I found this good article about Moira Anderson, an eleven-year-old girl who’s been missing from Scotland for over half a century now.
There are some cases, like Moira’s, which I would like to be able to profile on Charley if I could. Genette Tate is another. I actually read one of the two books her father wrote about her disappearance, which is available in only two libraries in the US. (The second book isn’t available at any library in the US.) It was written in 1979 and I reflected on how much thinking seems to have changed between now and then. A person quoted in the book said he looked at Genette’s missing child poster photo and thought no one could have kidnapped her for sex because she was so obviously a child, but then he found out it was an old picture (at age 10) and Genette (who was 13 when kidnapped) was actually considerably more developed than the photo showed, and he changed his mind. Apparently it never crossed the man’s mind that someone would want to have sex with a child. 😦
But if I listed those cases, I would have to do the same for them all, and I have a hard enough time keeping track of American cases.
The Charley Project Blog 
Much more innocent times. When it just didn’t occur to people that peodphiles actually existed. My mother told me that when she was young, the much more graphic details of evil were just not written about in the newspapers and there were more covert ways of hinting what actually happened. Kind of like in the South before the 1970s when a white woman was raped by a black man, if he was arrested or it was in the news that they were looking for a suspect, it was said he threatened her with a knife or something like that. But a lot of people had trouble reading between the lines, so it never occured to them what actually happened. Now that nothing is hidden or left to the imagination, all these people are now saying that this kind of stuff never happened when they were younger. It did, but it just wasn’t talked about.
I was once reading a book on bizarre cases psychotherapists have encountered and it said that what is ordinary for some people is sick to other people. A therapist from South Africa, now practicing in America, had a client from his old days come to him shamefully confessing to what he said was a very perverted, twisted sex thing, no doubt the therapist had never encountered anything like it, etc. The therapist was like, well, what is it, spit it out, and the guy said, “I, um, had sex with a black woman.”
Interracial couples are barely noticed now, at least here in the states, but in Apartheid South Africa it was something that could land you in prison.
I read a lot of old articles that talk about people getting arrested on “morals charges” which usually means sex crimes.
Thursday will be the 32nd anniversary of Genette’s disappearance.
It’s a shame her case isn’t a lot better known. I’ve only ever read a couple chapters about her in books long out of print, but I just ordered both of her father’s books.
I still think her case is related to the 1969 disappearance of April Fabb in Norfolk, England.
Karen
Genette is Missing, the book I read, was written only a year or so after her disappearance. Her father focused on a lot of paranormal theories, alien abduction, etc. He told one story that, if I’m remembering right, went like this:
A man came to him and said Genette had been kidnapped by aliens but they would return her. The guy said he would go out to the place where she was taken, alone, and wait, and the aliens would give her back. Genette’s father suspected perhaps the man had taken her himself and wanted to find a way to give her back without facing criminal charges, so he told the guy to go to the field and wait, but he secretly followed him and hid in the bushes. He saw the man go to the field and sit in a lotus position. Long after dark suddenly there were bright lights and Genette’s dad thought, OMIGOD, IT’S REAL, ALIENS ARE COMING! But it turned out to just be passing cars.
In some African country (I’m ashamed I can’t remember the details) they just put a gay (male) couple in jail. Interracial is still frowned upon in places, but goodness help you if you are gay, pretty much anywhere.
Not too long ago they executed two guys in Iran for being gay. Both were quite young, I think the younger one was only 17 or so.
A little off subject.
When I was living in Seattle, WA, there was an alternative newspaper there called The Stranger which did a big write up on the first Gay Pride March on Washington DC back in the 1990s. I remember it was interesting that although there were groups of homosexuals from all walks of life, the one group there that was avoided like the plague was NAMBLA, which I read was pointedly told to stay 20 feet away from the other marchers. For those who don’t know who NAMBLA is, they are the National Man Boy Love Association, not to be confused with the National Marlon Brando Lookalike Association. They are the “good” pedophiles (their discription, not mine). When NAMBLA members tried to mingle, some were almost beaten up. A member said he felt more hostility from other homosexuals at that march then from straight people.