The Child Protection eNewsletter

CDC study says at least 1 in 4 teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease…

At least one in four teenage girls nationwide has a sexually transmitted disease, or more than 3 million teens, according to the first study of its kind in this age group. Read More

A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls--nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared with 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens, the study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

Among girls who admitted ever having sex, the rate was 40 percent. While some teens define sex as only intercourse, other types of intimate behavior including oral sex can spread some infections.

For many, the numbers likely seem "overwhelming because you're talking about nearly half of the sexually experienced teens at any one time having evidence of an STD," said Dr. Margaret Blythe, an adolescent medicine specialist at Indiana University School of Medicine and head of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on adolescence.

But the study highlights what many doctors who treat teens see every day, Blythe said.

Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC's division of STD prevention, said the results are the first to examine the combined national prevalence of common sexually transmitted diseases among adolescent girls. He said they likely reflect current prevalence rates.

The results were prepared for release Tuesday at a CDC conference in Chicago on preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

Four common diseases were examined--human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18 percent of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4 percent; trichomoniasis, 2.5 percent; and herpes simplex virus, 2 percent.

Research suggests that children's memories may be more reliable than adults' in court cases…

The U.S. legal system has long assumed that all testimony is not equally credible, that some witnesses are more reliable than others. In tough cases with child witnesses, it assumes adult witnesses to be more reliable. But what if the legal system had it wrong? Read More

Researchers Valerie Reyna, human development professor, and Chuck Brainerd, human development and law school professor--both from Cornell University--argue that like the two-headed Roman god Janus, memory is of two minds--that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.

They say children depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, "what actually happened," while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, "the meaning of what happened." As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories, which can be extremely problematic in court cases.

Reyna's and Brainerd's research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), sparked more than 30 follow-up memory studies (many also funded by NSF), which the researchers review in an upcoming issue of Psychological Bulletin.

This research shows that meaning-based memories are largely responsible for false memories, especially in adult witnesses. Because the ability to extract meaning from experience develops slowly, children are less likely to produce these false memories than adults, and are more likely to give accurate testimony when properly questioned.

The finding is counterintuitive; it doesn't square with current legal tenets, and may have important implications for legal proceedings.

"Because children have fewer meaning-based experience records, they are less likely to form false memories," says Reyna. "But the law assumes children are more susceptible to false memories than adults."

The court's reliance on adult testimony has a long history. Before the early 1970s, children younger than eight years old rarely testified, because they failed the court's competency requirements.

Annual Catholic sex-abuse payout tops $526 million…

Total payouts to victims abused by Roman Catholic clergy nearly doubled to record levels last year, according to a new report. Read More The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said dioceses and religious orders received 691 new allegations last year, a decrease from 714 in 2006.

However, settlements with victims increased by 90 percent over the same period, to more than $526 million — the largest amount for one year. The overwhelming majority of claims date back decades.

The findings are part of an annual review the American bishops commissioned in 2002 as the abuse crisis consumed the church. A companion audit of bishops' child safety policies found that nearly every diocese was following the plan.

Still, the bishops' child protection officer cautioned against "issue fatigue." Teresa Kettelkamp, executive director of the Office of Child and Youth Protection, said the sense of urgency surrounding the issue is easing as dioceses finish enacting the reforms and cope with the many other demands on their resources

Auditors found that some lay-clergy review boards--created in every diocese to help bishops respond to abuse--hadn't met in more than a year because no new allegations had been made. Two archdioceses--Denver and Anchorage--hadn't reported abuse claims to civil authorities until after the lapse was discovered in the audit.

Nearly 14,000 molestation claims have been filed against Catholic clergy since 1950, according to tallies released by the bishops' conference. Abuse-related costs have reached at least $2.3 billion in the same period. Last year, total abuse-related costs, including settlements, legal fees, therapy for victims and support for offenders, surpassed $615 million for dioceses and religious orders.

Several dioceses reached massive agreements with victims in the past 12 months. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles had the biggest by far, pledging $660 million to about 500 people. See Volume 5, Issue 44. But many of those settlements have yet to be fully paid. Insurance covers some of the cost

The full report is available online from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at Read More.

In other news…

A jury recommended the death penalty for a man convicted of luring a 10-year-old girl into his apartment, killing her and mutilating her body. Read More Jurors deliberated for nearly 8 1/2 hours before recommending that Kevin Underwood, 28, be put to death for killing Jamie Rose Bolin. He was convicted last week of first-degree murder. Volume 6, Issue 19 Underwood, who showed no emotion as the verdict was read, was handcuffed and led from the courtroom while 10 armed deputies stood guard. He is scheduled to be formally sentenced on April 3. During closing arguments, prosecutors argued that Underwood should be put to death because he is plagued by deviant sexual fantasies that make him want to kill, rape, torture and eat his victims. Jurors also had the option of sentencing Underwood to life in prison, either with or without the possibility of parole. For him to be sentenced to death, prose cutors needed to prove either that he is a continuing threat to society or that the crime was heinous, atrocious and cruel. Underwood said in a videotaped confession that he fantasized about torturing and killing a person and cannibalizing the body. No evidence has been presented that any cannibalism took place.

A Canadian man arrested last year in a worldwide manhunt after Interpol unscrambled his swirled digital images from Internet photos went on trial this week in Thailand, accused of sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy. Read More Christopher Paul Neil, a 32-year-old schoolteacher who worked in several Asian countries, has pleaded not guilty in the case. He was arrested in Thailand on October 19, 2007 after Interpol issued an unprecedented global appeal to help apprehend him. See Volume 5, Issue 67 Interpol's public call for help was based on the discovery of some 200 Internet photos believed to show Neil sexually abusing at least a dozen Vietnamese and Cambodian boys, some as young as 6.

Detectives investigating the ongoing Jersey child abuse scandal (see Volume 6, Issue 16 and Volume 6, Issue 17) expect to arrest three suspects in the next two weeks, despite attempts by "corrupt former cops" to block the inquiry. Read More One of the three suspects lives in mainland Britain. Before announcing progress in the inquiry at the weekend, Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper said he had been facing sustained obstruction from retired officers trying to cover up their failure to investigate complaints of abuse at Haut de la Garenne, a former children's home. There are believed to be about 25 suspects in the Haut de la Garenne inquiry. Asked whether there had been pressure to limit the scope of his investigation, Mr. Harper, who is from Northern Ireland and has served in Jersey for almost six years, said: "There has been stacks of it. Mainly from ex-cops, corrupt cops who have got friends in among senior politicians on the island. I would not insult the island by saying there is a culture of corruption; there is a cache of corrupt ex-coppers."

FOXNews.com has learned that a former command master chief caught in a sex sting and discharged from the U.S. Navy continues to receive a partial pension and medical benefits despite a conviction as a sex offender. Read More Former Command Master Chief Edward E. Scott, 43, was arrested in March 2007 after a month-long covert Internet operation near Seattle uncovered Scott's communication with someone he believed to be a mother with 12-year-old twins. The woman was actually an undercover agent. Scott asked the woman to get a hotel room with her children, giving graphic detail of specific sex acts he wanted to perform on the children and for the children to perform on him.

Investigations into child mistreatment, including neglect and physical and sexual abuse, skyrocketed in Montgomery County, Maryland during January, as school and child-welfare workers reacted to the discovery of four children's corpses in neighboring Washington, D. C., officials said. Read More Montgomery Health and Human Services leaders told a council panel that they believe the spike stems from the case of Banita Jacks, who is accused of murdering her four daughters after District Child and Family Services Agency employees failed to follow up on warnings of trouble in the family's Southeast home. See Volume 6, Issue 3 and Volume 6, Issue 4. Child Welfare Services officials in Montgomery County said the rate of new investigations in January was up 40 percent over the average of the previous nine months. Officials said there was no corresponding spike in actual incidents of abuse. "We feel it's a direct response to what happened in D.C.," Child Welfare Services Director Agnes Leshner said. In Washington, the high-profile January arrest spurred a fourfold increase in calls to the agency's child protection hot line, a tripling of investigations into child abuse and neglect, and a doubling of children removed from their homes. Montgomery County did not see spikes in children removed from their homes, but the number of children receiving in-home services in January did hit its highest point--215 cases--during the past nine months for which data were provided.

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