Volume 5, Issue 10
February 9, 2007
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The Child Protection eNewsletter Allentown School hid rapes of four 1st-graders… Teachers and administrators at Central Elementary School knew they had a problem with F.H., a 12-year-old who had been accused of going into a bathroom stall and sexually assaulting a first-grade boy. Read More Here But instead of calling police and removing F.H., district officials covered up the attack and allowed him to remain in class, leading to the sexual assaults of three more first-graders, parents say. The allegations, contained in a $15 million federal lawsuit against the Allentown school system, have created an uproar in Pennsylvania’s third-largest city, with outraged parents demanding the superintendent’s ouster and state lawmakers working on a legislative fix. The case has also illustrated how difficult it can be under the law for parents to hold a school system responsible for the safety of their children. In federal court last month, the district’s lawyer, John Freund III, argued that under the Constitution school officials cannot be held responsible simply for failing to protect youngsters from assaults by other students. He cited federal court rulings that say school systems are generally immune from paying damages unless it can be shown that they actually took “affirmative” steps that put youngsters in danger, and that the action taken “shocks the conscience.”Austria busts global child porn ring involving 2,360-plus suspects…  Austrian authorities said Wednesday they have uncovered a major international child pornography ring involving more than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries, including hundreds in the United States, who paid to view videos of young children being sexually abused. Read More Here The children were under the age of 14 and screams could be heard, said Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on Internet crime who headed the investigation.Interior Minister Guenther Platter said the FBI was investigating about 600 of the suspects in the United States. German authorities were following leads on another 400 people, France was looking into about 100 others, and at least 23 suspects were Austrians, he said. Platter said videos downloaded from the Internet and seized by Austria's Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau included images that showed "the worst kind of child sexual abuse."  The Austrian case demonstrates the difficulty of tackling the growing problem of child pornography and the horrific abuse it entails without international cooperation. Read More Here Less than a month ago, Bernadette Chirac, the wife of the French president, hosted a meeting in Paris of other leaders’ wives, including Laura Bush, to urge international cooperation to fight child pornography and sexual solicitation of children online. Read More HereExperts say child porn rings are difficult to track because of the anonymous nature of Internet shields offenders from detection. Read More Here Meanwhile, a new bipartisan bill unveiled on Wednesday aims to crack down on Internet service providers who fail to report online child pornography. Read More Here The new Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act of 2007, or SAFE Act of 2007, was announced by U.S. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Representatives Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) and Nick Lampson (D-Texas) during a press conference in Washington, D.C. The bill would increase penalties for ISPs that knowingly and willfully fail to report online child pornography from $50,000 to $300,000. It also widens the circle of companies that would be required to report child porn to include chat room and social networking companies, like MySpace, which are currently not required to report child porn. Also, ISPs would be required to retain information about child porn discoveries for six month in order to help law enforcement agencies track down the criminals and build their cases, says Rep. Lampson. A copy of the bill is not yet posted on Thomas, the House website, but is available online at Read More Here Meanwhile, a top Google executive spoke out Tuesday against online censorship, arguing that protecting children from viewing objectionable material is the family's job, not the government's. "If we try to pass individual or family responsibility on to the government, we risk making a big mistake," said Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs. Read More Here In other news…  The host of "America's Most Wanted" said he's seen no evidence linking his son's unsolved kidnapping and slaying to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, despite a recent report laying out a possible connection. Read More Here Theories of a Dahmer tie to the 1981 killing of John Walsh's 6-year-old son Adam date back years but resurfaced with a report in the Daily Business Review, a Miami publication. vol5_iss9 Walsh believes another serial killer, Ottis Toole, killed his son.Oklahoma law-enforcement officials have announced plans to file child-molestation and child-pornography charges against Neil Havens Rodreick II, the 29-year-old sex offender jailed in Arizona for impersonating a 12-year-old middle school student known as Casey Price. Read More Here Investigators say they found a video recording of the molestation on a CD in Rodreick’s possession at the time of the Arizona arrest. Lt. Van Gillock of Oklahoma’s El Reno police department reports that investigators identified Rodreick by a pattern of moles visible in the video; police have located and interviewed the alleged victim, an Oklahoma boy believed to have been 11 when the tape was made in 2005. A new clergy sexual abuse lawsuit in Portland stands apart from the 170 or so others against the Catholic Archdiocese of Portland. Read More Here The accusations filed last week in a Multnomah County court are against two Catholic nuns. The alleged abuse occurred nearly 50 years ago. A transient suspected in the rape of an 11-year-old girl had been living in an elaborate bunker in a wooded city park about half a mile from the house where police say she was attacked, authorities said. Read More Here Police said a man with a knife entered the girl's house through an unlocked door early Monday and raped her in her bed. In the area where he was living, police found a boxlike bunker fortified with wood and about 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 12 feet long with a wood stove and several books. Investigators also found a knife that fit a description the girl gave. An Oregon man used a 100,000-volt stun gun on his 18-month-old son, police said Monday. Read More Here Rian Whittman, 23, has been accused of assault and criminal mistreatment. Police said he used it up to 10 times over a three week period.  Child and teen suicide rates rose for the first time in more than a decade in 2004 — and many psychological experts said the stronger warning labels that led to a drop in the number of prescriptions for antidepressant drugs may be to blame. Read More Here According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Annual Summary of Vital Statistics released Monday, the suicide rate rose more than 18 percent in those 1 to 19 years old, from 2.2 per 100,000 in 2003 to 2.6 per 100,000 in 2004.A 13-year-old Texas boy is accused of fatally stabbing his 4-year-old half-sister, police said. Read More Here The boy faces capital murder charges and is being held at a juvenile facility. *for access to member only sites like the New York Times, use the ID "JohnDoeID" and the password "whatever". On sites asking for an email address, feel free to use "info@childprotectionprogram.org" Unsubscribe |
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