The Child Protection eNewsletter

Feds to states: Find Katrina sex offenders…
We’ve been asking where New Orleans’ 1406 registered sex offenders were for months. (see vol3_iss52) Now, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is urging 30 state governors who accepted Katrina evacuees to find the missing sex offenders. http://abcnews.go.com

The Administration for Children and Families estimated that about 30 states are affected. In November, agency officials matched the names of sex offender registries in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with the names of evacuees who applied for disaster assistance. The agency came up with more than 2,000 matches.

In addition, 500 children are still missing among Katrina evacuees. http://www.wwltv.com

Webcams open new venue for child pornography…
The New York Times ran a series of articles on a 13-year-old boy who used his webcam to make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling online images of himself undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people. http://www.nytimes.com

Slate magazine reports that webcams have opened a new era in child pornography for six reasons: 1) Webcams are now cheap enough for kids to afford. 2) Broadband is fast enough to deliver sexual video. 3) A kid who posts innocuous video of himself is tracked down by pedophiles, who befriend him and offer money for favors, starting with partial nudity via the Webcam. 4) Some kids turn this into a business. 5) Parents don't know, because the Webcam is in the kid's room. 6) Cops can no longer pose as kids to catch pedophiles, because pedophiles insist that the kid show himself on a Webcam—and cops aren't allowed to use real kids as bait. http://www.slate.com

The single, best advice for every parent is still the same as it has always been. IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES DOES A COMPUTER BELONG IN A CHILD’S BEDROOM. Move it to the kitchen or family room.

In other news…
A bankruptcy judge ruled Friday that the Archdiocese of Portland, not its parishes, owns church assets, dealing a major blow to its efforts to protect church property from lawsuits filed by alleged victims of priest sex abuse. http://abcnews.go.com

200 new claims of abuse have been filed against the Archdiocese of Boston. http://hosted.ap.org The archdiocese settled more than 500 claims resulting from the pedophile priest scandal in 2003.

An Ohio couple accused of abusing their 11 adopted special-needs children by making them sleep in cages (see vol3_iss52) defended their actions but said they'd be willing to give up the enclosures to get the children back. http://hosted.ap.org

A convicted sex offender who worked as a production assistant at Nickelodeon Animation Studios was arrested on suspicion of molesting a boy at the studio, police said. http://hosted.ap.org The mother of the victim, a teenage boy, became suspicious of the man when he began spending time with her son, said city police department Sgt. Jay Jette. She later checked his name on the state's Megan's Law Web site and found he was a registered sex offender with a listing for "lewd or lascivious acts with child under 14 years."



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