Homeless man jailed 8 months on preteens' bogus attack allegation
GARDEN GROVE, California, U.S.A., Associated Press (AP), January 28, 2004
Eight months after he was locked up for allegedly attacking three preteen girls in a park, a homeless man was freed after the girls admitted making up the story so one of them wouldn't be punished for being late to school.
Eric Nordmark, 36, a self-described nomad who hitchhikes around the country, had stopped in Orange County last spring when the three 11-year-olds told police they were stalked and attacked by a transient in Woodbury Park in Garden Grove. Nordmark was jailed on seven felony and misdemeanor counts of assault and child molestation.
On Monday, one of his accusers admitted she and her friends made up the story to cover for her tardiness at school.
The charges were dropped and Nordmark was released from jail that night.
A spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney's office said the girls would be referred to juvenile court.
Spokeswoman Susan Kang Schroeder said Wednesday the district attorney's office went forward with the charges because "based upon what we had, we had no reason to think it wasn't true."
The moment officials discovered the accusations were false they dismissed the charges, Schroeder said.
"This was not a case where we found out weeks ago. We acted immediately," she said.
Garden Grove police said they may have erred in showing all three the same lineup of suspect photos, inadvertently helping them conspire to identify the same person.
Nordmark, who maintained his innocence during his months in jail, called his incarceration a "very terrifying experience."
"My civil rights were severely trashed. How could this happen if I didn't do this?" he said.
He said he hadn't decided if he would sue the girls or the city, but indicated he didn't hold a grudge against the girls.
"(The girls) probably didn't think this would be a big issue," Nordmark said. "It turned into a big issue. There were real lives at stake, real consequences of people on this."
2004 Associated Press
Health Canada Publication
The Invisible Boy: Revisioning the Victimization of Male Children and Teens
"... the existence of a double standard in the care and treatment of male victims, and the invisibility and normalization of violence and abuse toward boys and young men in our society.
Despite the fact that over 300 books and articles on male victims have been published in the last 25 to 30 years, boys and teen males remain on the periphery of the discourse on child abuse.
Few workshops about males can be found at most child abuse conferences and there are no specialized training programs for clinicians. Male-centred assessment is all but non-existent and treatment programs are rare. If we are talking about adult males, the problem is even greater. A sad example of this was witnessed recently in Toronto. After a broadcast of The Boys of St. Vincent, a film about the abuse of boys in a church-run orphanage, the Kids' Help Phone received over 1,000 calls from distraught adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It is tragic in a way no words can capture that these men had no place to turn to other than a children's crisis line."
American Psychological Association
Dating Violence Statistics in the United States
Nearly one in 10 girls and one in 20 boys say they have been raped or experienced some other form of abusive violence on a date, according to a study released Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
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The Associated Press
According to psychologist and author William Pollack, 'sports are the one arena in which many of society's traditional strictures about masculinity are often loosened, allowing boys to experience parts of themselves they rarely experience elsewhere.'
When Harvard Medical School psychologist William Pollack administered a test to a group of 150 teenaged boys a few years ago, the results were shocking.