The Child Protection eNewsletter

Report claims Holloway suspect Joran van der Sloot "traffics in women"… 

Joran van der Sloot, the young man believed to be involved the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway on Aruba, is now involved in selling Thai women into prostitution, claims TV crime reporter Peter R de Vries.  Dutch News story here

De Vries won an Emmy for his TV report earlier this year in which Van der Sloot is caught on hidden camera saying Natalee's body was dumped at sea.  Holloway disappeared in 2005 and the case has never been officially solved.

Now De Vries has made a second report based on an undercover operation in Thailand, reports Friday’s Telegraaf.  The paper has seen a rough cut of the program which was shown on TV on Sunday night.

According to this latest exposé, Van der Sloot makes €10,000 for every girl he delivers to the Dutch prostitution market.  The girls will work for "just 300 dollars a month" he is reported as saying on camera.

During conversations taped in a hotel in Bangkok, Van der Sloot tells a man posing as a Dutch sex industry boss that he can organize visas and passports for the girls, who think they are going to the Netherlands to work as dancers.

De Vries tells the Telegraaf: "The pictures show how little respect this 21-year-old has for the lives of others. The fact that he goes into the trafficking of women after the disappearance of Natalee is typical of him…  Making preparations for people smuggling is a crime.  It could land him into big problems in Thailand."

Dutch news reports said that Thai authorities had requested a transcript of the de Vries video.  The reports claimed that van der Sloot had left Bangkok and that his whereabouts were not known.  ABC News story here

De Vries said he expects the Thai government to take van der Sloot into custody and then "maybe he'll stand trial."

Bounty Hunter Holds Prayer Vigil For Caylee Anthony… 

What was supposed to be a memorial service for Caylee Anthony turned into a prayer vigil Tuesday morning as bounty hunter Leonard Padilla and dozens of others gathered at Blanchard Park to pray for Caylee.  WFTV News story here

"I'm not here to represent anybody but two people.  I'm here to represent the Lord and I'm here to represent Caylee, and that's it," Minister Richard Grund said at the beginning of the short service.  (watch full service)

Meanwhile, the man who spent thousand of dollars to look for Caylee's body was so fed up with the Anthony family he packed up and left Orlando, Florida Tuesday.

Tim Miller runs EquuSearch.  The group searches for missing people all over the country.  He organized several expensive search parties for Caylee's body over the weekend, but called them all off Monday.  Miller told Eyewitness News he's never had a case like this where the family offers only criticism instead of actually helping in the search.

The search began on Saturday with 1,300 volunteers, but on Monday, the number of volunteers dropped significantly.  Central Florida News 13 story here

They searched a 25-square-mile area where they believe the toddler’s body could be.  See more at vol6_iss71.

In other news…  

Even today, two years after Mark Foley's very public fall from grace, the former congressman can't explain why he sent lurid, sexually explicit computer messages to male teens who had worked as Capitol Hill pages.  AP News story here  Sitting in his room at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York this week, the Florida Republican, wearing a yellow tie with blue elephants, finally broke his silence.  "I'm trying to find my way back," Foley said in an interview with The Associated Press, his first public comments on the scandal since resigning from Congress on September 29, 2006.  Foley insists he did nothing illegal and never had sexual contact with teens, just inappropriate Internet conversations.  Investigations by the FBI and Florida authorities ended without criminal charges.  And while he concedes his behavior was "extraordinarily stupid," he remains somewhat unwilling to accept full public scorn.  For more on this story see  vol4_iss41,  vol4_iss44,  and  vol4_iss51.

Ted Haggard, the disgraced former evangelical leader, recently broke his silence on the second anniversary of the scandal that brought him down.  ABC News story here  He gave a pair of sermons at a small church in Illinois where the pastor is an old friend of his.  Haggard told the congregation that a sexual incident with a man when he was 7 years old may be related to the scandal involving a male prostitute and crystal meth use that cost him his job two years ago.  "My dad was pretty successful," Haggard said.  "He had a lot of workers.  One of those workers had a sexual experience with me.  I was 7 years old."  Haggard said that incident stayed with him throughout his life.  "There I was, 50 years old, a conservative Republican, loving the word of God, an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled, charismatic, all those things," he said.  "But some of the things that were buried in the depths of the sea from when I was in the second grade started to rage in my heart and mind."

Eighteen months after their child's disappearance and nearly four months after Portuguese police officially closed the books on their probe, the parents of Madeleine McCann have revealed they are only a fraction of the way through analyzing voluminous files relating to the unsolved case.  People story here  Writing a rare blog on a Web site dedicated to finding Madeleine, her father, Dr. Gerry McCann, says on behalf of himself and wife Kate (also a doctor), "We continue to work very hard behind the scenes.  Our support team has been expanded as we try to identify what has been done, what has not been done and what can still be done to help find Madeleine."  He adds, "We are not yet halfway through the Portuguese files but there is less information within the files than we were expecting."

A 17-year-old boy left by his mother at an Omaha hospital is the 30th child abandoned under Nebraska's safe-haven law, state officials said.  Fox News story here  The boy from the Omaha area was left at Creighton University Medical Center on Monday morning, said Todd Landry, director of children and family services for the Department of Health and Human Services.  The state was still investigating the case and additional details were not available, he said.  Nebraska was the last state to enact a safe-haven law, intended to protect unwanted newborns from being abandoned.  Some have interpreted the state's law as meaning it could apply to children as old as 18, because it uses the word "child" and doesn't specify an age limit.  Those interpretations take the word "child" to mean "minor," which in Nebraska includes anyone under the age of 19.  However, Health and Human Services spokeswoman Jeanne Atkinson said a separate state law pertaining to juveniles won't let authorities take in children older than 17.  Landry said an 18-year-old woman left at a Lincoln hospital by her mother on Sunday was not being handled as a safe-haven case.  The state Legislature opens a special session Friday to consider revising the safe-haven law.  MSNBC News story here  Most legislators have already agreed to set an age limit of 3 days.

Police say an 8-year-old boy confessed to planning and carrying out the shooting deaths of his father, Vincent Romero, 29, and co-worker Timothy Romans, 39, who rented a room from him.  CBS News story here  The men were found shot to death inside Romero's home in the small eastern Arizona community northeast of Phoenix last week.  Police and neighbors are at a loss to explain why he would have used a .22-caliber rifle to kill his father and another man at their home.  The third-grader was due in court Monday, the same day as a funeral Mass scheduled to be held for his dad at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church.  In a sign of the emotional and legal complexities of the case, police are pushing to have the boy tried as an adult even as they investigate possible abuse, St. Johns Police Chief Roy Melnick said.  If convicted as a minor, the boy could be sent to juvenile detention until he turns 18.  Some reasons children kill parents are explored in  ABC News story here.  A Hazelton Foundation study cited in the National Bulletin on Domestic Violence Prevention Volume 13, Number 7 found that 63% of boys between ages 11 and 20 in prison are there for murdering their mother’s abuser.

Prosecutors in the trial of a woman accused of a MySpace hoax that allegedly led a 13-year-old girl to kill herself will likely be prohibited from presenting evidence of the suicide, a federal judge said.  CNN News story here  U.S. District Judge George H. Wu told attorneys he was leaning toward excluding the evidence from the trial of Lori Drew, who is accused of using a fictitious profile on the social networking site to drive Megan Meier, her daughter's former friend, to hang herself.  Drew has pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing computers without authorization.  "I don't necessarily think the suicide is relevant to the crime charged," Wu said, adding he thought details of Meier's death would unfairly prejudice the jury.  He said he planned to announce his final decision Friday.  Prosecutors say Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Missouri, helped create a false-identity MySpace account and harassed Meier with cruel messages.  Meier, who was being treated for depression, hanged herself after allegedly receiving messages saying the world would be better off without her.  For more on this story see  vol5_iss76  and  vol6_iss38.

Public schools in Florida have until December 1 to implement a uniform anti-bullying policy after a bill was signed into law by Governor Charlie Crist thanks to a three-year effort from a teacher whose son committed suicide after being bullied.  Orlando Local 6 news story here  Debbie Johnston, whose 15-year-old son Jeffery committed suicide, consulted with parents, teachers and other victims of bullies, and the "Jeffery Johnston Stand Up For All Students Act" was signed into law this year.  All 67 school districts in Florida have to adopt a uniform anti-bullying policy that mandates schools keep track of every incident and take immediate action, whether the abuse is verbal, mental or cyberbullying.  Penalties range from expulsion to jail time.  “It wasn't against the law to kill a child with a computer in the state of Florida, and now that's changed," Johnston said.  For more information about bullying visit our Child Protection eGuide at eGuide/vol1_iss29.

There may be some truth to the notion that bullies make other people feel bad to make themselves feel better.  ABC News story here  A new study published in the journal Biological Psychology used fMRI scans to compare brain activity in eight unusually aggressive 16- to 18-year-old males to those of eight normal adolescent males while they watched videos of people getting hurt.  While both groups showed activity in the brain's pain centers, the brains of aggressive males, those with conduct disorder, also showed activity in the brain's pleasure centers, suggesting that they may have been enjoying what they were seeing.  Normal males showed no such activity.  While the study proposed an exciting new hypothesis about how young people with conduct disorder may respond to certain stimuli, experts caution that it may not be appropriate to extrapolate the results to the garden-variety bully roaming elementary and junior high school hallways.  See also a video interview on this study at  Today Show interview here.

A man accused of sexually assaulting several children was arraigned at a Belmont County, Ohio high school as part of an educational program.   WTOV 9 news story here   David Clemons is accused of raping and molesting several children over the past 20 years.  Numerous judicial proceedings are held at various high schools as part of the High School Live Court program led by Northern Division Belmont County Court Judge Frank Fregiato.  Friday, Clemons was arraigned at Shadyside High School as students looked on.  Superintendent Terry Brinker said having an accused child rapist walk in the school today makes kids aware of potential consequences and their actions.  "This isn't in front of the television.  This isn't made up.  This is real life.  These are real-life people," Brinker said.

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