boys. Every ounce of abuse related to this case comes from conservatives.
The reunification therapist, Bassett, is conducting the therapy at Lighthouse Christian Counseling in Fort Collins, which advertises itself on the internet as “integrating faith into the counseling process.”
This is like a JD Vance sort of org. Women should submit to their husbands vibe.
Quick question because you have a .world account as well, is the heart next to the up/down voting coming from .world or the app I am using (Jerboa)
It is off putting to me to put a heart next to articles like this, I don’t “love” anything about the events that took place, but I want it up voted for the content.
I’m using android jerboa, and I don’t see a heart.
Dunno if there has been an update recently, thoJerboa on Android, appeared recently for me, strange.
I don’t use Jerboa, but that sure looks like an app thing to me. It’s just displaying the combined score along with the split out up/down votes.
In the apps I’ve tried it’s usually been a setting, so maybe it’s a new one there.
I’m a different person, but also from lemmy.world and I don’t use an app. I don’t see any heart heart symbol around the voting buttons. It’s probably just your app.
If you asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to live in the United States, I would have jumped on the first ship to Staten Island in a heartbeat.
Nowadays I don’t even want to visit the country, and unjust bullshit like this is a big reason why. Y’all have a serious problem with allowing your police forces to do whatever the hell they want and argue “qualified immunity” for things that would land you significant prison time in another developed country.
I really question why there’s still a lifelong waiting list to apply for a visa to work in the US, when the state of the country is actually quite bleak…
I know a lot of Africans. I question why any of them would want to move to America as opposed to Canada (where I am) and like me they don’t understand when someone they know does make the decision to move south.
Yes the money is better but no one is going to care if you’re from Zimbabwe. A black person is a black person is a black person down there and by and large America is hostile AF to black people.
I know a lot of Africans. I question why any of them would want to move to America as opposed to Canada (where I am) and like me they don’t understand when someone they know does make the decision to move south.
theres a couple of good reasons i can think of. Canada has a terrible housing market right now, and historically it hasnt had the best government track record either, things like nortel. People are STILL fucked over from that one.
by and large America is hostile AF to black people
what?
US is trash bud
it’s really not that bad. Maybe geopolitically, but what country isn’t lmao. France literally still has a colony.
The reason is because this fucked up shit doesn’t happen to the majority of people and the USA does actually offer a substantially better quality of life compared to many other places.
THAT SAID, yeah we have a lot of fucked up institutions in place that are authoritarian in nature (police) to uphold the status quo and ensure the money keeps making money.
USA does offer a substantially better quality of life compared to many other places>
Lol no. It “offers” the mirage of a better quality of life. That’s like saying that gambling is a job that will invariably improve your economic position. The chances of immigrants actually improving their life by moving to the U.S. aren’t that good. I mean, most of the countries that people move from at least have socialized healthcare.
The chances of immigrants actually improving their life by moving to the U.S. aren’t that good.
this is just factually wrong.
The vast majority of working immigrants that come to america have family outside of america that they send money to. It not only improves their quality of life but their family’s as well.
We also have a fairly large temporary “guest” worker population in the agriculture field as well.
That currency conversion makes what they can spare a good amount of money for their family abroad does not mean that their quality of life has improved.
the QOL of their family certainly also has. A lot of these people also come from places that are war torn or experiencing significant political corruption, the US is not nearly as bad as those places either.
Even then, chances are they’re probably living in better conditions, for one reason or another. Healthcare, services, education.
Better quality of propaganda maybe, not life
If that was the only problem 🤗
to be clear, a lot of these problems exist on a county level and on a more broad state level, so this isn’t quite a country level problem.
Bad people everywhere do bad things.
Off topic: what radicalised you?
Being called a radical for wanting equality for everyone and justice for the marginalized and disadvantaged. The sociopathic, greedy robber barons and their sycophants are the real radicals.
Most people claim to want to see children succeed.
There are hungry children in many developed countries. This is not treated as an emergency.
Inequality affects children hugely. Education, employment, health (especially mental health). The status quo is preferred, because it benefits a tiny minority of very rich people. Those who shout loudest blame queers, feminists, and immigrants. I grew up in extreme poverty (top 5% of most deprived areas in my country), and a majority of the poor people I live with believe this bullshit to some extent.Acknowledging this is not being ‘radicalised’. It’s just being objective. People do not want to make the world better for people.
Nowadays people use radical in political terms as another word for extremist, but it used to mean going to the root causes. Equality and justice, or the lack of, are the root of many political issues. So you are radical in a way, but that is good.
I grew up in Toronto, it was the G20 for me:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_G20_Toronto_summit_protests
Canadian police proved they can be every bit as vicious, and monstrous as American cops the day, and to this day, not a single meaningful consequence was seen in regards to all the human rights violations committed by police.
They called me un American for not wanting my friends to die in their pointless war.
I’m trans, it was basically the only way to survive.
Other people, and their Insistence that I’m a commie bastard for the most mediocre opinions like “a 40 hour work week should be enough to provide basic housing.”
Ive always been vaguely left of center and while I’ve admittedly not done the reading my general take is “fine if I’m a commie then let’s seize the means of production comrade 🤷♂️”
companies being utterly dogshit at the one job they have
This article has sooo much being said between the lines.
The mother, Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins, said the reunification therapy by Christine Bassett, a licensed marriage and family therapist, has been harmful, abusive and counterproductive
When the other party is there perpetrator of abuse and the one with power, it very often is detrimental to have some sort of mediation or therapy/counseling. Because the abusers very often are able to manipulate the story so they are the victims in need of most support/compromise/thoughtfulness/time/money/basically ANY conceivable resource in life and relationships they will exploit.
Now I admit I am more familiar with the medical side of things but this entire dynamic gives me pause because it is so psych 101.
To be clear, I mean the courts are absolutely failing this child and caretaker by allowing the abuser to have have access to the victim(s)
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.”
As far as information in the article, it sounds like the two kids in court-ordered Christian therapy are the only two the guy didn’t (allegedly) abuse.
But still, the whole thing is disgusting. These children should be protected from such an abusive garbage human. Their mother is doing the right thing.
You’re looking at this objectively as a medical practitioner…which is understandable, but way off.
What’s happening here is not even in the world of psychiatric or psychology based therapy.
This is 100% Christian religious based bullshit “therapy”. This can be done in Colorado with an “equivalent” graduate degree.
Even worse is if you’re engaged in the practice of “religious ministry” you don’t have to comply with any of the states licensure requirements as long as you don’t advertise or yourself as “licensed”. So in reality this “faith based therapist” probably is just some random person that works or volunteers at the church.
You’re so right. Your point deserves a lot more recognition than it got. Don’t shut up, don’t stop what you’re doing.
Aurora makes a lot of national news, and usually it’s because of some absolute monster. What’s in the water over there.
It’s been that way for years too. Twenty five years ago my friends and I referred to the area as Sadia Aurora cause it always felt like a war zone.
There is also some oil drilling near the southeast side of the city, generally along Quincy and maybe Jewell Avenues?
is AuroraMan the new FloridaMan?
Ironically enough Aurora city water consistently wins awards for it’s quality lol.
I think the legitimate reason is that Aurora is a physically massive city, has lower housing costs than the rest of the metro area, and Denver has a habit of forcing its homeless population out and into Aurora. The police department is also an absolute good ole boys club who are all terrified of city residents to the point where they drive unmarked/undercover vehicles by default (at least it seems that way, I see so few marked police cars but whenever there’s a collection of cop cars with lights going the majority are the undercover)
Sauce: Current Aurora, CO resident. It’s not all bad
Is it lead?
What the actual fuck America?! How can you JUSTICE SYSTEM do this to people. To children?!
Kudos to the mother. I hope her sacrifice is successful in keeping these kids out of these so called “therapy sessions”.
we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system. Similar in structure, but different in purpose.
We have a legal INDUSTRY. Everything happens because the entity doing it has a profit motive.
To children?!
Well, the USA is the only United Nations member who hasn’t ratified the UN convention on rights of the child (since it would prevent children from being executed or imprisoned for life and give them guaranteed access to safe medical care, standing in court, the right to divorce their rapist spouses, protections from physical and sexual abuse, and so on, all of which go against the country’s core principle of maximising suffering), so no surprise there, really.
As always, the suffering is the point.
Christopher Estoll, the lawyer representing him in the divorce and the criminal case, claimed in an Aug. 1 court filing that the mother was “not a credible witness and is highly manipulative.”
I mean, whatever, but facts are he is a rapist and “reunification therapy” in this case is an absurd torture.
Fuck all of this.
But to be fair it’s definitely not the lawyers fault.
Anybody who says they can’t understand how somebody would become violent can understand instantly by reading this story.
I tried to think of something to say earlier but couldn’t - this sums it up very neatly.
Where is the fbi this needs an investigation
Fuck the law, just run. This is insane.
To be effective as a cop, you have to operate close to the edge.
🤮
I’m not religious, but this situation really makes me yearn for Hell’s fiery maw to open up and claim the cop, the judge, and the “therapist”.
May they end up spending eternity as a human centipede. Or better yet, make it a closed loop.
the…rapist? 🤔
