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
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…
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?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/reunification-therapy
It’s a little more complicated than this conservative rag makes it out to be.
No. No it isn’t. Forced reunification to your abuser. You sick fuck. Go on and double down. Tell us all how that’s complicated. Raise your coward hand again.
Sure.
The deal is it’s not really about reunification with your abuser, in cases of severe abuse you wouldn’t be reunified with someone who wasn’t fit, you’d remain in the foster system. In cases of milder abuse, a judge has to weigh whether the parent might be rehabilitated or you’ll be better off staying in the foster system, which is always itself a risk, remember. Foster families are not always the best.
Reunification therapy is also for divorce cases though, where one parent has essentially poisoned the well against another with no real abuse being present.
So, uh, sorry for whatever happened to you, it can be a very difficult situation when a child has nowhere else to go. Depending on availability of foster families, a judge may be forced to sometimes make a difficult decision, it just depends on the circumstances.
edit: Oh, and do keep in mind, this publication is owned by the same people that run the Washington Examiner. It’s NY Post or Daily Mail-tier when it comes to accuracy.
A parent does not have a right to affection from their children. Isolating from abusive people is a healthy reaction. Forcing this kind of therapy is itself abuse.
Usually. There’s two exceptions that I’d acknowledge. One is where abuse simply was not present, which does happen sometimes due to divorce, which young children can’t always understand.
The second was when abuse was minor and something the offender might be able to overcome after themselves undergoing treatment, and there are no other family that could take the child. If there is a shortage of foster parents as there often is, it can be preferable to try to reunify over just sending the child to grow up in a shelter.
Note, I’m talking about the therapy more broadly, not this specific case.
Reunification therapy is a child-focused therapy, meaning it must proceed at the child’s pace, and move forward when they have made progress. It can also be difficult as parents are asked to put aside their differences and focus on the goal of restoring healthy attachment for the benefit of the child or children.
Meanwhile:
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
She went into the room, and the very first thing that my boy said that she told them was, ‘We need to make progress, and today you need to tell your father that you forgive him.’
Whatever this therapy is supposed to be, it doesn’t really sound like that’s what’s happening.
Yeah I agree. There’s something fishy about this whole article though.
How is the mother even in jail when a year ago Colorado put restrictions on the therapy in just these sorts of cases? I feel like either some facts are being misrepresented, or we’re not being told everything, or this is some strange outlier and judicial malfeasance.
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
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.
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.
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).
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 resent despise 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.
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, tho
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.
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.
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 🤷♂️”
