Christian's Mission and Germans Recoil at a Mother’s Role in Child Abuse
This NY Times story below is about what actually goes on and happens to children out there at the hands of sick and unscrupulous adults, and why the mission of Hedge Funds Care & Help For Children, now in its 20th year of preventing child abuse and providing treatment to those who have been victimized, is SOOOO very important. Research and other help for the victims of virtually all childhood issues is funded primarily by the parents of the afflicted children. In the case of child abuse, for obvious reasons there is no such parental constituency and help from professional services is sorely lacking. Donations can be made directly on the website, www.HFC.org .

Another way to help is by following the tail end of the extraordinary feat of extreme athlete Christian Griffith, as he closes in on completing his quest to run 3,000 miles across the U.S. on behalf of HFC’s mission to prevent and treat child abuse. He did so for the purpose of using his own story, to build awareness of the need for victims of abuse to seek counselling as he had finally done after years of pain. Follow him by clicking here:
Christian has spent the last five months of his life running across the country. He left from New York on a cold day in March and is two weeks shy of completing Run2Heal in SF, a 3,000-mile journey of healing and helping raise awareness in the fight against child abuse.
As a child abuse survivor, Christian has used these months to speak out about his abuse and to share with others how treatment saved his life. In making the Run2Heal happen, HFC has created opportunities for Christian and others to break the silence around child abuse and force a dialogue around what has long been considered a taboo subject. Breaking the silence helps adults heal and creates awareness that helps protect children in the future. Wherever he goes to speak, folks comeout of the woodwork to share their own stories of suffering and how abuse has impacted their lives, a powerful and important step toward finally healing.
Some of the numbers:
$50k + The amount crowd sourced so far by Christian just on Go Fund Me
70+ The number of interviews and articles (click here) on Run2Heal, including an upcoming feature in Runner’s World! Hurray!!!
48 The age Christian turned on August 1 – Happy Birthday Christian!
23 The day in March, four days after he began the run in NYC that his first child, #babykai, was born in Jacksonville, FL
12 The number of states Christian will have traversed when Run2Heal is said and done
30+ The number of miles Christian has run each day, 5 out of 7 days a week for 23 weeks
119 The number of marathons Christian will have completed in a 157-day span
5+ The number of running shoes Christian went through during Run2Heal
Can’t make it to the finish line in San Francisco but are inspired to make a donation to honor Christian and save children– click button below!
Warm wishes to all those who have helped along the way, and those who will be joining the quest to protect our children.
NY Times Article
By Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze Aug. 7, 2018
BERLIN — The case would have stoked public outrage if the mother had known her young son was being raped and had done nothing to stop it.
But when Germans heard that she and her boyfriend had raped the boy themselves and served him up to pedophiles on the dark web, the fury only grew.
The mother and her companion — identified only as Berrin T., 48, and Christian L., 39, in keeping with German privacy laws — were convicted on Tuesday of sexually abusing her son over the course of two years, beginning when he was about 7. The abuse included inappropriate touching, rape and making videos that were placed as advertisements on the dark web for pedophiles — among them a German soldier — who paid the couple thousands of dollars to abuse the boy.
For many Germans, the most horrific part of a horrific case was the woman’s complicity, which violated deeply held assumptions about motherhood and contradicted the common image of sexual predators as male. But the case also shocked the country for the severity of the abuse and the failure of authorities to protect the child, despite repeated opportunities for intervention.
Interest groups and politicians called for an investigation and for better training of social workers and judges in recognizing potential sexual abuse of children. Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, Germany’s independent commissioner for questions pertaining to sexual abuse of children, called for an inquiry to determine what signals may have been missed.
“There were obviously structural problems in cooperation between the courts and authorities that must now be thoroughly investigated,” Mr. Rörig said. “The case in Staufen has exposed an array of misjudgments and failures. We owe it to this child to draw the right consequences.”
The pair, who lived in Staufen, in southwestern Germany, were arrested in September 2017. They were found guilty on Tuesday of 40 charges of aggravated sexual assault, including rape, forced prostitution, distribution of child pornography and child endangerment. Both had admitted at the start of the 11-day trial to abusing the boy, now 10.
Christian L. was also found guilty of sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl in early 2015. He was sentenced to 12 years in jail and ordered to remain in preventive custody upon his release.
According to the court, Berrin T. helped facilitate her boyfriend’s contact with the little girl, who was mentally and physically disabled. Several months later, in May 2015, the girl’s mother broke off contact with the couple, effectively ending her abuse.
Christian L., a known pedophile with a criminal record who had previously shown an interest in abusing little girls only, then began abusing the boy, the court said. Berrin T. did nothing to stop the increasingly perverse advances on her son, which began with showing him pornographic videos and bribing him with expensive gifts in exchange for being allowed to touch him inappropriately, it said.
When the trial opened in June, Christian L. admitted to the charges of abuse, telling the judge “I am the main culprit.”
But the presiding judge, Stefan Bürgelin, handed a longer prison sentence, of 12 and a half years, to the boy’s mother. She was always present during the assaults, the court said, initially calming the child and then sexually assaulting him herself.
In his pronouncement, the judge cited a video showing Berrin T. violating her son as evidence that her offenses were not only sexual, but also included emotional and psychological abuse. He said she broke her son’s trust in his “closest female caregiver” and robbed him of the protection of his home.
“If the boy dared to show or voice any resistance, he was frequently ignored, or dismissed with physical abuse,” the court said, adding that the couple would “regularly shout at him” and insult him using “an utterly contemptuous choice of words.”
Before the arrest, the youth services agency considered the man a potential danger to children because he had been caught with child pornography in an unrelated case, and was ordered by the authorities to stay away from children. The agency also knew that he was frequently in the boy’s home.
In early 2017, the agency’s concern was great enough to temporarily place the boy in a foster home, but he was returned to his mother after she convinced a family court that she was aware of her boyfriend’s history and could protect her son from him.
The mother, who had sat stonily throughout the trial, showed no emotion while the sentence was read out, German news media reported. She chose not to challenge the ruling, which in addition to jail sentences, included fines worth 42,500 euros, or $49,200, to be paid to the victims.
“She accepts full responsibility for what happened to her son,” Matthias Wagner, an attorney who represented the mother told the Badische Zeitung newspaper. “This is important for the boy. He can now be certain that this process is over.”
But in a country where a mother’s “right to the protection and welfare of society” is enshrined in the Constitution, it was the role played by Berrin T. that most appalled Germans.
“When parents become criminals to their children, the state must protect the child, with everything in its power,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper wrote in a commentary. “It must protect children from their parents.”
The identities of the victims were not made public, in keeping with child protection laws. Authorities have placed the boy in the care of a foster family.
Several of the men who paid to assault the boy have also been convicted, and on Monday, one was handed a 10-year prison sentence by a Spanish court. All but one found their victim on the dark web — parts of the internet that are concealed from view and are used for anonymity and criminal activity.
Peter Egetemaier, chief of the criminal police in Freiburg, said investigators were lucky to get a tip from an anonymous user who came across the videos advertising the boy. A buyer had asked whether he could kill the boy after assaulting him, leading the tipster to alert both the federal police and the state police.
“It was an exceptional case — we were very lucky — but it won’t always be like this,” said Mr. Egetemaier in a telephone interview. Because Christian L. cooperated with authorities, they were able to glean crucial insights into the netherworld of criminal pedophilia that takes place online.
Confident that they have found everyone involved in the boy’s case, Mr. Egetemaier’s team is combing through material they collected to try to find suspects in unrelated cases.
“He opened a door to this very dark world for us,” Mr. Egetemaier said.