The Child Protection eNewsletter

Mental health staff rips Texas Child Protective Services over handling of FLDS kids… 

Mental health workers sent to emergency shelters in San Angelo last month to help care for the hundreds of women and children removed from a polygamist sect's West Texas ranch have sharply criticized the Child Protective Services operation, telling their governing board it unnecessarily traumatized the kids.  Read More

The CPS investigation of suspected child abuse and its decision to seek state custody of all 464 children punished mothers who appeared to be good parents of healthy, well-behaved and emotionally normal kids, workers said in a set of short and unsigned written reports made at the request of the board after a briefing.

All nine reports by employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state's child welfare agency for removing the children from their community, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter.  A few described ongoing tension between the two groups of social workers, including threats by CPS to have interfering MHMR workers arrested.

"I have worked in Domestic Violence/Sexual Abuse programming for over 20 years and have never seen women and children treated this poorly, not to mention their civil rights being disregarded in this manner," one wrote.

The workers spent several days in San Angelo, some shortly after the April 3 search of the Yearning for Zion Ranch prompted by a sexual abuse complaint, during the chaotic opening of a shelter in the city's coliseum, or in the days leading up to the children's dispersal to foster care facilities across the state later that month.  See  vol6_iss30  vol6_iss29  vol6_iss27.

"The entire MH support staff was 'fired' the second week; we were sent home due to being 'too compassionate'," one report stated.

The state has argued that enough evidence of "spiritual marriages," pregnancy and childbirth by underage girls at the ranch exists to seek permanent removal of all the children from their parents because of the risk of child abuse.

To respond to the allegations, CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins said via e-mail:  "We have received no complaints from Hill Country MHMR.  However, we will be looking into what are obviously very serious allegations, and sharing these allegations with other agencies as appropriate."

The state now has the minors in temporary custody, including a young woman and the son she gave birth to after the raid.  Read More

The case, remarkable for its scope, involves a complicated tangle of legal, religious and social issues.  The group—called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—practices a brand of polygamy taught by the earliest leaders of the Mormon faith but officially abandoned by Mormons in 1890.  The case brings into question whether the group's religious practices put children at risk.

No criminal charges have been brought to date, and the investigation continues.  Meanwhile, child-custody hearings are scheduled to begin May 19 in the city of San Angelo.  Guy Choate, district director for the State Bar of Texas, said hearings for individual FLDS children grouped by families would begin simultaneously in five courtrooms.  Each child has been appointed an attorney; lawyers from across the state offered their services free of charge.

Hand-scrawled records taken during searches of the FLDS headquarters are helping untangle the spider-web network of family relationships at the Yearning For Zion ranch, where some husbands had more than a dozen wives.  Read More

The church records offer a peek into an intricate culture in which men related to the sect's prophet, Warren Jeffs, enjoyed favored-husband status in the distribution of wives and all young women were married by 24.

An Associated Press analysis of the records, which authorities seized in a raid last month, show that by the time a girl reached 16, she was more likely to be married than to live as a child in her father's household.  The same was not true for boys.

Ben Bistline, a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who was raised in the sect, said Jeffs or other church leaders decided who got married and when.  Jeffs is imprisoned on an accomplice-to-rape charge in Utah.

The records, released by court officials last week, include 37 families totaling 507 individuals.  At the time the lists were written from March through August of 2007, most of the people were living at the YFZ Ranch, though others were in homes along the Utah-Arizona line.

Traffickers target child cyclone survivors… 

Child traffickers are targeting the youngest and most vulnerable survivors of Myanmar's catastrophic cyclone and two suspects have already been arrested, the UN said.  Read More

The children, among up to two million people struggling to survive without enough clean water, food or shelter in the aftermath of the storm that hit May 2 and 3, were approached last week in the main city Yangon (Rangoon), it said.

"A broker came to a shelter and tried to recruit children," said UNICEF's chief child protection officer in Myanmar, Anne-Claire Dufay.  "There was an intervention.  The police intervened and made arrests," she said.

Ms. Dufay said children who had been separated from their parents, and who were possibly orphans, were now facing the threat of violence on top of the everyday struggle to find enough food and water.  "There are concerns for children in camps," she said, adding that sleeping spaces and toilets should be well lit and safe for women and youngsters, to reduce the risk of harm in camps that can become crowded and tense.

Katy Barnett, Save the Children's child protection adviser in Rangoon, said the organization was aware of the report of the arrests and expected more trafficking problems as the crisis develops.  Read More  "It's something which agencies have been expecting.  It's an absolute standard thing in the fallout from an emergency like this,'' Ms Barnett said.

"Traffickers can easily get hold of unaccompanied or separated children and tell them they'll lead a better life or be safe.''

Ms Barnett said another unconfirmed report of people looking in camps to recruit girls to work as domestic workers—a typical ruse for traffickers—was being investigated by a church organization today.  "They are asking families if they would give their girls up and they haven't been stopped yet apparently,'' she said.

Myanmar made human trafficking illegal in September 2005, but in a report last year the US State Department listed the isolated nation as one of the world's worst offenders, along with North Korea and Laos.

Many of those involved in the trade are women and girls who face sexual exploitation after being smuggled across borders.

In other news… 

A growing number of communities across the USA are moving to prevent sexual predators from becoming ice cream truck drivers.  Read More  Law enforcement officials across the country are taking a closer look at ice cream truck vendors, after a number of high profile arrests of sex offenders working the ice cream circuit.  Cases in which ice cream truck drivers have been convicted of crimes against children in New York and Florida, as well as concerns about a registered sex offender selling ice cream in California have prompted some state and local governments to consider banning criminals from selling ice cream or at least requiring background checks before licenses are issued.

Details of the felony child sexual abuse charges against New Mexico cult leader Wayne Bent have been released in the affidavit for arrest warrant at  Read More.  For more on this story see  vol6_iss34  and  vol6_iss36.

The Dallas school system, which, like other large districts, has found it difficult to manage the large numbers of truant students, is among the first in the nation to experiment with electronic monitoring.  Read More  Nearly one-third of American students drop out of school, and Dallas has the seventh-worst graduation rate among large school districts, according to a study released in April by America’s Promise Alliance, founded by Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.  Dallas’s experiments in tracking truancy started three years ago.  Last year, case managers used a G.P.S. system to locate a truant student on the verge of overdosing on drugs, and they discovered that a student had skipped school because he was contemplating suicide.

A 42-year-old Las Cruces man was handed what amounts to a life sentence for raping a 9-year-old child.  Read More  District Judge Doug Driggers handed down a 252 year sentence to Jose Luis Cortina, according to Doña Ana County District Attorney Susana Martinez.  In February, Cortina was found guilty of 12 counts of criminal sexual penetration and six counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor.  The sentence handed down was the "maximum possible" sentence, Martinez said.

Attorneys and the judge in R. Kelly's child pornography trial began questioning 150 potential jurors Monday, asking what they know about the allegations against one of urban music's biggest stars.  Read More The 41-year-old R&B singer, known for sexually charged hits like "Bump N' Grind," has pleaded not guilty to charges that he videotaped himself having sex with a girl as young as 13.  When the trial gets under way, prosecutors will face a daunting challenge:  The girl believed to be on the videotape, who is now 23, says it wasn't her.  And Kelly's lawyers—including prominent Chicago attorney Ed Genson—haven't conceded it's Kelly in the video.  Prosecutors say the videotape was made between January 1, 1998, and November 1, 2000, and that the girl who appears in it was born in September 1984.  Kelly was indicted on pornography charges June 5, 2002, after the tape surfaced.  If jurors find the Grammy-winning artist guilty, he could go to prison for up to 15 years.

A former bus driver for Iraq war contractor KBR Inc. who was fired in 2006 for possessing child pornography got rehired less than a year later, and has again been caught with a large collection of child porn, according to prosecutors.  Read More  Ira L. Waltrip of Lampasas, Texas, who had been working for KBR at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, was charged this week in U.S. District Court with possessing child pornography.  According to a court affidavit, KBR fired Waltrip in January 2006 when he was assigned to the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq after he was discovered with a collection of child pornography.  At the time, authorities with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service elected not to prosecute Waltrip because they said they lacked sufficient evidence that the pornography in question actually depicted minors.  KBR rehired Waltrip in December 2006 as a bus driver.  Again, Waltrip was caught with an extensive library of child pornography, some of which appeared to depict children as young as four to six years old.

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing a man and woman of training the woman's child to be a dominatrix, selling her sexual services and photographing some of the acts.  Read More  U.S. Attorney John Wood said the case is unusual in that a parent has been charged with the commercial sex trafficking of his or her own minor child.  Todd B. Barkau, 35, of New York state, and the 44-year-old mother were charged in the seven-count indictment.  They once lived together in Blue Springs, Missouri, where the sex business was allegedly run.  "Barkau obtained control of a 12-year-old girl and he groomed, trained and forced her to become a sexual dominatrix," Wood said at a news conference in Kansas City.

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