The Child Protection eNewsletter

UK Police make 'significant find' in Jersey care home cellar…

Police searching a former children’s home for human remains said today they had made "a couple of finds of some significance" in a bricked-up cellar room. READ MORE

Jersey Deputy Police Chief Lenny Harper told reporters: "They are items which witnesses have said were in there when offenses were committed against them."

The Haut de la Garenne home is at the centre of a major child abuse investigation involving more than 160 alleged victims and 40 suspects going back to the 1960s.

Mr. Harper declined to say what the items were but he did say that no more human remains had been found. A child’s skull was discovered in the building on Saturday. READ MORE

Apart from painstakingly searching the cellar, police began to excavate more sites of interest around the building. Two hidden underground rooms have already been discovered at the home, which was at the center of an abuse scandal, and police are now investigating whether there is a third.

Children who lived at Haut de la Garenne have told detectives of a dark, windowless "punishment room" where victims were caged in solitary confinement.

An alleged victim told The Daily Mail that she was locked up, beaten, drugged and molested by the staff -- and her cries for help were ignored. READ MORE

The mother of two children, who gave her name only as Pamela to the British newspaper, said she was drugged on valium at the Haut de la Garenne -- now a youth hostel -- between 1973 and 1975.

Employees of the home in Jersey, U.K., held wild parties and drunkenly raped children they saw as "weak," she told the Mail. The workers would bribe the teens with alcohol and cigarettes in exchange for sex acts, Pamela said.

The now 49-year-old victim told of being stripped naked and locked in 10-square-foot cells as punishment -- frequently for days on end for minor infractions, according to the Mail.

Other victims have told of a "deep dark" place where youngsters were locked up, drugged and sexually abused beneath a trap door. Workmen renovating the building in the past have told of finding shackles, leg irons and wooden stocks.

Police have now gained access to a subterranean room described as a "chamber" or "cellar" that does not appear on site plans. A police sniffer dog gave his handlers a strong reaction, suggesting he had found human remains or blood.

The room is around 12 feet square, bricked up from the front, and filled with rock, clay and soil, blocking access. Mr. Harper said, "The cellar is exactly as some of the witnesses who made statements described. There is some corroboration for the features that they described in there."

A second room, about the same size, is still blocked off. The way it has been bricked up appears suspicious, said police, who intend to move artificial lights into the rooms because of the lack of natural light. They have not ruled out finding further rooms, and revealed today that ex-members of staff have told them they remember a third chamber.

Women pushing boundaries with teens…

One woman just got out of prison for a second time, after being convicted in the statutory rape of a 15-year-old boy whom she eventually married and bore a child with. READ MORE

And another woman may be heading to jail after allegedly opening up a Pennsylvania hotel room last Friday to a group of teens for what police describe as a sex- and drug-fueled party.

In both cases, the women find themselves in trouble with police for what is considered inappropriate and illegal behavior with minors. But neither woman is saying she is sorry or even offering regret for decisions that led to their respective arrests.

And experts say that it should not come as a surprise that some women do not see why society and law enforcement look unfavorably at adult women who get involved with teenagers. Shades of the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau case, some say.

"Their conscience is not shocked the way the general public is shocked," Frederic Reamer, a professor in the School of Social Work at Rhode Island College and a member of the state parole board, told ABC News.

Reamer has worked with many female offenders involved in what the laws -- and generally the public -- consider taboo relationships with teens. While he said that the circumstances often differ from case to case, the patterns of behavior are typically the same.

94% of statutory rape offenders against boys are women. See vol1_iss8 for more.

In other news…

Leading Internet scholars at Harvard University will convene a yearlong task force to explore how children can avoid unwanted contact and content when using MySpace and other popular online hangouts. READ MORE The Internet Safety Technical Task Force is the result of an agreement that MySpace reached with all state attorneys general except Texas' in January. See vol6_iss4 MySpace, a unit of News Corp., created the task force, named its members and chose Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to run it, but the group will operate independently, said John Palfrey, Berkman's executive director. Its recommendations will be nonbinding. The task force will be made up of leading Internet service companies and nonprofit groups, including those focused on children's safety. Although the task force grew out of concerns that attorneys general have about Internet sexual predators who target children on social-networking sites, it will also explore how to keep children safe from online bullies and pornography. Besides MySpace and Berkman, task force members include social-networking sites Facebook and Bebo; Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL; Internet service providers Comcast, AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. and child-safety groups such as the missing children's center, WiredSafety.org and Enough is Enough. READ MORE

Newsweek takes a look at how the system may have failed three young boys on Long Island who were killed by their mother after nine child abuse complaints had been filed against her. READ MORE The children's mother, Leatrice Brewer, 27, is now accused of drowning, stabbing and possibly poisoning her two sons, Michael Demesyeux, 5, and Innocent Demesyeux, 1, and her daughter, Jewell Ward, 6. Brewer calmly called 911 to alert police that she had killed her children, even spelling her name out for the operator. Nine complaints about the family had been filed with Nassau County social services, but follow-up was only considered necessary for three of them. In the most recent instance, caseworkers visited the home twice last Friday to investigate a complaint by Jewell's father that Brewer might harm the children, but no one answered the door. The supervisor scheduled a return visit on Sunday, but by then it was too late. Brewer had been embroiled in a custody battle with both of her children's fathers; the father of the boys, Innocent Demesyeux, was arrested in June 2004 on an assault charge for allegedly beating Brewer.

The mother of a 7-year-old boy whose mummified remains were found in the basement of an apartment will not receive a million-dollar payout from the state, an appeals court ruled. READ MORE Melinda Williams has no right to inherit the money from Faheem Williams because she abused and neglected him and his two brothers, the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey found in a 3-0 decision that upheld a lower court ruling. Melinda Williams had sought Faheem's $1 million share of a $7.5 million settlement paid by New Jersey in 2006 amid charges of failures by its Division of Youth and Family Services. Instead, all the money will go to care for the surviving boys, who are in foster care. The brothers -- Faheem's twin Raheem Williams, and 4-year-old Tyrone Hill Jr. -- were found starving and clad in clothes soaked in urine and feces in a locked room adjacent to where the corpse was found. For a textbook case of the system failing children see the opinion in this case at READ MORE.

A new program used to catch people with child pornography can seek out illegal images on the Internet and tie them to someone's home computer. READ MORE Police said the tool has identified more than 1,000 computers in Herndon, Virginia alone. The software, called Peer to Peer, sweeps the Internet for child pornography. It's designed to identify individuals, Web sites and host servers. When illicit images or files are found, they're flagged and police are alerted to the computer's IP address. The information could lead officers to the home of a child predator, said Capt. Tim Evans of the Virginia State Police Department. The software is so valuable that police said it's identified more than 20,000 computers in Virginia that contain hardcore child pornography. Now Virginia authorities need the resources to follow through with this information. vol6_iss11

A priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse has been charged with felony sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child in Montgomery County, New York. READ MORE The Reverend John W. Broderick, 47, was suspended from the ministry early this year for incidents unrelated to sexual abuse, said Danielle Cummings, assistant chancellor and diocesan spokeswoman. She said she could not discuss specifics, but confirmed that Broderick was disciplined for "lack of pastoral judgment." Cummings said she and diocesan officials learned Wednesday about Broderick's arrest. She said the diocese received no previous complaints accusing Broderick of sexual abuse. State police in Fonda say Broderick engaged in inappropriate sexual contact last year with at least four children ages 5 to 11. The victims' parent told investigators Broderick befriended the family and was considered their spiritual adviser.

*for access to member only sites like the New York Times, use the ID "JohnDoeID" and the password "whatever". On sites asking for an email address, feel free to use "info@childprotectionprogram.org"