The Child Protection eNewsletter

Another Texas Youth Commission arrest…  

A corrections officer from a juvenile halfway house was arrested, accused of having sex with an 18-year-old female resident during a group trip to a park.  Read More Here  Andrel Waddle, 30, was charged with improper sexual activity with a person in custody, Texas Youth Commission spokesman Jim Hurley said.  Waddle took nine Willoughby Halfway House residents to a park in Benbrook, near Fort Worth, on April 18, Hurley said.  He and three residents stayed in the van, where he and the teen engaged in a sexual act, witnesses said.  Waddle was suspended after the encounter was reported the next day, and the resident transferred to another facility, Hurley said.  Waddle was arrested at his home and is being held on a $10,000 bond, police said.

Allegations of sexual and physical abuse have rocked the commission, which incarcerates about 4,700 offenders ages 10 to 21.  The governor took over the troubled agency late last month, and most of its top officials have resigned or been fired.  See  vol5_iss29,  vol5_iss27,  vol5_iss26,  vol5_iss25,  vol5_iss24  and  vol5_iss23

Miss America goes undercover in predator sting… 

Miss America Lauren Nelson recently went undercover with police in New York for a sting targeting sexual predators.  Read More Here  Officers with Suffolk County's computer crimes unit created an online profile of a 14-year-old girl that included photographs of Nelson as a teenager.  "I got to chat online with the predators and made phone calls, too," Nelson said by phone from Atlantic City, N.J.  "The Suffolk County Police Department was there the whole time."

The operation was filmed for a segment of "America's Most Wanted" that will air Saturday on Fox.  Police spokesman Tim Motz said the operation was ongoing and declined to comment.  At least four men were arrested and face charges, said Avery Mann, a spokesman for the show.  Another six men agreed to meet Nelson, he said.

Nelson, 20, of Lawton, Oklahoma, posed as a young teen online and went into chat rooms, where she said men would begin sending her instant messages asking her how old she was and where she lived.  "I would say I'm a 14-year-old female from Long Island.  Sometimes they would say, 'You're too young, sorry,' which is exactly what needs to happen, but some would continue chatting.  "It would only take a matter of time before it got pretty explicit."

In other news… 

The Church of England is fighting off allegations that it covered up years of child abuse by an ex-choirmaster.  Read More Here  Peter Halliday, 62, formerly a choirmaster in Farnborough, Hampshire, admitted indecently assaulting boys under his care between 1985 and 1990.  He was sentenced by Winchester Crown Court to two-and-a-half years in jail today and ordered to pay £2,000 to each of his three victims.  The Church of England has been strongly criticized for failing to report the abuse to police when church authorities were first made aware by the parents of one victim in 1990.

A series of exposés on sexual abuse at a well-known yeshiva is roiling the Baltimore Jewish community and inflaming the already strained relations between the local Jewish newspaper and the city’s sizable Orthodox population.  Read More Here  The controversy revolves around allegations in the Baltimore Jewish Times that the late principal of the Talmudical Academy, Rabbi Ephraim Shapiro, may have molested Jewish students at the school and other youngsters who came to him for bar mitzvah classes.

Three women teachers were among six people arrested in Italy accused of sedating and sexually abusing children as young as 3 at a school near Rome.  Read More Here  The teachers, two of whom are grandmothers who had taught at the school and at Sunday school for decades, are said to have taken part in the repeated abuse of 15 children aged 3 and 5 for a year, filming them in sexual acts with satanic overtones at the teachers’ homes and in a wood.

A bankruptcy judge has confirmed a plan to allow the Catholic Diocese of Spokane to emerge from bankruptcy and pay victims of sex abuse $48 million.  Read More Here  The settlement requires Spokane Bishop William Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to support an end to statutes of limitations for sex-abuse crimes and write letters of apology to victims and their families.

An attacker killed two young brothers and stabbed their 13-year-old sister in a South Side Chicago apartment early Thursday, authorities said.  Read More Here  The girl was able to identify a suspect, who was taken into custody shortly after police found the boys, ages 12 and 14, unresponsive in the home around 3:30 a.m., police spokeswoman Monique Bond said.  Bond would only say that the man is a "known acquaintance" of the family.  He is a registered sex offender, Bond said.

A Colorado radio personality could spend the next six years in prison after pleading guilty to felony charges of trying to lure a young girl over the Internet.  Read More Here  Scott Eller Cortelyou, 53, pleaded guilty to felony charges of Internet luring and attempted Internet sexual exploitation of a child.

Fifteen states get failing grades on a first-of-its-kind report card assessing the legal representation provided to abused and neglected children as courts make potentially fateful decisions about whether to separate them from their families.  Read More Here  The report, released at a Capitol Hill briefing Tuesday by the Washington-based child advocacy group First Star, is sharply critical of states which do not require all children in these proceedings to be represented by their own attorneys.  The entire report card is available online at  Read More Here.

A South Carolina man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty in Abbeville to having sex and impregnating a then nine-year-old girl.  Read More Here  Twenty-six-year-old William Edward Ronca was arrested last year after doctors discovered the girl was at least seven months pregnant.  Statistics show that the younger an underage pregnant girl is, the greater the likelihood that the baby’s father is an adult. 

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