In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an a...

Cathy Glass, the no.1 bestselling author of Damaged, tells the story of the Alice, a young and vulnerable girl who is desperate to return home to her mother.Alice, aged four, is snatched by her mother the day she is due to arrive at Cathy's house. Drug-dependent and mentally ill, but desperate to keep hold of her daughter, Alice's mother snatches her from her parents' house and disappears.Cathy spends three anxious days worrying about her whereabouts before Alice is found s...

It had been years since I had seen any of the children with whom I had grown up. When I left the children's home, I promised myself that I would have nothing to do with them, I was sure that my only chance of living a good life would be to put the past behind me, even though that meant saying goodbye to some of the people I loved the most - as well as the ones I hated...it turned out that six of us had died, several by slow suicide in the form of heroin abuse, and at least two by faster me...

‘Punished’ is the inspiring true story of an unusual little girl, Vanessa, whose childhood was devastated by torture and abuse at the hands of her sadistic mother. Vanessa was nearly destroyed until she discovered a secret that ultimately saved her life.From the age of 3, Vanessa lived in daily terror of her mother's unpredictable rage. If she was 'naughty', her mother would lash out at her – with beatings, torture, starvation and making Vanessa sleep in their garden's pigsty, tied...

Kenneth and Patrick Doyle grew up in a family of nine children in Tullamore, Co. Offaly.Though the home was dysfunctional and all the children suffered at the hands of their parents, Kenneth and Patrick were singled out for horrific abuse at the hands of their mother.Starved, beaten and sent out to steal, their story is a catalogue of abuse. It also implicates the authorities, who had pages upon pages of reports on their situation, and yet never stepped in.

Shane Dunphy was involved in social care for fifteen years. This book is a distillation of some of the cases he encountered in that time into a single, year-long narrative. In spite of the narrative's compression, and allowing for the necessary change of identifying details, everything in this book is true. And what the truth reveals! Here are the cases of three dysfunctional families, struggling at the margins of a society that barely acknowledges their existence. This is a portrait of fa...

Sophie Young tells her shocking true story in Please Will Someone Help Me?Sophie Young was born into a dysfunctional family, with a violent mother and father. Sophie was routinely neglected and harmed, starved and left to fend for herself. Social workers were often involved but, despite numerous visits and extensive reports, nothing was ever done.When Sophie was six, her life took another horrible turn: her adored grandfather began to sexually abuse her....

Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author and foster carer Cathy Glass’ heartbreaking memoir I Miss Mummy now combined in a single volume with her inspiring new title Please Don’t Take My Baby, about a pregnant teenager desperate to keep her child.In Please Don’t Take My Baby, Jade, 17, is pregnant, homeless and alone when she’s brought to live with Cathy. Jade is desperate to keep her baby, but little more than a child herself, she struggles with the responsibilities her ...

Edgar Award Finalist: The shocking account of a Wyoming father who terrorized his family for years—until his children plotted a deadly solution.One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met. When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action sho...

The name Ian Huntley is one synonymous with pure evil. Convicted of one of the most horrific and baffling crimes ever witnessed by the nation - the brutal murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman - it was only after his conviction that the horrific nature of this man's predatory past became apparent. It was only when it was too late that many girls and women stepped forward to reveal that they, too, had been victims of this terrifying man.One such woman is Hailey Giblin, who was just ele...

The job of any sensory system is to create objects in the world out of the incoming proximal stimulus energy. The energy is neutral; it does not specify the objects itself. Thus, sensory systems must abstract the energy that does specify objects and differentiate it from the noise energy. The perceptual variables that specify objects for both listening and looking become those of contrast and correlated change across space and time, so that perceiving occurs at several spatial and temporal...

Assigned to a quiet corner of Ireland's most remote county, Martin Ridge was heading for retirement after a long career with An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. All that changed when a call from a local priest set in motion what would become the most horrific sex abuse investigation the island had ever known. At Christmas 1997 a local priest Fr Eugene Greene reported to the Gardaí that a man had tried to blackmail him. This call, an act of hubris, set in motion a Garda investigation...