{"id":6243,"date":"2019-02-13T21:13:11","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T05:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=6243"},"modified":"2019-02-14T04:35:28","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T12:35:28","slug":"message-of-the-day-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=6243","title":{"rendered":"Message of the Day: Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Predator on the Reservation<\/em>, The Wall Street Journal, Frontline, February 12, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Last night, Frontline on PBS aired\u00a0<\/span>Predator on the Reservation.<\/em><\/p>\n

A related article on the Frontline website,\u00a0How The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE Uncovered a Pedophile Doctor\u2019s Past,<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>begins with the following:<\/p>\n

\u201cWall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch and Gabe Johnson spent\u00a0more than two years investigating the Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health care for Native Americans. In collaboration with FRONTLINE, they found that the agency employed a number of problem doctors, including Dr.\u00a0Stanley Patrick Weber,\u00a0a pedophile who \u2014 despite the suspicions of co-workers up and down the chain of command \u2014 continued treating children for\u00a0more than two decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Links to this and other related articles and videos, and the full transcript and link to the one hour program, follow.<\/p>\n

Most would agree that if there is a primary job government is supposed to do, it\u2019s to protect its citizens and their basic human rights\u2013starting with children.<\/p>\n

There is a theme in this new Frontline program that is not unrelated to its July 24, 2018 program,\u00a0<\/span>UN Sex Abuse Scandal,\u00a0<\/em>which we posted on then. Here\u2019s an excerpt from our commentary:<\/p>\n

The issue of child sexual abuse is, as noted often, not primarily an institutional issue\u2013but the institutional issue is critical because any source of such abuse is critical to unmask, and because of the inter-related impact of institutions, culture, families and individuals.<\/em><\/p>\n

And as we noted before, the importance of the scandal this documentary covers is in no small part that it is about the United Nations. This is the benchmark institution, with all its declarations and conventions, which is used to measure the proper or improper conduct of other institutions and nations on this and other issues.<\/em><\/p>\n

So too for nations. The United States was the most influential founding nation of the UN, and is still, as we keep reminding, although power on the planet is increasingly diffuse and shifting, the single most powerful and influential nation on earth.<\/p>\n

The most important level on which child sexual abuse is an institutional issue is the degree to which the most powerful institutions\u2013governments\u2013protect or fail to protect children from individuals and other institutions. The government agencies, child protection services, police, prosecutors, courts, legislative and executive branches either protect or fail to protect. Too often, it\u2019s the latter. In the end that\u2019s on all of us too. It can change, and is in some ways, but the resistance remains enormous as is always the case in attaining progress. The first step in change is fully facing the problem, from institutions to our own avoidance. Everyone agrees there is no more heinous evil. When it is unveiled in ways we haven\u2019t faced, most of us respond with demanding and creating change.<\/p>\n

There is another element to this story of abuse of power, which child sexual abuse is the ultimate example of\u2013and that is the inequality of the haves and have-nots that has driven history in so many ways, the grievous crimes against indigenous peoples and the racism attached. The film-makers and journalists make clear that while this is the backdrop that has its own impact, the larger story focused on is what can and does happen everywhere in society, and the failure of a government agency to do its job.<\/p>\n

We have praised Frontline for many years. It is the flagship of documentary excellence on PBS, and has been as good or better than any such series for decades. The program has an impeccable record of journalistic integrity, sparing no one or no ideology from its factual investigations.<\/p>\n

The program and related articles and video speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

. . .\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

How The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE Uncovered a Pedophile Doctor\u2019s Past<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

By Rashima Nasa, February 12, 2019<\/p>\n

Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch and Gabe Johnson spent\u00a0more than two years investigating the Indian Health Service, the federal agency that provides health care for Native Americans. In collaboration with FRONTLINE, they found that the agency employed a number of problem doctors, including Dr.\u00a0Stanley Patrick Weber,\u00a0a pedophile who \u2014 despite the suspicions of co-workers up and down the chain of command \u2014 continued treating children for\u00a0more than two decades. FRONTLINE\u2019s Rahima Nasa spoke to Weaver about how he and his colleagues got the story.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n

How did you come to learn about Dr. Weber?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

We first heard about Dr. Weber over the course of reporting on the Indian Health Service hospitals in the Dakotas. We were covering some regulatory problems those hospitals had, one of them being that they were kicked out of the Medicare program, which is about the stiffest sanction that a U.S. hospital could ever get. In more than 10 years of covering U.S. health care, the only hospitals I\u2019ve encountered that have faced that penalty were the ones that would later be indicted on fraud charges and things like that. It\u2019s just not something that ordinarily happens, so it caught our attention.\u00a0In this case, the hospitals were getting penalized for poor care.<\/p>\n

One of the other things that began to emerge was that a lot of the doctors who were employed by the Indian Health Agency had issues clinically, like maybe they had malpractice claims against them or some track record of adverse effects in the operating room. Also, there were doctors with conduct problems.<\/p>\n

We heard about these very serious allegations: that a pediatrician at this one hospital in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, had been sexually assaulting his patients for many years and on possibly more than one reservation. We thought, if this was true, that exemplifies the broader range of issues that this agency has been grappling with and has been unable to put an end to.<\/p>\n

What were some of the challenges you, Dan and Gabe faced during your reporting on tribal communities?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trying to get documents for this story has been a huge challenge, and it\u2019s not just with the tribe. We don\u2019t have the same access or right to government records that members of the tribe would have. We have not had the law on our side in trying to get records of the tribes\u2019 own investigations or some of the incidents that surround the story.<\/p>\n

For instance, Dr. Weber faced justice not because of something the IHS or federal investigators did, but because a tribal investigator took the initiative to pursue this guy even though the tribe has no jurisdiction to prosecute a non-Indian perpetrator of an alleged crime. But the records of that investigation, which could have been invaluable, are basically unavailable to us.<\/p>\n

But even more vexing is that the federal records, the Indian Health Service\u2019s own records, have been really hard to come by. They\u2019ve not produced substantive responses to our FOIA requests in many cases. In some measure it\u2019s a reflection of the dysfunction of the agency, because I don\u2019t think they are stonewalling us on some specific requests. They may just not have documentation of stuff that you would expect a government agency that\u2019s running hospitals to have at its fingertips.<\/p>\n

How did you convince folks to trust you all to tell this complicated and sensitive story?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

When we first got there, people were skeptical of us. Then, when we came back again, we were just people who were around \u2014 people expected to run into us. We\u2019ve made at least eight trips to Pine Ridge and\u00a0additional trips to the Blackfeet Reservation near Browning, Montana, and additional reporting trips to other locations. We spent eight weeks on the Pine Ridge reservation over the course of a year and became familiar faces.<\/p>\n

How did you approach privacy concerns from victims?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

At The Journal, we have a pretty strict policy to not out victims of sexual assault who have not agreed to be identified affirmatively. There are people who we are not naming because of that. There have been some people who have been identified in court records, in the public record, and we named them\u00a0in some cases.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to talk about with people. For many of them this is the last thing in the world that they want to discuss. I don\u2019t worry about offending people when I ask about this. I think it\u2019s clear that we genuinely want to know, and I think in many cases people have agreed to talk to us because of that.<\/p>\n

What does the IHS need to do to better handle cases like this in the future?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

I mean, it\u2019s a tough thing. The balancing act they are trying to achieve is real, right? They need to fill positions in their hospitals, and they need to keep those hospitals open because in many cases they are the only access that the people they serve have to health care. The pool of medical providers and administrative leaders they have to choose from is not always as good as you would hope. As one senior administrator in the agency told us, they just don\u2019t get \u201cthe best of the best.\u201d They\u2019re making compromises all the time because they want to keep their facilities operating.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know exactly what the answer is. If you take a zero tolerance policy for providers who have conduct issues, or if you fire every provider who gets nailed with a DUI, then you\u2019re reducing the pool of people you have to provide the only health services that are available.<\/p>\n

But on the other hand, they have created a situation in which they are running into the inevitable problem of having to make those kinds of compromises. The buck stops not just with the Indian Health Service, but with the federal health department and with Congress, which appropriates the money that they have at their disposal to fix it.<\/p>\n

Is there anything that wasn\u2019t captured in the film or print story<\/a> that you want to emphasize?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

We spent a lot of time with these people, and in some cases we spent a lot of time with friends and families of victims, with administrators, with people who one way or another touch a different part of the story \u2026 People who, in many cases, were living in these really dire situations. There\u2019s this incredible circumspection about what\u2019s going on in the world that immediately surrounded them and the history that they are living with \u2014 that was kind of a surprise to me. You hear a lot about intergenerational trauma when talking about the Sioux Indians \u2026 the Wounded Knee massacre was just in the 1890s, so up until recently a lot of great-grandmas may have remembered it.<\/p>\n

A lot of reporting on indigenous people by those outside of the community has a tendency to rely on stereotypes \u2014 usually with a focus on substance abuse, poverty or exotifying their identity. How did you, Dan and Gabe circumvent that in your reporting?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first guy we interviewed on the Pine Ridge reservation was named Henry Brown. He didn\u2019t actually make it to the film. What he said to us was that every day of the year, somebody is on Pine Ridge making a documentary \u2026<\/p>\n

In looking at other work on the reservation, it\u2019s always about the day in the life of a particular niche \u2014 like basketball in America\u2019s poorest place, or about fixing cars in America\u2019s poorest place or whatever. That kind of celebritization of poverty, of guys like Henry Brown, made people skeptical of us at first, because they are so used to having people film the trash piles in people\u2019s backyards and things.<\/p>\n

We made this really conscious decision from the beginning to not to let the poverty or the Indian-ness be something that we\u2019d focus on. We wanted to cover this crime the same way we\u2019d cover it in suburban Connecticut. We were there not to cover the story of a pedophile in America\u2019s poorest place, but to cover this incredible tragedy that would have been a tragedy anywhere. At the same time, like any tragedy, it would take on some of the character of the people that it happened to \u2014 that it was visited upon. You can\u2019t be on Pine Ridge and not see the poverty, or be affected by it or see people outside of it. We just decided to unravel this crime and what the fact that this was allowed to happen said about the Indian Health Service, an arm of the federal government.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Sexual Abuse Victim, and Two Colleagues Who Suspected A Predator Doctor<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

By Rashima Nasa, February 12, 2019<\/p>\n

Joe Four Horns was just a boy when he first met Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber.<\/p>\n

Four Horns lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana. He\u2019d broken his tailbone in a skating accident, and was recovering at a health center. Weber, a government pediatrician based in a hospital run by the Indian Health Service, came to see him.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust the way he was talking to me, but had his hand was on, like \u2014 on my leg while he was talking to me,\u201d said Four Horns. \u201cHe just left it there, and that was \u2014 it made me uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four Horns would later tell The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE that Weber molested him several times over subsequent visits. But he was not the doctor\u2019s only victim. Over the years, Weber allegedly sexually abused several Native American boys, even as colleagues and whistleblowers raised alarms.<\/p>\n