A senior Scientology official, a winner of an award for her activities in promoting human rights has been arrested and released on bail following allegations of perverting the course of justice. Click on photo to watch video of the news.The allegations are that she instructed a girl and her mother to lie to police about sexual abuse by girl's stepfather. Allegedly, she told mother and daughter to hide abuse or otherwise the girl would be taken into care.
Ms Eastgate has been arrested and released on bail and is due to appear in court soon.
It is certainly true that even without any instructions to pervert the course of justice, police may have plenty of difficulties in investigating child abuse anyway and on daily basis. There are not just the frequent problems of denial by the abusers, but that of evidence (proof) and reliability of witnesses at the level required by the courts.
Children themselves can be very fearful, feel ashamed and take many years to work through different stages of the trauma following abuse. Many self -harm and some kill themselves.
Those children who are not believed by their family even when they speak up suffer for many years. The reasons for denial by family members include financial dependency on alleged abuser in nuclear family and fear of social shaming and blaming.
Scientology is a religion and there are many others. However, surely, mother is responsible for accepting alleged advice by Ms Jan Eastgate and for her other beliefs religious and not religious. Equally responsible is Ms Jan Eastgate if the allegations are true.
Psychologists and social workers as well as psychiatrists have supported many victims of abuse and Scientology has reputation of being anti-psychiatry.
The case of Ms Jan Eastgate has many interesting psychological and political aspects. There is a worldwide shortage of psychiatrists and it is very difficult for many people to get help even when they are begging their General Medical Practitioners for referrals to psychiatrists (in London, UK, for example). Patients are told they cannot be referred to psychiatrists because there is not enough psychiatrists to see them. Perhaps, Australia has decided to lead the world and show itself as being psychiatrists friendly unlike some places, like UK , where significant persecution of psychiatrists has taken place at the hands of the religious lot and not just Scientologists.
There are activists who see it as their mission to do in as many psychiatrists as possible. Doctors who have never experienced the relentless onslaught of telephone calls from such activists have no idea just how stressful and dangerous some of these people are.
Psychiatrists have been made bankrupt, lost their registrations with medical regulator and their reputations in a wider social context.
Religiously biased medical institutions did absolutely nothing to stop this kind of abuse of properly qualified professionals because they had so much support from the government of the past days who lavished money on them (millions) and later on promoted infiltration by such religious activists into medical organizations.
Earlier on, in 1988, Dr Bisa Haeger and Dr Joy Dalton psychiatrists published the first investigation in the world into the attitudes of psychiatrists about child sexual abuse. They found psychiatrists were well informed about the psychological consequences of abuse but had not many cases of victims on their books despite the prevalence research which showed it could be somewhere around 50% of psychiatric patients. Click HERE to read the study. It would be interesting to see how things have changed in the last twenty years in terms of social attitudes of psychiatrists to child abuse.
CLICK HERE to watch video of Scientology conference and their mission to destroy psychiatry sent by the Anonymous commentator below.
9 comments:
Congratulations on a timely and generally well-written article. Much more attention needs to be paid to the malign influence of groups who hide behind their status as religions while imposing anti-scientific and anti-medical policies on their members (and trying to impose them on all).
The article makes a startlingly glaring omission in failing to emphasize that Ms Eastgate is the President of CCHR International, the virulently anti-psychiatry arm of the Church of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs (OSA, their intelligence-gathering, PR and dirty-tricks department). While the CCHR claims to be an independent entity, the Church proudly claims it as an important part of its Division 6 (PR and recruitment). See http://faq.scientology.org/tmnotice.htm and http://faq.scientology.org/cchr.htm . For its part, the CCHR celebrates its role in destroying the careers of psychiatrists, with the ultimate stated objective of "obliterating" and "abolishing" the profession worldwide. Its unstated objective, of course, is to replace all mental health care (and all spiritual and much medical care as well) with Scientology. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to see this for yourselves, from the mouth of Scientology's leader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=channel&hl=en&v=hfu7Sr50N7U&gl=US .
Thank you, Anonymous.
I have seen the video you sent and will put a link to it in the article as well.
There is place for criticism of psychiatry but many psychiatrists have also saved many lives.
I have experienced harassment from scientologists as well as offers of help from them when I experienced abuse by some nasty ex-psychiatric colleagues who were using false allegations of mental illness to discredit me as a whistleblower. There is such a thing as abuse of psychiatry and yes, there are abusive and bullying psychiatrists.
There is a real need for proper criticism of psychiatry, but CCHR is not meeting that need. Thanks for your moderation.
GMC has assassinated livelihood of a number of brilliant doctors and play in the hands of NHS/DH.GMC itself does not follow its own guidelines to be honest and judges others' probity. Judge branded GMC a totalitarian regime when it wrongly accused a psychiatrist of mental illness after she raised concerns on poor quality of care.
There is no simple way to work in the NHS.I am not sure if Mobbing will ever be tackled as GMC is part of NHS mobbing culture and is used to prosecute doctors and tough criteria is used if a doctor is from ethic minority
There is a place for criticism of psychiatry and the medical industry in general. There is a need for checks and balances and to guard against over prescription of drugs (which is as much to do with the public wanting a pill solution as it is "big pharma" in meeting the demand). There is a need to have watchdogs to protect citizens from those who would abuse such a trust. But the Citizens(sic) Commission for Human Rights (CCHR) is like Al-Qaeda is to Islam.
The CCHR are radical extremists with a hate agenda. As Anonymous said, their agenda is the "global obliteration of psychiatry". They scare off other watchdog groups with their extremist views and activities. There is no need for them and no should be no place for them either.
Jan Eastgate's full name is Janice Wendy Eastgate Meyer, a happy coincidence when you need to cover your tracks.
We're already seeing the cult refer to a "Wendy Meyer." To avoid future confusion, I recommend using all four of her legal names.
Why does everyone have to criticise and not alter pyschiatry to include expalining the physical process of hormones and TRAUMA that cause these illnesses and then exclude all the old gits who abused everyone with so many drugs and labels etc? Peopel are always going to need help with trauma, it lasts a long time but hey, lets not go around traumatising people about it? *not a scientologist
She will be back in court in August:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_8fpw1DVVs&feature=player_embedded#at=23
Not enough evidence for perverting the course of justice:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3488352.htm
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