The Child Protection eNewsletter

Police probe link between Madeleine and trafficking network…

The abduction of Madeleine McCann may be linked to a trafficking network that sees children put on the market for $14,000, detectives have said. Read More Here Officers in France say Eastern European gangs are holding auctions in supermarket parking lots in Portugal and France. They have released details of the trade, as they believe it may be related to the four-year-old's disappearance, a Sky source said.

In one recent case, the mother of a baby boy was arrested for attempting to sell her baby North of Lisbon. In addition, two Romanian couples were arrested in a supermarket parking lot near Bordeaux while attempting to sell a girl.

Madeleine was snatched from her bed in her family's holiday flat in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz on May 3. Shoppers in Monaco have reported seeing a girl of similar age and appearance to the missing child escaping abductors when they attempted to cut off her hair.

Experts have questioned, however, whether child traffickers or a childless couple are behind Madeleine's disappearance, as they would have taken her younger siblings, who were with her at the time.

Meanwhile, detectives in Malta have been investigating more than a dozen reported sightings of Madeleine in the last month. Read More Here

Familicide: Why parents kill kids and themselves…

In an apparent murder-suicide, police are investigating the deaths of World Wrestling Entertainment wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife and 7-year-old son at the family's home in Fayetteville, Georgia. http://www.foxnews.com Their deaths come on the heels of several recent family murder-suicides, which criminologists and forensic psychiatrists call familicides. http://abcnews.go.com Though rare, experts say, familicides tend to occur in clusters. Benoit's wife, Nancy, 43, and son, Daniel, were each found in different rooms and are believed to have been killed days before the wrestler seemingly took his own life, according to police.

Days before the Benoit killings, independently, and on opposite sides of the country, Thomas Reilly and Kevin Morrissey each decided to kill their children and then kill themselves. Reilly, 46, drowned his two young daughters, ages 5 and 6, in the bathtub of their Montclair, New Jersey, home before hanging himself from the attic rafters last Wednesday. A week ago Monday, Morrissey, 51, shot his wife and two daughters in a parked car at a popular park near Berkeley, California, before turning his .357 handgun on himself. Both crimes came after another murder-suicide earlier this month in Wisconsin. Amborosio Analco, 23, killed his two twin infant sons, their mother, their aunt and himself.

Men, experts said, are often driven to murder their families by intense feelings of shame resulting from a job loss or a perceived inability to provide for family members. Forensic psychologists and criminologist said, however, that these murderers do not simply "snap" but usually have long histories of mental illness. Men and women who kill their children, forensic psychologists told ABC News, tend to be severally depressed or psychotic. Women are more likely to kill their children than men are, but men are more likely to kill both their children and their spouse, said Dr. John Bradford, head of the forensic psychiatry department at the University of Ottawa.

Dr. Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University, said Morrissey may have been "severely depressed and believed his family was similarly miserable. He was ending the entire family's pain….Money is often an issue. The man sees himself as a breadwinner and may feel like he has to take the whole family out with him," Resnick said.

Experts said that women are often motivated to kill their children for different reasons than men are. Rather than feeling they have failed to adequately provide for their kids, women often kill their children out of a delusional sense of altruism.

In other news… 

Two-thirds of parents said they are very concerned about sex and violence the nation's children are exposed to in the media, and there would be broad support for new federal limits on such material on television, said a survey. http://www.cnn.com/ Yet the report released by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that two in three parents said they already closely track their children's television viewing and use of the Internet and video games. The complete survey is available online at http://www.kff.org/.

A 16 year old North Carolina girl has married her 40-year-old high school track coach. Read More Here Her anguished parents signed consent forms, claiming they had no choice. The parents had contacted the school principal, the school board and even the police in an attempt to intervene before things got this point. "School officials can't be responsible for what happens the other hours of the day, and I would think the relationship developed much more outside of school," said Brian Shaw, an attorney for the school district.

Convicted sex offenders in Sweden are free to read pornography in their cells following a court ruling that has angered the prison service. http://www.courttv.com/ The Supreme Administrative Court in Stockholm last week ruled that the Swedish Prison and Probation Service had no right to deny a rape convict access to his porn magazines.

A computer game that featured footage of murdered British toddler James Bulger has been withdrawn from sale after complaints from his mother. http://www.foxnews.com/ Denise Fergus was furious that a company used the grainy closed-circuit television image of her son’s kidnapping, which had been widely broadcast during the police search for the child, as a clue in a game. The photograph showed James, 2, walking off hand in hand with Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, his 10-year-old abductors, from The Strand shopping center in February 1993. The youngster was led through streets to a railway siding where he was tortured, killed and his body abandoned across the track. The two killers were released from state custody in 2001.

A Pennsylvania school crossing guard accused of molesting seven children was charged with more than 1,000 counts of sexual assault. http://www.foxnews.com/ Dale Hutchings was arrested Tuesday and charged with 305 counts of raping a child, 356 counts of aggravated indecent assault against a child under 13, and 356 counts of indecent assault against a child under 13. The assaults took place between 1998 and 2007, and all of the victims were under 13 when the attacks began, police said.

Australia's prime minister announced plans to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight child sex abuse among them. http://abcnews.go.com/ Some Aboriginal leaders rejected the plan as paternalistic and said the measures were discriminatory and would violate the civil rights of the country's original inhabitants.

Newly released affidavits in the case of a Connecticut 15-year-old found after a yearlong disappearance detail accusations made against the three people charged with harboring her. Read More Here The girl, who was found locked in a stairwell, kept a journal detailing a sexual relationship with her captor. It also claims that she had an abortion at Planned Parenthood, but wouldn’t say who the father was. Planned Parenthood has been under increasing fire for allegedly ignoring mandatory reporting laws in statutory rape cases. Under Connecticut law, both males and females who are under the age of sixteen cannot legally consent to sexual relations. http://www.211infoline.org/

Father Jonathan Morris, a Catholic priest and Fox News Commentator, compares abuse in the Catholic Church with the levels reported by insurance carriers in major Protestant denominations. http://www.foxnews.com/ See the background story at The Child Protection eNewsletter Volume 1, Issue 2 http://www.childprotectionprogram.org/.

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