The Child Protection eNewsletter

UN peacekeepers and aid workers raping children as young as six… 

Humanitarian aid workers and United Nation peacekeepers are sexually abusing small children in several war-ravaged and food-poor countries, a leading European charity has said.  Read More

Children as young as 6 have been forced to have sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in return for food and money, Save the Children UK said in a report released Tuesday.

After interviewing hundreds of children, the charity said it found instances of rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.

Video link:  Read More

"It is hard to imagine a more grotesque abuse of authority or flagrant violation of children's rights," said Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children UK.   The full report is available online at Read More.

Save the Children says that almost as shocking as the abuse itself is the "chronic under-reporting" of the abuses.  It believes that thousands more children around the world could be suffering in silence.

According to the charity, children told researchers they were too frightened to report the abuse, fearful that the abuser would come back to hurt them and that they would stop receiving aid from agencies, or even be punished by their family or community.

"People don't report it because they are worried that the agency will stop working here, and we need them," a teenage boy in southern Sudan told Save the Children.

The charity's research was centered on Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, but Save the Children said the perpetrators of sexual abuse of children could be found in every type of humanitarian organization at all levels.

Save the Children is calling for a global watchdog to tackle the problem and said it was working with the U.N. to establish local mechanisms that will allow victims to easily report abuse.

"We are glad that Save the Children continues to shed a light on this problem.  It actually follows up on a report that we did in 2002 with Save the Children.  I think every population in the world has to confront this problem of exploitation and abuse of children," said Ron Redmond, chief spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland.

"I think that the report is very valuable and does give us some good points to which the United Nations should continue to address this issue," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said Tuesday.  "On all these cases which have been raised, we will very carefully investigate" and will take "necessary measures" where appropriate.  Read More

This report comes as many thousands more children are vulnerable and in need of aid in China and Myanmar following catastrophic natural disasters in those countries, and traffickers are looking for victims too.  See  vol6_iss37.

Ex-employee reluctantly ID’s R. Kelly and victim… 

It hardly mattered that Lindsey Perryman didn't want the two people in the R. Kelly sex tape to be the R&B singer and the alleged victim.  Read More  She still identified them both in testimony Tuesday, her obvious regard for Kelly notwithstanding. 

"I didn't want to think it was them," said Perryman, who worked for Kelly in various capacities on and off from 1999 to 2006.  "I mean, I think so highly of Mr. Kelly and his family.  They've been very, very good to me."

But like most of the other state's witnesses who have been marched up for identification purposes, Perryman said the facial features of the alleged victim stood out to her.

"She has distinct cheekbones, the way she moves her mouth and talks and smiles," she said. "It's very distinctive to her."

As for Kelly, her former employer, she said:  "The image I saw looked exactly like Mr. Kelly."

Perryman's involvement in the case began in December, when she was contacted by Cook County prosecutor Shauna Boliker.  A month later, Boliker showed Perryman a portion of the tape.  At first, Perryman didn't identify either the alleged victim or Kelly, a point the defense took pains to note.

"I was in shock and I wanted to be 110 percent sure," she said of her reluctance to identify the parties.  That same month when she saw the tape again, she was "110 percent sure," she said.

Meanwhile, high drama is on tap for the trial on Wednesday.  Read More  CBS 2 has learned there's a lot more to the story to be told by a woman claiming to have had sex with Kelly and the alleged teen victim.

Until now, no one's been able to say they saw R. Kelly and a young teen having sex.  Only that the people on the now infamous sex tape look like Kelly and the girl who called him her godfather.

Wednesday, the subject of a recent Chicago Sun-Times report will tell the jury about an alleged sexual threesome with R. Kelly and the young girl; testimony expected to trigger major fireworks in the courtroom.

The mystery witness reportedly will claim she got tens of thousands of dollars from Kelly's people to return a tape of the threesome.  But she will also be questioned about what sources close to the case call another botched extortion attempt, which resulted in what prosecutors said, in court, were "Mr. Adam's attempts to have her arrested."

In other news…  

An explosion of pornography and blackmail has hit San Diego high schools.  Students are using their cell phones to text crude and pornographic images of each other to their friends.  Read More  Fox 6’s Jeff Powers explains this new disturbing trend in a video story.  Read More  Meanwhile, Japanese youngsters are getting so addicted to Internet-linking cell phones that the government is starting a program warning parents and schools to limit their use among children.  Read More  The government is worried about how elementary and junior high school students are getting sucked into cyberspace crimes, spending long hours exchanging mobile e-mail and suffering other negative effects of cell phone overuse, Masaharu Kuba, a government official overseeing the initiative, said Tuesday.  "Japanese parents are giving cell phones to their children without giving it enough thought," he said.  "In Japan, cell phones have become an expensive toy."

A dozen children removed from the polygamist Yearning for Zion Ranch have been reunited with their parents while the Texas Supreme Court decides their fate—and that of more than four hundred children still in state custody.  Read More  The lawyer for a couple whose three children were among the hundreds removed last month by Texas authorities says the family is celebrating.  The attorney says a "little boy just grabbed for his daddy" when he and his two sisters were reunited with their parents.  Among those released was newborn Richard Daniel Jessop, born while his 22-year-old mother Louisa was in state custody.  Friday was only the second time Dan Jessop had been allowed to see his 12-day-old son.  The agency has agreed to allow the parents to live with their children in the San Antonio area under state supervision.  The three families are not allowed to return to the Yearning For Zion ranch, where they lived before the raid.

A mother was sentenced to 20 years in prison for keeping her 17-year-old adopted son caged in her home.  Read More  Brenda Sullivan pleaded guilty in January to three counts of aggravated child abuse.  Prosecutors agreed to drop lesser child neglect charges.  The teen weighed 49 pounds when child welfare workers found him in 2005 in what appeared to be a cage.  Sullivan told a judge at the time that Ohio authorities told her to keep the boy, who had severe medical and emotional problems, in a crib.  "There's only one conclusion when you look at the medical evidence in this case, and that is that she literally starved him," prosecutor Julie Schlax said.  Two other children, 13-year-old twins the Sullivans adopted as infants, both testified they were kept in similar cages.

Facebook, MySpace and other web sites have unleashed a potent new phenomenon of social networking in cyberspace.  (For information every parent should know about social networking web sites, visit  vol1_iss2.)  But at the same time, a growing body of evidence is suggesting that traditional social networks play a surprisingly powerful and underrecognized role in influencing how people behave.  Read More The latest research comes from Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at the Harvard Medical School, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.  The pair reported last summer that obesity appeared to spread from one person to another through social networks, almost like a virus or a fad.  In a follow-up to that provocative research, the team has produced similar findings about another major health issue: smoking.  In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person's decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit—even people they do not know.  And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.

Austin police have charged a local entrepreneur with sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl for whom he had served as a court-appointed advocate and said they seized a video showing him having sex with other children.  Read More  Billy Dan Carroll, the 53-year-old founder of a court reporting firm with offices in Austin, San Antonio and Houston, appeared to be having sex with children ranging in age from 3 to 15 in one video, Austin police Sergeant Brian Loyd said.  Loyd said the videos also show Carroll having sex with two adult women who appear unconscious.  Investigators are now trying to learn the identity of the victims and asked anyone with information to call police.

*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"