Many close relationships that I’ve had with other women have revealed through intimate conversations a past of some sort of inappropriate sexual behavior from an adult, while they were still children.

I became interested in how often the abuse was from someone they knew. About 95% of victims of sexual abuse know their perpetrators.

Most abuse goes unreported. This work is a reporting and explores the memories that child abuse leaves years after.

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Molested Memories is a collaborative photographic project that explores the experience of sexual abuse survivors. Interviews about the sexual abuse are heard and juxtaposed with images that portray contemplative moments about their past.
Full disclosure is given about the intimate details which are often only shared in high confidence and promotes a space for conversation about the topic.

After our cop ride quite surprisingly I’ve realized that American cops aren’t dramatically different from their Italian counterparts, carabinieri. They both are proud of serving their community, love respect, complain about their wage and don’t mind stopping for a coffee or a slice of pizza even when in service. After all, you need your calories to play tag with criminals.

Here is the story of an American cop. But could be an Italian “carabiniere”.

As a child, Sgt. Gonzales didn’t get along with the Latino kids of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. His skin was white, his hair red and his mother Irish. But Gonzales couldn’t get along with Irish children, either. His Spanish was almost better than his English, and his last name, Gonzales, did not exactly sound Irish.

 “Now I feel respected, I am a cop,” says Sgt. Gonzales, driving lazily to the first job of the day, an alleged theft of a pair of glasses at the Automotive High School on Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Gonzales, 41, who has been in the profession for two decades, has seen worse times. His morning patrols in the Greenpoint area are a sleepy merry-go-round compared to his nightmarish shifts in Harlem 10 years ago.

These days, most of the time his hardest task is to help a flock of school children crossing the street in a bad corner.

“If you help them, their teacher smiles at you and says thanks,” recounts Gonzales. “Children got to know you are around. When they get old it’s harder. You need to establish a relationship where they respect us and we respect them.”

Sometimes teenagers can be problematic. Today Gonzales has to interrogate a 17-year-old man who allegedly stole a teacher’s glasses yesterday morning.

“Oh man, this substitute teacher was awkward,” says the school coordinator Kim Laboy. “He went on picking on the kids and they got upset. He told them that they look like Flavor Flav. It doesn’t surprise me that his glasses are missing.” 

It’s almost 11 a.m. and the suspected kid is not in the school yet. He might not show up today, Laboy says.

“All right,” says Gonzales, with a shrug. “We shall come back tomorrow.”

Gonzales’ patrol is over for the morning. As he pulls the car out and heads back to the precinct, his thoughts go to the next hassle.

For a generation of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers of mind, one man had more influence on our understanding of the human mind than anyone else.  And most of us never knew his name.

H.M. died yesterday, and the initials with which the scientific community respectfully – and affectionately – maintained his privacy are no longer required.  they might stay in use for a while, though.  Patient H.M. was a research subject for over fifty years, and old nicknames can be hard to shake.

H.M.’s amnesia was the opposite of the amnesia in daytime soaps.  He knew the name the textbooks always concealed.  He could tell stories and ask after people from the life he lived before the experimental brain surgery he underwent as a young man.  After that surgery, for the rest of his 82 years, he never formed a memory of another event.  He could carry on a conversation until you left the room; if you came back in, he had no idea you’d ever met.  It’s like that folk trivia about goldfish, only in a person, not a fish.

What’s amazing, though, is that though he didn’t remember events or names, he did remember.  He recognized the patterns, voices and feelings of his post-surgery life, he just never knew where he recognized them from.   I’ve heard his experience compared to a permanent state of déjà vu.

He must have known the spaces around M.I.T. where he lived out his life like the back of his hand.  He must have learned, without knowing when he learned it, to accept acting on knowledge he couldn’t explain.

In one study he solved the same puzzle repeatedly over subsequent days. (The Tower of Hanoi – it’s similar to Heather’s frogs.)  He found the solution faster every day until he had the steps memorized.  But he still approached each attempt unsure if he’d be able to figure it out.

Studying H.M. was a career-long commitment.  He knew which researchers he liked and which he didn’t, and would confidently state made-up histories explaining how he knew the people he considered his friends. Those scientists must be experiencing a unique and complicated feeling of loss.

There have been other cases of amnesia like H.M.’s, but it’s usually brought about by alcoholism or an infection that visits indiscriminate damage around the brain.  H.M. was removed from the stream of time with a surgeon’s scalpel – personality and crossword puzzle fondness intact.

The Times’ obit is here. This is good if you like your history of science from primary sources. If you’re really intrigued you can put this book on your list.  The next few days will surely produce some thoughtful eulogies from the people who think hardest about thought.

Memory research – and, by definition, H.M. – haven’t been part of my life for years. Reminded of him now, there’s something comforting in his bittersweet story.   We all do the most amazing things without knowing what’s going on.

Natives are free to disagree, but I really believe that the most difficult achievement in America is not becoming President. It is obtaining a soft drink with no ice.

In New York ice is like American flags: ubiquitous. Whether it is an unbearably hot summer day or a freezing winter one, ice boldly floats in gigantic water jars, invades fast food plastic glasses, and surrounds transparent boxes of pineapple chunks.

For a foreigner, the war against ice is a serious issue and has to be handled professionally. I sense that the best strategy to defeat General Ice varies depending on the battle field.

Take the easiest ground, restaurants. Here you have to convince the waitress from Prague, Cordoba or Mexico City that even if she gives you water with no ice, you’ll tip her well. If you are lucky enough to meet a waitress on her first week of training you might succeed. If she has been working there for more than a month, relax. Focus on the food. You’ll drink when you get home.

Now let’s consider an ever tougher combat zone, the bar. Getting a rum and Coke without tons of ice is harder than convincing and Italian not to eat pasta for a week. You have to yell in the bartender’s ear: “No ice please,” and hope he is not deaf, disinterested or disconnected.

Restaurants and bars, however, are a piece of cake compared to fast food places. Here, if you request a drink with no ice they will think you want to challenge them. They take it personally. So I found that the best strategy is to follow the rules of the Ciceronian rhetoric. You say what you are going to say (anticipate you want a drink with no ice), you say it (“No ice please”), and finally you say it again (“As I said, no ice please.”)

It doesn’t always work, but it reduces the chances of getting a cold.

You can toast. You finally found a decent ad on Craigslist, contacted your new housemate by email and paid the first month’s rent through Western Union. Now you have a home in New York City. The excitement, though, lasts till you actually see it. 

When a brisk taxi driver kicks you out of the cab in front of your new building, you are not too impressed. A team of rats dances joyfully around the garbage bags. A snobby bunch of raccoons stares at you, as if your European look was rather funny. You realize that the door lock has been picked a considerable number of times. Plus, nobody has ever bothered to repaint the interior walls of the building.

Your apartment is a studio designed for hobbits. Your room, as pointed out in the ad, is cozy. It couldn’t be cozier. It’s no more than 32 square feet.

A white fan covered in dust is on a twin size mattress laid on the floor. The mattress is wrapped in olive-colored sheets. You take a closer look and establish that they used to belong to the previous roomie. Naturally, nobody took a stab at washing them.

The window, one of your main concerns, is there. It is a narrow rectangle covered with a Venetian blind. The view is breathtaking. You can see into other people’s living rooms.

Just 60 feet separate your pillow from the couch of a bold individual who frantically bangs on the keyboard of his laptop, from a woman who chews carrots, from a guy with a baseball cap surrounded by empty Budweiser cans.

As for the door, you realize you weren’t as lucky as with the window. You have no door. Instead, there’s a bright red cloth that is sometimes lifted up by your housemate as he makes period trips to “the office”, the toilet.

The bathroom reveals other problems. Problems it would be inelegant to mention them here. But just imagine that a colony of beetles has elected it as their adopted land, and the toilet is so tiny you need to be a contortionist not to get stuck.

It happens. Don’t despair. It’s not so bad. You get the chance to say hi to a next-window neighbor who is in the same situation. 

Judy Chen, 50, an American citizen and a Falun Gong practitioner, said that she was attacked by a mob of pro-Communist Chinese people supported by the Chinese consul general in the U.S. on May 17, 2008 in Flushing, Queens, but nobody was arrested.

Judy Chen said that she no longer feels safe in Flushing. She is afraid she will be abducted and end up in jail in China.

“Since 1999 we know that the Chinese Communist regime has killed more than 3,000 practitioners in China,” she said. “They sell the healthy organs of Falung Gong practitioners online.”

Erping Zhang, a U.S. spokesman for Falun Gong, said that the crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners started in China in 1999 when the movement was banned. Now it’s taking place in the U.S. too.

According to Zhang, violence escalated after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, in May. The Communist party blamed the Chinese community in the U.S. for not being compassionate towards those people in need.

But Zhang believes that the real reason for the attacks is that U.S. Falun Gong practitioners pointed out China’s inadequate response to the earthquake in the international press, and in the process, made China look bad.

The problem with Judy Chen’s story and the explanations of the U.S. spokesman for Falun Gong, Erping Zhang, is that very little of it can be verified. Practically none of it can. Before publishing anything, a reporter needs to check with the Chinese consulate.

Can reporters cover issues where access to sources is limited by language problems and the possibility that one or both sides are trying to manipulate information? Should journalists just ignore certain news because they don’t trust either source, or should they try and recount what is happening, relying on tricky sources and informing readers about these difficulties?

“I called the Chinese embassy three times and finally got to a live person,” said Karina Ioffee, a reporter for the NY City News Service. “A woman mumbled something about Falun Gong not being a religion, but when I tried to ask her further questions she hung up the phone on me. I’m really trying to be fair, but when the other side is totally stonewalling me, there is not much I can do.”

This reporter decided to report the story, stating in the article that the Chinese consulate was repeatedly asked to comment, but declined. Other reporters, conversely, might decide not report it at all.

“We cannot report about Falun Gong under our system of ethics,” said Lou Parajos, editor-in-chief of The Queens Courier. “You can’t write about gossip, rumors and innuendo.”

For Lou Parajos, verifying Falun Gong practitioners’ statements is impossible. So reporters shouldn’t write anything, according to him.

“They say that a friend of a cousin of an uncle of someone went to jail and had their organs transplanted,” said Parajos. “This is fourth-hand information, this is Hollywood, how on earth can you check that? Are you sending a reporter to China to see whether it is true? And even if you do, I don’t think the Chinese would allow anybody to see anything.”

According to Parajos, the only information that can be used in a piece is the information written in the police report.

Parajos, for instance, could write in his paper that Wei Qiu was arrested on June 21 for assaulting a Falun Gong practitioner with a metal steering wheel lock and Ngan T. Yung was arrested on June 16 after allegedly assaulting Mr. Pan Hongyi, vice editor-in-chief of The Epoch Times. Parajos would write this information because it was confirmed by the police.

But if no one had been arrested, would the violence against members of the Falun Gong not been newsworthy? Is it ethical for a reporter not to write a single line about the people who say they are threatened every day if no police report has been filed?

The issue, as Parajos puts it, is a catch-22, but perhaps the solution is to verify all you can and identify the source to the reader.

In Judy Chen’s story, for instance, you can’t verify whether she was actually attacked on May 17, 2008 because there were no witnesses. But you can verify whether there are cases of Falun Gong people assaulted by other members of the Chinese community in Flushing.

On October 5, 2008, as I was filming Judy Chen distributing Falun Gong magazines next to the Flushing library, a woman approached her.

“Are you lying?” said the woman to Judy Chen. Then she grabbed her magazines and threw them on the floor.

A pickle project for Broadcast and chocolate slides for Interactive? This is how rumors get started.

Bom apetite!