The Child Protection eNewsletter

Dakota Fanning 'Rape' Film Heads to Sundance… 

Maybe the most controversial film heading to this month's Sundance Film Festival concerns the rape of a 12-year-old girl while Elvis Presley is heard singing in the background.  foxnews.com  "HoundDog," written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier, is already getting more advance attention than "Chapter 27," the film about Mark David Chapman murdering John Lennon.  That's because the character played by 12-year-old actress Dakota Fanning, who made her mark six years ago in "I Am Sam," is raped onscreen.

Kampmeier doesn't show the actual rape, but it's quite clear, from sources who've seen the film, that as scripted and directed, the scenes in question are going to cause as big if not bigger uproar than when Brooke Shields played a pre-pubescent prostitute in Louis Malle's classic "Atlantic City”.

Kampmeier explains the scenes in an interview, “Exactly how I was going to film the rape scene was articulated quite specifically in the script, and her mother, her agent, and her teacher/child welfare worker were all present for the filming of the scene, which was carried out exactly as we discussed it.  There was so much I had to hide [during filming].  I had to hide the fact that there is not a boy on top of this girl having sex.  One of the choices I made as a director is, I shot her face.  I didn’t shoot flesh against flesh, his leg touching her leg; I shot her face because I wanted to capture a soul going through this experience, not a body.  The assumption that [Dakota] was violated in order to give this performance denies her talent.”  imdb.com

MySpace users targets for ID thieves… 

The social networking site MySpace.com is becoming a place for attacks from predators.  msnbc.msn.com  MySpace bills itself as a "place for friends."  Increasingly, it is also a place for unfriendly attacks from digital miscreants on the prowl, luring users to sexually explicit Web sites, clogging mailboxes with spam messages and playing on the trust users have when speaking to "friends," in order to obtain passwords that could lead to identity theft.

With child identity theft an increasing problem, representatives of collection and credit agencies, law enforcement officials and advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to create laws with stronger penalties for those who victimize children.   biz.yahoo.com  California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, Virginia and Wyoming have passed new child identity theft laws in recent years.

Meanwhile, college students appear to be rethinking how much personal information they are publicly posting on MySpace.  msnbc.msn.com  When it comes to posting personal information online, predators and other criminals are, of course, always a concern.  But it goes well beyond that as more adults — teachers, parents, university admissions counselors and prospective employers — become savvy about searching online spaces.  Sometimes, personal information lives on in the archives of Google and other search engines, no matter how much people try to get rid of it.

 In other news... 

The United Nations will investigate a report of allegations of sexual abuse and child rape by peacekeepers operating in southern Sudan, a key U.N. official said Tuesday.  usatoday.com.  The British Daily Telegraph, citing an internal UNICEF report along with interviews with more than 20 alleged abuse victims, reported that several children, some as young as 12, had been sexually abused by U.N. peacekeepers and civilian workers.  The paper said that the alleged abuse began two years ago when the U.N. Mission in Southern Sudan, known as UNMIS, arrived to help maintain peace in the region after a more than two-decade civil war.

Nearly half of all U.S. high-school students admit to recently drinking alcohol illegally, and most of them were binge drinkers, according to a government survey published on Tuesday.  cnn.com  These binge drinkers, who had five or more drinks in a row, were more likely to have sex, fight, smoke or use drugs, the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.  abcnews.go.com  Girls in middle school who read dieting articles were twice as likely five years later to try to lose weight by fasting or smoking cigarettes, compared to girls who never read such articles.  They were three times more likely to use measures such as vomiting or taking laxatives, the study found.

The Vatican has reinstated a priest suspended in 2002 over allegations of sexual misconduct and will allow him to return to active ministry after undergoing counseling, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati said.  A spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests  snapnetwork.org  was outraged.  hosted.ap.org  Reverend James Kiffmeyer "was removed because of an allegation that the archdiocese found to be credible," Christy Miller said.  "I don't understand how he could be allowed to return to ministry after that."

Physically abused and neglected children are much more likely to grow into severely depressed adults, a finding that researchers said on Monday points to an urgent need to test abused children for depression early on.  news.yahoo.com  Physically abused children have a 59 percent increased risk of lifetime major depression compared with similar children who were not abused, said the study in this month's issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.  The abstract of the article is available online at archpsyc.ama-assn.org.

A couple accused of forcing some of their 11 adopted special-needs children to sleep in chicken wire cages were convicted Friday of child endangering and abuse.  cnn.com  A jury found Michael Gravelle, 57, and his wife, Sharen, 58, each guilty of four felony counts of child endangering, two misdemeanor counts of child endangering and five misdemeanor counts of child abuse.  Each was acquitted of 13 other charges.

Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” will focus on female teachers’ sexual relationships with underage male students every night this week.  foxnews.com

Canada is becoming a destination for child sex tourism because of its relatively low age of sexual consent (14), according to a recently released international report.  cbc.ca  The Global Monitoring Report on the Status of Action against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, prepared by a Bangkok-based children's advocacy group, says Canada must take action to protect its children from foreign pedophiles.


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