The Child Protection eNewsletter

Texas takes legal custody of 401 sect children… 

Authorities said they have taken legal custody of 401 children who lived on an isolated West Texas polygamist retreat built by imprisoned "prophet" Warren Jeffs.  Read More

The children are being kept at a temporary shelter at historic Fort Concho in nearby San Angelo while authorities investigate whether a child bride gave birth on the ranch at age 15.

Jeffs is jailed in Kingman, Arizona, where he awaits trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.  Read More

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.  See  vol5_iss65.

The children in state custody are joined at the shelter by 133 women, most of them mothers, who were taken during the past few days from the sprawling Yearning for Zion ranch, said Marleigh Meisner, a spokeswoman for the Texas Child Protective Services agency.

The women are free to return to the 1,900-acre compound, officials said, but many have chosen to remain.  At this point, officials said, the children's fathers are not permitted to see them.

Court proceedings began Monday to determine whether there is enough evidence to remove the children from their homes on the ranch, which is near Eldorado, Meisner said.  A hearing is scheduled April 17.

The children will be appointed lawyers and legal guardians in about two weeks, she added.

Meisner said the temporary shelter is filling up quickly, and officials are facing a "critical shortage" of foster homes.  Officials will try to keep siblings together, she added.

Law enforcement officials would not provide many details of their investigation, but Meisner said the 401 court affidavits being filed should shed some light on the alleged abuse.

The investigation, which began Thursday night, is continuing and authorities remain on the property to search for evidence and other children, said Tela Mange of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

One man has been arrested, allegedly for interfering with investigators.  He faces a misdemeanor charge, authorities said.

Investigators said they believe more children will be found at the ranch, but Mange stopped short of saying they were being hidden

U.S. Justice Department suing 11 jurisdictions, alleging abuse of teen inmates…  

The U.S. Justice Department has sued nine states and two territories alleging abuse, inadequate mental and medical care and potentially dangerous methods like the use of restraints.  Read More

The department doesn't have the power to shut down facilities--states do--but through litigation it can force a state to improve its detention centers and protect the civil rights of jailed youths.

Florida issued a report in January asking for more than 50 changes to its system and a partnership with the Department of Education to attack problems before kids drop out of school.  Overall, the report calls for treating troubled kids with therapy as an alternative to jail.

Texas is grappling with the fallout from reports of long-term sexual abuse at its facilities, where, since 2000, more than 90 Texas Youth Commission employees--roughly one a month--have been sanctioned or fired for sexual misconduct with adolescents, commission spokesman Jim Hurley told CNN.   (see vol5_iss39,  vol5_iss37,  vol5_iss36,  vol5_iss35  and  vol5_iss19)

Texas granted early release in February to a 16-year-old girl who attempted suicide after she was allegedly molested repeatedly by a male guard.  The guard was indicted in December on four counts of molesting the girl.  He was previously charged with raping four other female inmates, but those charges were dropped, said Hurley, after witnesses retracted their accounts.

This spring, two administrators at a west Texas youth facility are scheduled to stand trial on charges they were having sex with juvenile inmates, one allegedly enticing a teen to perform sex acts for birthday cake.  The men resigned in 2005, Hurley said.

Texas recently has added hundreds more surveillance cameras and personnel to its facilities to avoid more problems, he said.

"Girls are sexually abused in these institutions more often than the public would believe," said Paul DeMuro, a delinquency expert who in 2002 inspected Mississippi’s Columbia Training Center for the Justice Department and is now a consultant for the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Nationwide, the Justice Department has said 2,821 allegations of sex abuse were made in 2004, the most recent data on the topic available.

In other news… 

Five teenagers brandishing baseball bats and a machete rampaged through a school in Sydney, Australia, smashing windows, terrorizing students and hitting a teacher over the head, police said.  Read More  Eighteen students were also slightly hurt.  The five, between the ages of 14 and 16, were arrested after storming into suburban Merrylands High School and would likely be charged with assault and other crimes, Police Detective Inspector Jim Stewart said.  The offenses carry penalties up to seven years in prison.  One teacher was treated at a hospital after being hit on the head with a bat when he tried to stop the attackers, and 18 students were treated for cuts from broken glass and other minor injuries, Stewart said.  "It beggars belief they would attempt this kind of activity against innocent students," Stewart said.  Police were questioning the suspects--who were not identified because they are minors--about their reasons for the attack, including whether they were looking for someone in particular.  "The information to us is they were coming here ... seeking someone," Stewart said.

Medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses and bad drug reactions harm roughly one out of 15 hospitalized children, according to the first scientific test of a new detection method.  Read More   That number is far higher than earlier estimates and bolsters concerns already heightened by well publicized cases like the accidental drug overdose of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins last November.  “These data and the Dennis Quaid episode are telling us that... these kinds of errors and experiencing harm as a result of your health care is much more common than people believe.  It's very concerning,” said Dr. Charles Homer of the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality.  His group helped develop the detection tool used in the study.  Researchers found a rate of 11 drug-related harmful events for every 100 hospitalized children.  That compares with an earlier estimate of two per 100 hospitalized children, based on traditional detection methods.  The rate reflects the fact that some children experienced more than one drug treatment mistake.  The new estimate translates to 7.3 percent of hospitalized children, or about 540,000 kids each year, a calculation based on government data.

On a screen at the front of a classroom, Gene Fishel flashed an online social-networking profile of "hotlilflgirl," which said she was 15, enjoys being around boys and wants to meet new people.  Read More  The next image revealed the real "hotlilflgirl" - a mug shot of a 31-year-old man who was convicted of sexually abusing 11 children he met online and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.  "Not little, not fly and not a girl," said Fishel, a Virginia assistant attorney general.  He warned his audience about the dangers of sharing personal information on the Internet and agreeing to meet Web acquaintances in person.  Fishel's presentation at James River High School recently was one of many being held this school year in the state, the first to mandate that public schools offer Internet safety classes for all grade levels.  Nationally, Texas and Illinois are among states that have since passed their own Internet safety education laws, but unlike Virginia they don't make the courses mandatory.

Meanwhile, the British government wants to bar convicted pedophiles from using social networking Web sites such as Facebook.  Read More  The plan involves forcing sex offenders to give any e-mail address they use to police, who will then ask the Web sites to block their access, said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, whose department is in charge of law enforcement.  Smith said the proposal is aimed at sending out the message that the Internet is "not a no-go area when it comes to law enforcement."  "We are changing the law ... so that we have got better control over the way in which child sex offenders are able to use the Internet," Smith said on GMTV.  The government wants to prevent pedophiles from using social networking Web sites to groom children to be sexual abuse victims, according to the Home Office.  Under the proposed legislation, it would be a crime punishable by up to five years in prison for a convicted child sex offender to use an e-mail address that has not been registered with police, a Home Office spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with government policy.  For more information on what you should know about online safety and social networking sites visit vol1_iss1 and vol1_iss2  

A 14-year-old girl gave birth in a restroom at her junior high, and the baby boy cried once before she tried to flush him down the toilet, killing him.  Read More  An autopsy confirmed the baby was alive when born at Cedar Bayou Junior High in Baytown, near Houston.  The boy was probably full term and cried before the mother, an eighth-grader, tried to flush him, said police Lieutenant Eric Freed.  The mother was taken to a hospital.  People who knew her at school said she wore baggy clothing, and nobody suspected she was pregnant, The Houston Chronicle reported.  Meanwhile, a housekeeping supervisor is credited with saving the life of a newborn whose mother had just given birth in a toilet at a western New York hotel.  Read More  Cathy Masic says a hotel housekeeper gave birth in the bathroom in a guest room at the Quality Hotel and Suites in Niagara Falls.  Masic tells The Buffalo News that the newborn boy wasn't breathing when she pulled him from the toilet.  She says she wrapped the baby in linens and phoned for help.  An emergency dispatcher told her how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before paramedics arrived.

A recent study revealed a physiological connection between child abuse and feelings of intense pain.  Read More  Researchers at UCLA and the University of North Carolina compared pain responses in a test group of 20 women, 10 suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and 10 not.  Both groups had people with a history of abuse, both physical and sexual.  When subjected to mildly painful stimuli, the subjects with both IBS and a history of abuse reported feeling more intense pain than their counterparts.  In addition to self-reported data from the test subjects, the authors were able to document the pain experience using fMRI brain imaging.  This data showed that the women who reported the most pain had heightened activity in the sensation and emotion regions of the brain.  In addition, the brain areas that normally help to dampen negative sensations and emotions were inhibited.  Based on their study, Dr. Yehuda Ringel, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dr. Doug Drossman, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at UNC, reported that the link between abuse and IBS-related pain can apply to other physical conditions.  Ringel pointed out that the study did not show that a history of abuse leads to IBS, or any other chronic pain problem.  Nor did they suggest that people with IBS necessarily have a history of abuse.  Rather, Ringel and Drossman were able to provide quantifiable data on how trauma can have long-term effects on the brain, amplifying pain sensations.  During a traumatic experience, the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, shuts down. Anything the body experiences after that time--including fear, confusion, feeling out of control and physical pain--is relayed directly to the emotion processing centers in the brain, creating areas of hypersensitivity. Later, pain can parallel those feelings.

*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"