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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 33 - May 20, 2009 Preschooler found buried in New Mexico playground...Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, released a composite image Tuesday of a young boy found buried beneath the sand of a local playground. CNN News story here 
The boy was discovered on Friday by a passerby who saw a tiny black and lime shoe protruding from beneath the playground sand. It led police to the body of a boy, who had been buried there in a shallow grave less than 48 hours earlier.
On Tuesday, police still had no answers as to what happened at Alvarado Park - or even who the boy was. His name is unknown, though the community has dubbed him "Baby Justice" or "Baby Angel." Nobody in the area has claimed his body, and nobody has reported a child of his age missing. Before the composite image was created, police weren't able to release a photo of the boy because his body was so disfigured by the sand's heat. Police say the Native American or Hispanic boy was between 3 and 5 years old, 38 pounds, 38 inches in height, with brown eyes and dark quarter-inch hair. When he was found, he was wearing Arizona brand clothing, size 3T - nylon black running pants with red stripes, a red shirt with a monster truck on it and black, gray and lime green Skechers sneakers. Police aren't sure how he died. Albuquerque Police Department spokesman John Walsh said a preliminary autopsy didn't reveal a cause of death. Walsh said there were no obvious signs of bruising on the boy. "We have canvassed the entire adjoining neighborhood," Walsh said. "We're knocking on every door. We've been broadcasting and pleading for tips from the community. But still, nobody has come forward." Irish probe: Abuse "endemic" in Catholic schools... The Catholic Church in Ireland knew that long-term sex offenders were repeatedly abusing children while working in the country's church and state-run institutions, a damning report revealed today. 
The Child Abuse Commission detailed a catalogue of disturbing and chronic sexual, physical and emotional abuse inflicted on thousands of disadvantaged, neglected and abandoned children by both religious and lay staff since the 1930s.
Angry exchanges took place between Commission staff and victims of abuse today when they were barred from the launch of the report in a central Dublin hotel. Daily Mail UK story here A fiercely debated, nine-year investigation into Ireland's Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades - and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation. Fox News story here High Court Justice Sean Ryan on Wednesday unveiled the 2,600-page final report of Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, which is based on testimony from thousands of former students and officials from more than 250 church-run institutions. The full report is at http://www.childabusecommission.ie/. 
The report found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.
"In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. ... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family denigration was widespread." Wednesday's five-volume report sides almost completely with the former students' accounts. It concludes that church officials always shielded their orders' pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy. "A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from," the report concluded. But its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document. The Irish government already has funded a parallel compensation system that has paid 12,000 abuse victims an average of $90,000. About 2,000 claims remain outstanding. Meanwhile, the last remaining plaintiff in a priest sex abuse trial against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle has settled his case. Seattle Times news story here Both The Seattle Times and SeattlePI.com report the 44-year-old suburban Auburn man settled late Tuesday for $700,000. He testified earlier in the day in the King County Superior Court trial about the abuse he said he suffered as an eighth grader in the late 1970s when Patrick O'Donnell was a priest at his Seattle parish. A second plaintiff in the trial settled Monday; two others settled before the trial began. This has been the first lawsuit against the Seattle archdiocese over priest sex abuse to go to trial. Lawyers for the archdiocese say more than 200 claims involving a number of priests have been settled and fewer than 20 pend. O'Donnell has admitted abusing at least 30 boys. At issue was whether former Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, who testified Monday, and other archdiocesan officials knew or should have known that O'Donnell molested boys repeatedly before he was abruptly sent to Seattle from Spokane, and whether he was monitored sufficiently before he returned to Spokane. The Auburn man "felt really good that he got to tell his story - that was the most important thing," his lawyer Timothy Kosnoff said. He also felt proud that he'd been able to get Seattle archdiocese leaders to court, and that he got Hunthausen to publicly "admit that mistakes were made," Kosnoff said. Also, a victim of an abusive Roman Catholic priest and victims' supporters expressed disappointment Monday over former Archbishop Rembert Weakland's upcoming memoir and say he and the Milwaukee church continue to hide one of the state's worst abuse cases. AP News story here Father Lawrence Murphy worked at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis from 1950 to 1974 and worked for the archdiocese until he died in 1998. In 2004, the archdiocese named Murphy as one of 43 Milwaukee-area priests restricted from duties because of abuse allegations. Court documents released Monday in an ongoing fraud case against the church show Weakland oversaw a 1993 evaluation that concluded Murphy likely assaulted up to 200 students. GAO report: Special-needs kids abused in schools... Congressional auditors have uncovered widespread abuse of techniques use to restrain or discipline special-education students in U.S. schools, with some deaths linked to the practices, a top congressman says. CNN story here 
The findings are among those expected from a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday. The report documented serious problems with the way children with disabilities are being treated in public schools, including cases of children being held face-down on the ground.
The GAO report was prepared for the House Education and Labor Committee, which is considering new laws governing what actions teachers can take to rein in disruptive special-needs students. "I think what we're going to hear from the GAO is that very often, special-need children are subjected to the policies of seclusion and policies of restraint that have turned out to be lethal in a number of circumstances," said Representative George Miller, D-California, the committee's chairman. In other cases, children as young as 6 have been locked away "for hours at a time," Miller said. "What the GAO is telling us is that that policy is fairly widespread," he said. "The state regulations about how to handle these incidents don't exist in about half the states, and in other states you have kind of a patchwork of regulations." The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found that state laws governing the treatment of the more than 6 million children classified as having "special needs" - conditions including autism and Down syndrome - are patchy at best. Teachers and school staff frequently lack training in correct restraint methods, and in some cases, where improper restraints led to injuries, teachers often kept their jobs. Only five states keep track of incidents where special-needs students are separated or restrained. Parents contacted by CNN commonly said they were not told their child was being disciplined until he or she began to behave badly at home - a sign of trouble at school. When confronted with complaints, school systems sometimes sought to minimize or deny the allegations, even after public investigations found the charges to be true. And parents told CNN that when they got into a dispute with the teacher, their child was made to suffer as retribution. 
Meanwhile, a Georgia high school teacher and her paraprofessional have been arrested after allegedly duct taping a special education student to a chair. WSBTV News story here
Cherokee County officials said Woodstock High School teacher Laurie Peavy and her paraprofessional, Nancy Cheek, duct taped a special education student to a chair in 2008. During the investigation, police said another allegation surfaced that Peavy confined another student under a desk in the classroom. Monday, the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office arrested Peavy, 44, and charged her with two counts of false imprisonment and two counts of cruelty to children in the first degree. Cheek, 49, was charged with one count of false imprisonment and one count of cruelty to children in the first degree. In other news... 
The 3-year-old California boy abducted from his family by gunmen almost two weeks ago is back home, shorn of his long, curly hair, but apparently unharmed after being found wandering the streets of a Mexico border town. MSNBC article here Briant Rodriguez rejoined his family after being hospitalized overnight for a physical and emotional evaluation. Police have not questioned him about his ordeal, but plan to do so in coming days after the boy has time to settle into his normal routines at home. "Physically, he's in good shape. He was obviously fatigued," Cindy Beavers, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, told The Associated Press. Authorities said Briant was kidnapped May 3 by two gunmen who burst into his family's modest home and tied up his mother and four of his siblings. A local police officer found him wandering the streets of the border town of Mexicali late Thursday. His long, curly hair had been shaved but authorities said he looked fine otherwise. For more on this story see vol7_iss31.
A group of Czech pedophiles are urging fellow offenders to be castrated in order to return to society. news.com.au story here Four self-confessed Czechoslovakian pedophiles told UK paper The Sun that castration - physical or chemical - had helped them overcome overwhelming urges to rape children. The Czech Republic is the only country in Europe to surgically castrate sex offenders. Last November, Rafael Josef asked to have part of his testicles removed to stop pedophilic urges, and hopes his actions will convince the Czech state that he's fit to return to society after 13 years behind bars. "It was painful but afterwards I felt calmer, more balanced," he said. "Now I would trust myself to live near a school. "I wish I had been castrated years ago." The 30-minute operation, which can be done under local anesthetic, removes the part of the testicles which produce testosterone. Dr Zelmira Herrova, 58, said she felt castration for dangerous offenders was not just advisable, but essential. "They find castration a relief," she said. "The rate of re-offending among my patients is zero." 
Elisabeth Fritzl's cries for help during the 24 years she spent imprisoned by her father in an Austrian cellar could be heard by those living above, a new book reveals. news.com.au story here It has been widely assumed that the cellar in Amstetten, where Josef Fritzl kept his daughter and three of the seven children he fathered with her, must have been soundproofed for the captives to have gone unnoticed, The Times reported. But The Crimes of Josef Fritzl: Uncovering the Truth, by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski, reveals that a sound engineer who tested the cellar's acoustics found that the reality was quite different. A single-page report by Peter Kopecky, which was mentioned but not elaborated on during closed session at Fritzl's trial in March, stated that knocking and cries for help from the cellar would have been "very audible" to tenants living there, in flats rented out by Fritzl. The noises that the tenants thought they had heard coming from the cellar beneath them had been real: the thumping, the moaning, the strange clanking noises emanating from deep underground," the book states according to The Times. "But nobody had thought to investigate." For more on this story see vol6_iss78, vol7_iss18 vol7_iss19, and vol7_iss20.
It's hard to say what's going on in the heads of children, but a new study shows how it's going on. MSNBC News story here Kids' brains are organized differently than those of adults, scientists have learned through a series of brain scans. (video story here) The workings of children's neural connections are more governed by proximity to one another than is the case in adult brains, said Steven E. Petersen of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Petersen and his colleagues are interested in normal brain organization and development to learn more about how developmental disorders and brain injury can impair mental capabilities. Their new findings on children's brains could be used to develop new treatments for such disorders. For the new study, Petersen and his colleagues scanned the brains of 210 subjects ranging from 7 to 31 years old. Researchers set the lower limit for study subjects at 7 years of age because the brain is approximately 95 percent of its adult size at this age. Previous research revealed four brain networks with varying responsibilities in the adult brain that typically involve tight links between several brain regions that are physically distant from each other. The new research found that this is not the case in children: Instead of having networks made of brain regions that are distant from each other but functionally linked, most of the tightest connections in a child's brain are between brain regions that are physically close to each other.
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