The Child Protection eNewsletter

Police focus on pedophile network in British toddler's disappearance…

Portuguese police are now working on the assumption that Madeleine McCann was abducted "to order" by an international pedophile network, after narrowing the focus of their six-day investigation. Read More Here Detectives have now discarded a range of other possibilities, including the theory that the British toddler could have walked out of her Algarve hotel room by herself or was kidnapped for adoption, Portuguese newspapers have reported.

“Everything points to a kidnapping,” a person close to the investigation told Correio da Manhã, adding that police were now exclusively investigating the possibility that she had been captured by a child abuse network. Police sources quoted anonymously by several other local newspapers said the same thing.

It would not be the first time that a child taken from Portugal has ended up in the grip of a pedophile ring. In 1998, an 11-year-old boy called Rui Pedro Mendonça vanished while walking home from school in the northern Portuguese town Lousada. Read More Here A month later, hopes were raised when he was sighted with a middle-aged man in Disneyland in Paris. Then three years later, his mother’s worst fears were realized. Horrific images of Rui Pedro being sexually abused were reportedly uncovered during an international police operation that cracked a global pedophile network. More than 200 pedophiles in 13 countries had exchanged more than 750,000 images of children through a private internet club called Wonderland.

Analysis showed that 1,236 children had been subjected to abuse that officers described as “unimaginable.” Some were babies, raped by their abusers. Others were sexually abused live, to order, online. Officers described weeping as they catalogued the pictures and being haunted for years afterwards.

Drug dealers concoct drugs for younger kids…

Something called “cheese” is killing kids. Read More Here In August of 2005, no one had even heard of it — so much so, that when a school district police officer first saw a bag of this drug, he thought it was fake. Now officials realize cheese is all too real; at least 21 kids have died from overdosing on it. Cheese is a combination of black tar heroin and crushed up Tylenol PM tablets and hits of it sell for a buck or two. Like any type of heroin, cheese is highly addictive and deadly. If that’s not enough to scare you, there’s this: drug pushers cooked it up special for kids.

“Traditionally heroin is going to be an adult user drug,” says Dallas Independent School District Officer Jeremy Liebbe. “Black tar heroin is cooked on a spoon, mixed with liquid and injected. Meaning needles. Not many kids are wild about needles, so if you want to market heroin to kids you've got to come up with an alternative to it.” That’s exactly what drug dealers in the Dallas area have done — they’ve come up with a form that can be snorted and gave it a seemingly benign name: “cheese.” But cheese is just the start. Have you heard of “Strawberry Quick?” It’s not a kid’s drink — it’s a kid’s methamphetamine. Drug dealers mix meth with Kool-Aid in an attempt to make it look and taste better. And again, there’s the snappy name. While Strawberry Quick hasn’t made a big splash in Dallas, it is gaining ground in other parts of the country.

The DEA says the whole act of marketing drugs to kids is a dangerous and relatively new trend. “They're looking for a new consumer,” says James Capra, the Special Agent In Charge of the DEA office in Dallas. “They've taken the tactic that advertising people have taken for years; you want to sell a product, you’ve got do a good marketing approach to it.”

In other news…

A vegan couple was sentenced to life in prison in the death of their malnourished 6-week-old, who was fed a diet largely consisting of soy milk and apple juice. Read More Here Superior Court Judge L.A. McConnell imposed the sentences on Jade Sanders, 27, and Lamont Thomas, 31, for starving the boy, who weighed just 3 1/2 pounds when he died. The sentences come a week after a jury found the couple guilty of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children. Defense lawyers said the first-time parents did the best they could for their son, Crown Shakur, while adhering to the strict lifestyle of vegans, who typically use no animal products. They said Sanders and Thomas did not realize the baby, who was born in a bathtub at their home, was in danger until minutes before he died.

An Oklahoma man was arrested on charges of attempting to sell two children, ages 1 and 5, over the Internet for sex. Read More Here Jason Todd Burns, 25, told investigators he had a conversation in an Internet chat room and promised to procure the children for a New York man for $5,000, said Grady County Assistant District Attorney Lesley March.

Police say a 45-year-old South Carolina man was hiding more than drugs and gambling machines in a walled-off section of his home. Read More Here When they arrived, authorities said they also found the man's wife and her two sons living in a concealed part of the house amid human waste and food scraps. The woman claimed that she and her sons — all barefoot when discovered by authorities — had been held captive for four years, said county Sheriff's Detective Scott Thompson.

About two-thirds of U.S. children will go through a traumatic event in their childhood but few are likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, U.S. researchers said. Read More Here The finding reveals a certain emotional resilience in children, but it also suggests that the way children process troubling experiences is different from adults, said William Copeland of Duke University Medical Center, whose study appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Amid an emotional debate that nearly ripped apart a church congregation, the Pilgrim United Church of Christ voted Sunday in a two-thirds majority to permit a registered sex offender to join its flock, after it develops a special set of guidelines for such a situation Read More Here The tight-knit California community found its motto "All are welcome" greatly challenged in January when its pastor, Madison Shockley, introduced a registered sex offender (whose name is being withheld at the request of the church) to the congregation. The man was asking to join the church. A split developed in the church, leading to Sunday's vote, which resulted in an agreement to create a set of stipulations for when a registered sex offender wants to attend services.

Those little cards with black-and-white pictures of missing children are being replaced by larger, color images. Read More Here Direct mail advertiser ADVO sends the cards to 114 million homes every month, along with its ShopWise mail circular. Starting Monday, the cards will be eliminated and larger, color pictures of the missing children will be included on page four of the circular itself, the company said.

Rebecca Riley was a vibrant, smiling 4-year-old, but suffered from bipolar disorder and was placed on a cocktail of adult medications. Read More Here On the morning of Dec. 13, 2006, she died in her home in Hull, Massachusetts, where she was found lying on the floor next to her parents' bed. Whether it was a horrible accident or something more may now be decided in a court of law. But the diagnosis and treatment of children for the disorder is highly controversial.

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