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Child safety authorities warned of risk to gang-raped 10-year-old, family says…

The family of a 10-year-old gang-rape victim has revealed they had warned child safety authorities she would be attacked if taken out of a Cairns foster home and returned to their remote Aboriginal community of Aurukun. Read More Amid a continuing public outcry over the Queensland Department of Child Safety's failure to protect the girl and a Queensland District Court judge's controversial decision not to jail her attackers, her family has told of a community in crisis and "a little girl who has had the light turned off on her life".

They expressed outrage at the sentence the nine males received, and claim some of the offenders had first raped the girl when she was seven. "She should never have been allowed to come back from foster care while those boys were still here. We told that to welfare. (Some of) those boys had raped her in the past," the girl's mother said.

In October, Judge Sarah Bradley decided not to record convictions against six teenage attackers and gave three others, aged 17, 18 and 26, suspended sentences over the rape. The sentences will be appealed and dozens of other sex abuse cases from the Cape reviewed after the lenient sentences in the gang-rape case were revealed.

The prosecutor in the case, Steve Carter -- who described the rape as "a form of childish experimentation" of which the victim was a willing participant -- has also been stood down pending an internal investigation.

The Queensland, Australia Child Safety Department knew that a 10-year-old girl had been gang-raped but did not report it to police, despite the girl also contracting a sexually transmitted disease from the encounter. Read More The child -- who had been living in a Cairns foster home before the department decided to return her to Aurukun, in Cape York - has been diagnosed as "mildly intellectually impaired" and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, having been born to an alcohol-dependent mother.

A senior departmental official told The Australian that the child involved was sexually abused at age seven and, as a safety measure, was put with various foster families, eventually ending up in 2005 with a non-indigenous family in Cairns. But she was returned nine months later to Aurukun, where she was gang-raped by the nine males.

The official report produced following the eight-month investigation states that a senior Child Safety officer was told on May 11 last year that the child had gonorrhea. It was revealed after the girl attended the Aurukun medical clinic on May 5 last year asking for a pregnancy test and condoms.

That information was immediately relayed to Child Safety, but the senior Child Safety officer did not pass the information on to police in line with her statutory obligations, and when questioned about it said she had spent several weeks making inquiries if gonorrhea was contractable through means other than sexual transmission. The investigating committee also reported that the Child Safety officers took no remedial action when the girl threatened to commit suicide.

When sentencing the nine juveniles for the gang rape carried out last year, Judge Bradley said: "All of you have pleaded guilty to having sex with a 10-year-old girl and (one of the juveniles) has pleaded guilty to having sex with another young girl as well.

"All of you have to understand that you cannot have sex with a girl under 16. "If you do, you are breaking the law, and if you are found out, then you will be brought to court and could end up in jail. "I accept that the girl involved, with respect to all of these matters, was not forced, and that she probably agreed to have sex with all of you."

Maryland Juvenile Detention Center head’s past probed…

The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services is investigating the background of the new head of the Victor Cullen Center for juvenile offenders in the wake of a disclosure that he ran a youth boot camp in Montana that closed amid child abuse allegations. Read More

Chris Perkins was hired in May as superintendent of the Frederick County detention center, a once-crumbling facility that recently underwent a $16 million renovation. Perkins, 38, was also recently promoted to director of detention for the state's beleaguered juvenile facilities.

Tammy Brown, a Juvenile Services spokeswoman, said yesterday that the department is looking into Perkins's professional history and that Juvenile Services Secretary Donald W. DeVore only recently learned of a state investigation that found violations at the private Montana youth facility Perkins headed for much of the three years before it closed in February 2006. Although the investigation is ongoing, Brown said the inquiry thus far has "exonerated" Perkins of wrongdoing in the Montana case.

Montana's Public Health and Human Services Department began investigating allegations of abuse at the Swan Valley Youth Academy in November 2005 after the Montana Advocacy Program, a nonprofit civil rights organization, raised concerns about the facility.

The Montana agency found 19 licensing violations at Swan Valley, according to a January 2006 agency report. In one instance, a youth was kept in seclusion for five days, according to the report. The report said Perkins and other staff members did not always report complaints of abuse, as required.

Although records show that the abuse allegations were "substantiated" by the Montana agency, a state hearing officer later dismissed the case against Swan Valley when state health officials failed to show up for a December 2006 hearing, Montana records show.

In other news…

Friends and classmates of a 16-year-old Canadian girl who police say was murdered by her devout Muslim father in a Toronto suburb told local media she was killed for not wearing a hijab. Read More Police said in a statement they received an emergency call at 7:55 am local time Monday from "a man who indicated that he had just killed his daughter." The victim, Aqsa Parvez, was "rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries, but tragically passed away late last night." Her father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, was arrested at the scene and will be formally charged with murder when he appears in court, said police. The girl's friends, meanwhile, told local media she was having trouble at home because she did not conform to the family's religious beliefs and refused to wear a traditional Islamic head scarf, or hijab.

Two Austin, Texas boys, ages 11 and 14, have been charged with breaking into the home of a 60-year-old woman and trying to sexually assault her, police said. Read More The boys wore bandanas and gloves when they broke through a window in July, and one of them tried to sexually assault her but stopped when a heart device was triggered, Detective Scott Stanfield said. The boys were charged with burglary with intent to commit sexual assault. The boys had a kit that included items to restrain the victim, Stanfield said. A 15-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy were standing outside the victim's house serving as lookouts, Stanfield said, but they have not been charged because they did not break into the house.

A Pennsylvania woman who killed her two young sons in 2004 has been found not guilty by reason of insanity. Read More The verdict in Lancaster County Court means Meghan Lippiatt, 32, avoids prison and the potential for the death penalty and will instead be treated at a psychiatric facility to be determined later. Lippiatt killed her two children, 4-month-old Myles and 2-year-old Silas, on April 18, 2004. She first suffocated the younger child with a diaper, then placed the elder son in a tub of warm water and drowned him. Her defense team argued successfully that she was suffering from schizoaffective disorder and didn't know the difference between right and wrong when she killed the children. Lippiatt told psychiatrists that she heard the voice of God telling her to kill her children because they were suffering. Lippiatt's fate rested on the narrow distinction between knowing that what she had done was bad -- as she admitted in her 911 call -- and whether she also knew that killing her children was wrong in the eyes of the law.

Assailants shot six young people at a Las Vegas, Nevada school bus stop, wounding two critically, in a midday attack that followed a fight over a high school girl, authorities said. Read More School police arrested three teenagers in the fight that happened hours before the shooting, Sheriff Doug Gillespie said. Investigators were still seeking two gunmen, who were believed to have fled on foot from the scene of the shooting, a working class neighborhood of northeast Las Vegas.

An Indiana special education teacher is accused of having sex with one of his students in a classroom and giving the victim better grades after the encounter. Read More The allegation involves Timothy Erwin, 31, who taught at the New Castle Alternative School. The student told police that Erwin pulled her into a closet this fall and began to kiss her and that he had sex with her in a classroom within the last two weeks, police said. The teen said that Ervin favored her over other students and that she got As and Bs in class for doing nothing. Erwin was charged with three counts of child seduction and one count of interfering with the reporting of a crime. He was accused of trying to keep the student from talking to police, Jameson reported.

A Minnesota high school hockey coach is charged with third degree sexual misconduct for allegedly having sex with a 16-year-old player. Read More According to the criminal complaint, Nathan Paul Antrim, 35, admitted to having sex with a 16-year-old player on his team. On December 6, the victim’s father reported suspicious conduct between Antrim and his daughter. School officials called police, who spoke with the teen, who said Antrim had been her hockey coach for two years. During that time, she said he gave her a cell phone and an iPod, and often drove her home from practice. On November 30, Antrim brought the teen to his home where she spent the weekend. She called her father and told him she was staying at a friend’s house. According to the charges, Antrim had sex with his player on the night of December 1 to December 2. In a statement, Antrim told police he gave her the cell phone and iPod as gifts. He admitted sending suggestive text messages and said he had been having “issues” lately. He admitted having sex with the teen the previous weekend.

See Fox News video compilation of teacher/student cases in 2007

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