The Child Protection eNewsletter
 About 48 hours after Tuesday’s edition of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featured eight suspected child predators and announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to any of their arrests, the first was captured in Fargo. http://www.startribune.com The arrest comes three months after registered sex offender and Fargo resident Joseph Duncan was arrested in connection with the kidnapping and sexual assault of an 8-year-old Idaho girl. Duncan is also accused of killing her family.
According to a criminal complaint filed in Posey County, Indiana, Davis repeatedly raped a boy between January 1 and July 28, 2004. The boy's mother met Davis while he was working for a youth crisis line. Davis developed a relationship with the boy and his brother, including taking them fishing and sometimes spending the night in their Evansville home, the court papers said. In late July, however, the boy told his mother that Davis had raped him. The charges said that at least one other boy accused Davis of rape. Davis also was convicted in 1992 of two counts of child molestation. Upon his 1994 release from prison for those crimes, Davis failed to comply with sex-offender registration laws, court papers said. Obviously any background check that the youth crisis line performed on him was inadequately done, if done at all.
Earlier this year, the FBI began working with staff members from "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to highlight some of the most notorious fugitive child predators in the country, McCabe said. Those fugitives were highlighted on the show Tuesday.
 "With every breath in my body, and with you by my side, we are going to move heaven and earth to stop an evil that has been going on for far too long," Winfrey said in a statement on her website. "Before one more child lands in the headlines, we need to capture these criminals and put them away for good." http://www2.oprah.com We couldn’t agree more. The only truly effective way to protect children from child sexual predators is to put them and keep them in prison.
 It's been five weeks since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children still has a list of 2,329 missing children, as of Thursday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com That’s down from the more than 4,500 reported missing just after the storm, but still a shockingly high number. The National Center is available online at http://www.missingkids.com/. They also publish a guide providing safety tips for children relocated because of natural disasters. It is available online at http://www.missingkids.com
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Tuesday measures to tighten surveillance of criminals and crack down on child molesters, but vetoed a bill strongly endorsed by his fellow Republicans to find ways to keep more than 105,000 registered sex offenders from committing more crimes. http://www.latimes.com In an unusually strong veto message, Schwarzenegger said that under the bill, not one sexual offender would have spent a day longer in prison, been prohibited from living near schools or been monitored by satellite tracking. The governor's proposals would have required registered sex offenders to wear global positioning system devices for the rest of their lives, increased penalties for child molestation, made possession of child pornography a felony and expanded parole terms to as much as a decade for some sex offenders.
In action on 65 bills, the governor signed legislation that will allow counties and the state to strap global positioning system devices to the ankles of criminals on probation or parole and track them 24 hours a day, seven days a week; prevent Medi-Cal from paying for erectile dysfunction drugs for registered sex offenders; strip judges of the discretion to order therapy or probation instead of prison for people who sexually abuse their children or stepchildren; give the victims of certain felony sex offenses when they were children until their 28th birthday to report those crimes; ban courts from granting custody or unsupervised visitation rights to a parent who lives with a convicted child molester; and to prohibit certain child molesters on parole from living within half a mile of public or private schools.
Trauma, Violence and Abuse, a review journal, has a five part series on the sexual abuse of infants. The article is written by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. who is Chief of Psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital. The first part is available online at http://www.childtrauma.org
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