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Archives > Volume 8 Issue 8 - January 29, 2010 Traffickers targeting Haiti's children, human organs, PM says...Trafficking of children and human organs is occurring in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated parts of Haiti, killed more than 150,000 people, and left many children orphans, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said Wednesday. CNN News story here 
"There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs," Bellerive said in an exclusive interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
Haiti is trying to locate displaced children and register them so they can either be reunited with other family members or put up for adoption, Bellerive said. But, he said, illegal child trafficking is "one of the biggest problems that we have." Many groups appear to be legitimate, "but a lot of organizations - they come and they say there were children on the streets. They're going to bring them to the [United] States," he said. Bellerive said he's trying to work with embassies in Port-au-Prince to protect Haiti's children from traffickers. "Any child that is leaving the country has to be validated by the embassy under a list that they give me, with all the reports," he said. Speaking at his temporary headquarters in a police station near the Port-au-Prince Airport, Bellerive said the first thing Haitian officials seek to confirm is whether the children have adoption papers before they leave the country. In Washington, the State Department said Wednesday it is moving cautiously on the issue of adoptions from Haiti. "We want to be sure that when a child has been identified, that due diligence has been done to make sure that this is truly an orphan child and not a child that actually has family," said State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley. "Sometimes if you push too hard, too fast there can be unintended consequences. So we are being very, very careful." The U.N. says it's on alert to prevent the exploitation of the thousands of Haitian kids who have lost or been separated from their parents and who wander aimlessly in search of food, water and shelter. UNICEF, the U.N.'s child-advocacy arm, as well as groups like Save the Children and the Red Cross, say they're registering at-risk kids and setting up shelters exclusively for them. Says a UNICEF official: "Traffickers fish in pools of vulnerability, and we've rarely if ever seen one like this." TIME story here "There are health concerns, malnutrition concerns, psychosocial issues and, of course, we are concerned that unaccompanied children will be exploited by unscrupulous people who may wish to traffic them for adoption, for the sex trade or for domestic servitude," said Kent Page, a spokesman for UNICEF. MSNBC New York Times news story here Child-welfare organizations have focused their initial efforts on orphaned children and those who have been separated from their families. They started Tuesday to compile a registry, sending workers into the streets to collect information for a database, in which each child would be assigned a numbered file to help track their cases, said Victor Nyland of UNICEF, a senior adviser for child protection and emergencies. Such a registry was used in the Indonesian province of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami to help reunite separated families. Archdiocese of Boston admits ties to 3 Irish pedophile priests... The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has announced that three Irish priests accused of sexually molesting children had at one point worked in Massachusetts, tying the local church to the sex abuse scandal roiling Ireland. Boston Globe story here 
The disclosure comes as the archdiocese faces pressure from victim advocate groups to release the names of all allegedly abusive priests who worked in the archdiocese, whether the accusations arose here or elsewhere.
The Boston Archdiocese said it has no record of accusations against the three Irish priests while they were working here. A fourth priest from Ireland, a member of a religious order, is under investigation in alleged abuse that occurred 30 years ago in Boston, although he has not been charged and is no longer in the country. The archdiocese would not identify him. Yesterday, victim advocate groups called on the church to identify the fourth priest and any others who have been accused and said that a full disclosure of accusations is the only way to help survivors heal from the sexual abuse crisis that rocked the church a decade ago. "The information released in the last couple of days raises as many questions as it answers," said Anne Barrett Doyle, of BishopAccountability.org. BishopAccountability.org and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (snapnetwork) sent a public letter to Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley last month, asking him to identify any priests who have faced accusations of abuse elsewhere and had worked in the area. The request followed the scandal in Ireland. Four bishops have asked the Vatican to be allowed to resign in response to an investigative report that found church leaders in Dublin had covered up abuse allegations against scores of priests. For more information on this story, see vol7_iss77, vol8_iss1, and vol8_iss2. Meanwhile, a judge has approved the final details of a bankruptcy plan revision for the Fairbanks Catholic Diocese that will help compensate sexual abuse victims. FindLaw AP News story here U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Donald McDonald approved the reorganization plan at a Monday hearing in Anchorage. It was the third revision negotiated over nearly two years by the diocese and a creditors' committee representing nearly 300 abuse victims. The plan, expected to be signed by the judge within two weeks, provides $9.8 million in compensation to be divided among victims. Anchorage attorney Ken Roosa, who has represented most of the victims for the past seven years, said he still expects lengthy court action with two insurance companies - Catholic Mutual Relief Society of America and Travelers Casualty and Surety Co. See eGuide/clergy abuse for more information on clergy abuse. In other news... 
A UK teenager who sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl while on bail after the rape of a ten-year-old girl was named yesterday after a judge overturned a court order which banned him from being publicly identified. The Times news story here Simon Heaton, 17, was branded a "sick monster" by the mother of one of his victims. He was jailed indefinitely for the public's protection and ordered to serve a minimum of five years at Liverpool Crown Court. Heaton, of St Helens, Merseyside, had earlier pleaded guilty to rape, five counts of sexual assault and causing grievous bodily harm to the two girls. The court was told that he targeted his victims and subjected them to a "chilling" ordeal. Jailing Heaton, Judge David Harris, QC, told him: "To read and hear of the violence which you perpetrated on those little girls for your own sexual gratification is truly chilling." Debbie Gould, for the prosecution, said Heaton was a "predatory sex offender" who first struck in April last year, when he was 16. He began to follow his victim, who was three weeks short of her 11th birthday, through the town's Victoria Park before he grabbed hold of her and threatened to break her neck. After a prolonged attack, during which the ten-year-old was raped, she managed to free herself from his grip and ran home. Miss Gould said the teenager was arrested and, although he denied the assault, he was charged with rape. After initially being remanded in custody he was granted bail at Liverpool Crown Court with a condition that he reside outside Merseyside. He went to live in Blackburn, Lancashire, and ten weeks later the second offence took place, Miss Gould said. The defendant targeted the nine-year-old as she was collecting insects with friends close to an area of woodland.
A 100-year-old pedophile is been jailed again after failing to comply with terms of his parole. MSNBC News story here It's the second time that Theodore A. Sypnier, who has a more than 60-year history of sexually molesting children, has been declared in violation of parole for his conviction involving attacks on two sisters in the late 1990s, the Buffalo News reported on its Web site. New York's oldest registered sex offender had moved out of a Buffalo halfway house for released inmates and into a place of his own in December, after completing his latest term in state prison for molesting little girls. But authorities said Sypnier had been detained for failure to participate in sex offender counseling. Sypnier's youngest daughter, an out-of-state resident who has told investigators she and another girl were raped by him as children, expressed relief.
Seeing the cramped, windowless basement where Natascha Kampusch was locked up for 8½ years, it's almost impossible to believe that anyone could have survived the ordeal. Yet the Austrian kidnapping victim not only made it out of the dungeon where an engineer named Wolfgang Priklopil had imprisoned her as a child but also emerged a remarkably confident and self-assured young woman. TIME Magazine story here In a powerful new documentary titled Natascha Kampusch: 3,096 Days' Imprisonment, which was broadcast on the German public television channel ARD on Monday night, Kampusch allowed cameras into the cellar where she had been locked up in the Vienna suburbs for the first time and revealed new harrowing details of her brutal captivity, which ended with her lucky escape in August 2006. "I have a stamp on my forehead which says victim of violence," Kampusch tells the TV crew who filmed the house that she now owns. "I will be ostracized for the rest of my life." Kampusch was just 10 years old when Priklopil kidnapped her as she walked to school in March 1998. "He came towards me, grabbed me and bundled me into his white van ... I tried to scream but I just couldn't utter anything," she said. When they arrived at his house, Priklopil wrapped her in a blanket and took her to the cellar, which was only reachable through a fortified iron door. He then forced her to take off her shoes, which he burned, telling her, "You won't be needing them again." "The cellar was cold, damp and disgusting ... just imagine if something would have happened to him, or he became weak, I would have been like an Egyptian pharaoh, buried alive and then later dead," Kampusch says in the documentary. At the beginning of her captivity in the 50-sq.-ft. (4.6 sq m) basement, Kampusch recalls how she used to count the seconds to try to keep track of time but soon could no longer tell whether it was day or night. Priklopil reinforced her sense of isolation by installing an intercom and a timer that turned the lights on and off at regular intervals so she wouldn't even have contact with him. She says she was tortured by the sounds of the wheezing ventilator and the slow, monotonous drip of the tap. For more on this story, see vol4_iss36 and vol6_iss38.
Elizabeth Miller, an assistant professor of pediatrics at University of California, Davis, published a study in the journal Contraception detailing "reproductive coercion," when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. Newsweek story here According to Miller's research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence. Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are surprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy. "What we're seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control," says Miller, who studied 1,300 female patients culled from five family-planning clinics in Northern California. "You have guys telling their partners, 'I can do this because I'm in control' or 'I want to know that I can have you forever.'" This may help explain previous findings of higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence. (See Newsweek story here.)
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