The Child Protection eNewsletter

Amish school shooter planned sex crimes…
Haunted by memories of molesting 3- to 5-year-old relatives as a twelve-year-old boy some twenty years ago, a Lancaster County milk-truck driver backed his truck up to a one-room Amish school house, prepared for a long siege. He was armed with guns, restraining devices, lumber and nails for barricades and two tubes of KY jelly, presumably to enable him to sexually assault the girls in the school. http://local.lancasteronline.com The adult women and boys were told to leave before Charles Carl Roberts IV used 2 by 6 boards to nail the door shut. He then lined the girls, ages 6 to 13, up against the blackboard, binding their feet together. When police arrived, he gave them 10 seconds to leave, but before they could even call him back, he shot each of the children in the back of the head, execution style, before turning the gun on himself. http://local.lancasteronline.com For more information on the Amish school assault, visit http://local.lancasteronline.com. It is believed that the carefully-planned assault may have been inspired by last week’s school hostage incident in Colorado. http://www.foxnews.com and http://www.mercurynews.com

The recent series of school assaults–there have been at least 27 since school opened–has prompted a Presidential Conference on the subject. http://www.cnn.com MSNBC offers 10 myths about school shootings at http://www.msnbc.msn.com. For the 63-page 2002 report of the government study on school safety, visit http://msnbcmedia.msn.com.

Foley claims “abuse excuse” too…
Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley says a clergyman molested him when he was a teenager in the 1960s. http://www.palmbeachpost.com Foley made the announcement Tuesday through his attorney, David Roth, who also said Foley "wants you to know that he is a gay man." It was the first time in nearly 30 years of public life that Foley, who is 52 and single, has declared openly that he is gay. The twin announcements, made outside the West Palm Beach Library, started another jarring chapter in a saga that began Friday when Foley was forced to resign from Congress in disgrace because of sexually explicit instant messages he exchanged with teenage boys who had worked as congressional pages. The alleged molestation of Foley took place between the ages of 13 and 15, said Roth, who did not name the clergyman, the denomination or where the sexual contacts took place, but Foley is Catholic.

The “abuse excuse” follows the other typical defense in Congressional scandals, rehab. When disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley announced he was entering rehab for treatment of alcoholism and "other behavioral problems," some of those who have known him for years were surprised. http://www.chicagotribune.com

ABC has posted one of the graphic IM exchanges between Foley and a former page that prompted his abrupt resignation Friday online at http://abcnews.go.com.

MSNBC asks if Foley’s attraction to pages were “an open secret.” http://video.msn.com

FBI cyber-sleuths are looking into the text of some of Foley's messages, checking to see how many e-mails and instant electronic messages were sent and how many computers were used, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. http://www.cbsnews.com Ironically, Foley could be found to have violated a law that he helped to write as co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. Florida law prohibits anyone from ''encouraging, offering or soliciting sexual conduct'' over the Internet with anyone under 18. Child predators face a minimum of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, with steeper penalties for repeat offenders. http://www.miami.com

ABC News looks at the psychology of Foley’s case. "The righteous, fervent crusading against something often may represent an attempt to keep one's own impulses under control," said Dr. Jon Shaw, director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami. http://abcnews.go.com Dr. Martin Kafka, a clinical psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Boston and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said Foley's situation is similar to what he saw during the Catholic Church sex scandals, when he worked with clergy who struggled with homosexuality. "I've seen this before," he said. "Some of these men who were struggling with homosexuality actively chose to join the clergy in an effort to suppress their homosexuality.

ABC also reviews previous scandals involving pages at http://abcnews.go.com.

Did Pope lead cover up of pedophile priest scandal?…
A British TV documentary claimed last Sunday that the Pope led a plot to cover up child sex abuse by priests. http://www.thesun.co.uk The BBC documentary claimed that he sent a secret letter to Catholic bishops advising them to keep victims and abusers quiet rather than report crimes to police. The document, from 2001 when the Pope was still Cardinal Ratzinger, tells bishops to threaten to excommunicate victims who speak out, said the BBC program. Some were given hush money, it claimed. The documentary, which also accused the Church of harboring pedophile priests, was presented by Colm O’Gorman who was raped by a priest when he was 14.

Roman Catholic bishops in England and Wales rejected as false and misleading the BBC documentary about the alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse under a system enforced by Pope Benedict XVI in his previous job. http://today.reuters.co.uk In a letter of protest to the BBC, England’s Catholic primate, Cormac Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, said the BBC’s program deliberately tried “to inflict grave damage” on the Pope. “It is quite clear to me that the main focus of the program is to seek to connect Benedict XVI with cover-up of child abuse in the Catholic Church. This is malicious and untrue and based on a false presentation of Church documents,” the Cardinal wrote. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said he could not understand why the BBC made no attempt to allow the Church a response to Doyle’s and O’Gorman’s accusations. http://www.lifesite.net “I must ask if within the BBC there is a persistent bias against the Catholic Church. There will be many, not only Catholics, who will wonder if the BBC is any longer willing to be truly objective in some of its presentations," he said.

Meanwhile, the largest U. S. Roman Catholic archdiocese could sign a $60 million settlement with dozens of alleged victims of clergy abuse within days, several attorneys told The Associated Press. http://hosted.ap.org The settlement being drafted by attorneys for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the alleged victims would give 45 claimants a total of $60 million, said Venus Soltan, a plaintiffs' attorney. The settlement would encompass alleged victims whose claims are not covered by the church's insurance policies, she said.

In other news...
The trial of former JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr on child pornography charges remains indefinitely postponed, as a California judge wades through a flurry of defense motions aimed at getting the case dismissed. http://hosted.ap.org

A CBS News experiment found that college students fell for the same tricks that pedophile use to lure small children into their vehicles. http://www.cbsnews.com

Despite current media frenzy over high-profile suicides, including most recently two Sago mine workers who lost 12 comrades to a mining disaster, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health reports a decline in suicide rates from 1970 to 2002. http://abcnews.go.com

The percentage of U.S. youths who have experienced harassment online rose 50 percent between 2000 and 2005. That study appears in Pediatrics' October edition. http://www.cbsnews.com

Georgia officials have arrested a 58-year-old man on charges stemming from the false imprisonment and sexual abuse of a 17-year-old Massachusetts boy he met on MySpace.com. http://www.wsbtv.com MySpace could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast last Wednesday. http://today.reuters.com


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