Lisa and A.J. Demaree’s decade-long legal ordeal started with, by all accounts, an utterly innocent family moment.
In 2008, the couple took their three daughters, then ages 5, 4 and 1½, on a vacation to San Diego. They snapped more than 100 photos during the trip, like parents do, including several of the girls playing together during bath time. When they returned to their home in Peoria, Ariz., they dropped the camera’s memory stick off at a Walmart for developing.
Within a day, a police detective came knocking.
A Walmart employee had flagged the bath-time photos as pornographic, the detective told the parents. One showed the girls wrapped in towels with their arms around each other; another showed their exposed bottoms.
The Demarees said they were harmless shots of the children goofing around, no different than what you’d expect to find in any family scrapbook. But police and social workers launched a full-blown sex abuse investigation, raiding the couple’s home and putting the girls in protective custody for a month while they interviewed dozens of family members and friends about whether the Demarees were child sex offenders.
Anyone remember the McMartin trial?
Moral panic leads to witch-huntery. So, now when a parent takes a photograph of their children nude, it must be that there is some sexual deviancy at play.
I don’t know which is sicker. The sexual deviant, or the ass hat running around with a mallet and wooden spike.
This is America?
….
This story always gets me steamed, utterly incensed at the cascade of gross incompetence, government overreach and a host of other injustices to this family.
Sadly, here in CA we have the opposite end of the spectrum in a case involving social workers who repeatedly ignored the horrendous, heart-wrenching abuse of an 8 year old little boy who died because of the profoundly evil actions of his parents and criminally incompetent lack of action by maladroit government social “workers.”
“The panel held that the social workers were not entitled to qualified immunity. Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the social workers did not have reasonable cause to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily harm or molestation when they removed the children from their home without judicial authorization.”
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2018/01/23/14-16207.pdf
A shocking amount of child pornography changes hands every day in the dark corners of the Internet and whatever other channels pedophiles use to traffic sexually exploitative images of minors, as evidenced by the steady drum beat of arrests and sting operations by law enforcement. “Rarely a week goes by,” the FBI wrote in a memo last year, “that a child pornographer is not charged or sentenced for federal crimes related to the sexual exploitation of children.”
Especially from the FBI’s own website.
Jesus tap dancing Christ. Will this lunacy ever end?
So much happiness that they won and that the two social workers were stripped of their immunity. What an insane overreach. Then again, its not surprising at all when teens and preteen are regularly prosecuted and registered as sex offenders for no real crimes.
August 29, 2008: Guilty until proven innocent.
January 23, 2018: Found Child Protective Services weren’t entitled to qualified immunity and that they violated the parent’s and children’s constitutional rights.
10 years (at least) of pain and suffering for the parents and the children but they, especially the children, will be haunted forever by being taken away from their parents for NO REASON…no laws were broken by the parents and they were never arrested or charged.
ALL BECAUSE SOMEONE SAW AN INNOCENT PICTURE OF A CHILD’S BUTT. Fear mongering at it’s best.