The Child Protection eNewsletter

Boy Scouts have booted 5100 leaders in 60 years over sex abuse…

CBS News reported "disturbing revelations" regarding the Boy Scouts, saying that "over the last 60 years, at least 5,100 adult leaders were kicked out of the Scouts because of allegations of sexual abuse." http://rawstory.com/ That figure emerged as the result of a lawsuit against the Scouts by two brothers, who told CBS they were abused throughout their entire childhoods by an assistant scoutmaster who has since acknowledged his guilt.

Last year, the Boy Scouts were forced to turn over all confidential files on adult leaders accused of wrongdoing, as part of a lawsuit filed by Matt, left, and Tom Stewart, shown here in Seattle in May 2007. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories Matt Stewart and his brother Tom were sexually abused by their assistant Scout master. Former troop leader Bruce Phelps admitted under oath to having sexual contact with one and then the other.

As part of a lawsuit against Phelps and the Boy Scouts of America, the Stewarts' attorney, Tim Kosnoff, got an unprecedented look inside thousands of secret files through 2005. "I was blown away," Kosnoff said. "It was staggering."

Kosnoff analyzed the numbers and came to this shocking conclusion: Before 1991, "a Scout leader was being tossed out for child molestation at the rate of one every three days," he said. "Post-1991, the rate was one every two days." That includes people suspected of abuse.

The Boy Scouts of America would not confirm how many troop leaders it has had to dismiss, but released a statement saying, "The total number of individuals in the file is an extremely small percentage of the tens of millions who have served in BSA since 1910."

Criminal background checks are now required for Scout leaders, and adults are prohibited from being alone with a child.

Virginia Tech criticized in report…

A state panel's report on the Virginia Tech massacre concluded that had university officials warned students earlier about the shooting rampage, some of the carnage might have been prevented. Read More With memories of the 32 murders on that campus still fresh in people's minds, the report came down hardest on Virginia Tech's administration and was released just a week after the university's own report found only minor problems.

"The report contains an awful lot of information that demonstrates ... that signs and warnings were missed," said Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who commissioned the eight-member panel, today on "Good Morning America." "They [the panel] have made a series of recommendations that will be helpful to Virginia Tech and campuses all over Virginia and all over the nation."

The university did not immediately issue a campus warning after Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed the first two students in a dorm on the morning of April 16. Cho moved on to classrooms and killed 30 more students.

Kaine said that after the university learned of the first shootings, a committee was convened and a statement to campus approved, which took about two hours. "The police chief on campus did not have the ability to put out a notice on his own, without convening the committee under university policy," Kaine said.

The panel also said that Cho was an angry and disturbed student who had shown "clear warnings of mental instability," but the "university did not intervene effectively."

Cho's middle and high schools in Fairfax Country, Virginia were praised for identifying his problems and working with him.

"The high school system he went to intervened in his life significantly... and helped him to be a successful student," Kaine said. "They had grave doubts he should go away to college. …But none of that information was passed on to the university."

The full report is available online at http://www.governor.virginia.gov/ and a summary of key findings is available at http://www.governor.virginia.gov/

Cho was a sickly child -- shy, frail and leery of physical contact by the time he was 3. His teachers said he began showing suicidal and homicidal tendencies by the eighth grade. Read More A new report that provides the most comprehensive look yet at Seung-Hui Cho also shows his parents, teachers and mental health counselors wove a safety net that held him together through most of high school.

Then, in his junior year, Cho declared "there is nothing wrong with me" and turned away from treatment, the report says. Because he was about to turn 18, his parents decided they could do little to stop him. His teachers made accommodations for his painful shyness, and he graduated with the grades and test scores that got him into Virginia Tech.

But there his support system fell apart, and unbeknownst to his family, he grew increasingly anti-social. "What the admissions staff at Virginia Tech did not see were the special accommodations that propped up Cho and his grades," including private sessions with teachers that spared him public speaking, said the report issued late Wednesday by a panel that investigated the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Despite "the system failures and errors in judgment that contributed to Cho's worsening depression, Cho himself was the biggest impediment to stabilizing his mental health," the report said.

"While Cho's emotional and psychological disabilities undoubtedly clouded his ability to evaluate his own situation, he, ultimately, is the primary person responsible for April 16, 2007," the report said. "To imply otherwise would be wrong."

In other news… 

A 24-year-old Bucks County, Pennsylvania man was arrested on charges he used his MySpace account to lure a 15-year-old girl. http://www.myfoxphilly.com/myfox/ Police say he then used drugs with her and repeatedly raped her. "He's a predator. He's a sexual predator of young children," said Bucks County District Attorney Diane Gibbons. According to the DA, the young girl was given so much cocaine, her life was in danger. "He gave her drugs. She could have died. She felt ill and then he left her on the roadway," Gibbons added.

An Illinois woman involved in a custody battle killed herself by stepping in front of a train, and authorities later found her 7-year-old daughter dead at her home. Read More The girl had been suffocated, authorities said. "We believe that this could be a murder-suicide situation," McHenry County Sheriff Keith Nygren.

Michael Gerson has an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that looks at child sex tourism. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ One sexual predator, when interviewed by the FBI, described his experience with foreign child prostitutes this way: "It's like being a star. They want to try my food. They want to see what clothes I wear. They want to watch my television." Such "stars" are the global consumers of innocence, exercising a particularly brutal form of power over the poorest, most vulnerable children on Earth. About 25 percent of sex tourists targeting children are from the United States, traveling to Latin America, Asia and Africa in search of abomination on the modified American plan.

An internal letter suggests that a high-ranking official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles may have known that a priest accused of sexual abuse planned to flee to his native Mexico. Read More The letter, written by then-Reverend Monsignor Thomas J. Curry in 1988, was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court along with other papers as part of a lawsuit brought by one of Reverend Nicolas Aguilar Rivera's accusers. In the January 11, 1988, letter, Curry says that he met with Aguilar Rivera to discuss the sexual abuse allegations and that the priest told him he "plans to stay with some family members here and then return to Mexico."

A man accused of opening fire inside a southwest Missouri church was charged in the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl two days before the deadly shooting spree. http://www.foxnews.com/ Eiken Elam Saimon, 52, is charged with one count of second-degree statutory rape and one count of second-degree statutory sodomy, both felonies. Saimon already was being held without bond on three counts of murder and related charges for the August 12 shooting in the small town of Neosho at a church service of South Pacific immigrants from Micronesia. Saimon is also Micronesian.

A Pennsylvania man was accused of leaving his young son in a locked car while he shopped at a porn shop. Read More Deputy Tim Gessler of the Ohio County Sheriff's Department said the car window was open just enough for him to unlock the door and free the toddler, who was taken by ambulance to Wheeling Hospital for potential heat exhaustion on Saturday. The boy was later released in good condition.

A Louisiana couple has been arrested based on allegations of sexual abuse of their children, including allegations that the father viciously molested his 2-year-old daughter. http://www.nola.com/news/ The 35-year-old man was booked this week with aggravated incest, aggravated sexual battery and two counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile, according to Harahan Police Chief Peter Dale. The woman, 29, was booked with two counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile. Dale said his office began to suspect abuse in April 2006 when the girl, who was 2 at the time, had to be treated for an injury to her genitals. The children were immediately removed from the parents' custody, he said. Detectives then spent the past year investigating the case.

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