FBI: 168 kids rescued, 281 pimps nabbed in sex-trafficking crackdown, Deputies: Day care, mentoring program a front for Sanford child porn operation, Child abuse victims stung by Albany inaction (Child Victims Act)
June 26, 2014 Comments Off on FBI: 168 kids rescued, 281 pimps nabbed in sex-trafficking crackdown, Deputies: Day care, mentoring program a front for Sanford child porn operation, Child abuse victims stung by Albany inaction (Child Victims Act)
FBI: 168 kids rescued, 281 pimps nabbed in sex-trafficking crackdown
CBS/AP June 23, 2014
WASHINGTON — Nearly 170 victims of child sex trafficking, many of whom had never been reported missing, were rescued in the last week as part of an annual nationwide crackdown, the FBI said Monday.
Besides the 168 children rescued from the sex trade, 281 pimps were arrested during the same period on state and federal charges.
“These are not faraway kids in faraway lands,” FBI Director James Comey said in announcing the annual enforcement push known as Operation Cross Country. Instead, he added, “These are America’s children.”
This is the eighth such week long-operation, which this year unfolded in 106 cities. The FBI says nearly 3,600 children have so far been recovered from the streets….
He said one concerning trend is the increasing prevalence of children who are being prostituted online…. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-168-kids-rescued-281-pimps-nabbed-in-sex-trafficking-crackdown/
Deputies: Day care, mentoring program a front for Sanford child porn operation 6/25/14
Sanford, N.C. — A pseudo day care and mentoring program operating out of the Sanford home of a convicted sex offender was actually a front for a child porn production operation, Harnett County Sheriff’s Office detectives said.
Four people have been arrested in the case. Investigators are searching for Tommy Wall, a fifth person who may be in the Raleigh or Fayetteville areas….
Investigators say Bailey Joe Mills, 33, who was convicted three times on charges related to sexual contact with children, ran the operation out of his former Nicole Drive home. They believe Mills ran the day care and mentoring program to attract young girls to his residence and to create a relationship with their parents. Mills then offered the girls money to have sex with men he found through different social media sites, authorities said….
Mills has had multiple arrests and convictions over the years….
The operation, which involves about 10 male and female victims ranging from ages 1 to 14, dates back to 2013, but it wasn’t discovered until Mills’ arrest in January. Investigators said they realized they had a much bigger case after going through Mills’ computer and cell phones…. http://www.wral.com/deputies-day-care-and-mentoring-program-a-front-for-child-porn-operation/13758447/
Child abuse victims stung by Albany inaction
By Shant Shahrigian 6/25/14
Horace Mann School graduate Joseph Cumming says it took him 34 years to fully realize his treatment at the hands of his music teacher Johannes Somary was sexual abuse. But by then, even if he had wanted to, it was far too late for him to take legal action. New York’s criminal and civil statute of limitations for sexual abuse of minors is five years after the victim turns 18.
After revelations of decades of abuse involving more than 30 victims at Horace Mann emerged in June 2012, the Bronx District Attorney’s office said the limitations prevented it from prosecuting any of the perpetrators.
The state legislature’s recent failure to take up the Child Victims Act — which would eliminate the criminal and civil statues of limitations for child sexual abuse and create a one-year window for past victims to seek justice — infuriated Mr. Cumming and other survivors….
“The main reason [the Child Victims Act] has not passed is that there is a caucus of centrist Democrats in the senate who have blocked it again and again,”….
A man who says he suffered sexual abuse at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., which earlier this year acknowledged abuse of students in the 1960s, echoed Mr. Cumming’ point of view.
“These politicians end up protecting very bad people,” said the surivor, who did not want his name published.
The New York State Catholic Conference is strongly opposed to the act, saying it would unfairly subject the church — which has seen widespread allegations of child abuse by priests in recent years — to costly litigation. http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Child-abuse-victims-stung-by-Albany-inaction,54539
Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families
February 27, 2013 Comments Off on Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families
– Child Pornography: A Modern Day Childhood Gonorrhea Epidemic
– Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families; Study Finds Men With Legal Guns Are to Blame
Child Pornography: A Modern Day Childhood Gonorrhea Epidemic
By James R. Marsh on February 26, 2013
I am reading a fascinating book by Lynn Sacco, an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, entitled Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History.
Unspeakable
Unspeakable is an excellent book which explains how cultural mores and political needs distorted attitudes toward and medical knowledge of patriarchal sexual abuse at a time when the nation was committed to the familial power of white fathers and the idealized white family.
For much of the nineteenth century, father-daughter incest was understood to take place among all classes and legal and extra-legal attempts to deal with it tended to be swift and severe. But public understanding changed markedly during the Progressive Era, when accusations of incest began to be directed exclusively toward immigrants, blacks, and the lower socioeconomic classes. Focusing on early twentieth-century reform movements, Sacco argues that middle- and upper-class white males, too, molested female children in their households, even as official records of their acts declined dramatically.
One of the most interesting chapters in Unspeakable discusses the revolution in medicine in the early 20th century when doctors were first able to diagnose gonorrhea vulvovaginitis. Guess what they discovered?
When physicians began to use the new technology, however, they were shocked to discover that gonorrhea vulvovaginitis was widespread among American girls.…But though condemning child prostitution among the working class was one thing, explaining how girls from good families had become infected with a sexually transmitted disease was another. On the cusp of moving from the margins to the center of American health care, doctors used their professional authority, if not their medical skills, to twist the etiology of girls’ infections into existing narratives that fit more seamlessly with what doctors believed than with what they had discovered. In the process, doctors attributed fewer infections in girls to sexual assault.
Over the next ten years, doctors diagnosed gonorrhea vulvovaginitis so often that by 1904 an epidemiologist writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases declared it an “epidemic” among girls. In 1909, Dr. Flora Pollack, who treated girls at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Dispensary, estimated that at least a thousand girls in Baltimore became newly infected each year, and she visited police stations and met with community groups to press for more aggressive prosecution of their assailants….
In terms of child pornography, it is not possible to provide an exact number of people trading child pornography across the world. UNICEF and the United Nations have provided some estimates. UNICEF estimates that there are more than four million websites featuring sexually exploited minors. Further, the number of child pornography websites is growing: 480,000 sites were identified in 2004 compared to 261,653 in 2001. More than 200 new images are circulated daily, and UNICEF estimates that the production and distribution of child pornographic images generates in between 3 and 20 billion dollars a year.
The United Nations released a report in July 2009 asserting that there are approximately 750,000 sexual predators using the Internet to try to make contact with children for the purpose of sexually exploiting them….
http://www.childlaw.us/2013/02/child-pornography-a-modern-day.html
Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families; Study Finds Men With Legal Guns Are to Blame
Data suggests that a gun present in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide for women by 500 percent. AlterNet By Steven Rosenfeld February 24, 2013
A new analysis of 56 mass shootings across America since 2009 finds women and family members are the most frequent victims, and that the shooter almost always acquired his guns legally, in cases where the gun source is known.
“In at least 32 of the cases (57 percent), the shooter killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member, and at least eight of those shooters had a prior domestic violence charge,” the Mayors Against Illegal Guns report on mass shootings said, suggesting that the problem of gun violence is far more related to violence against women in homes than rampages in public settings such as schools and theaters.
The study also found that in the cases where the source of the guns was known, almost all were acquired legally: only two examples were given of mass killings with a stolen or illegal gun. That finding runs counter to the gun lobby’s oft-cited rhetoric that only criminals abuse guns.
“We had sufficient evidence to judge whether the shooter was a prohibited gun possessor in 42 of the 56 incidents,” the report said, referring to laws barring ex-felons, mentally ill people, drug addicts and other categories of people from owning guns. “Of those 42 incidents, 15 (36 percent) involved a prohibited possessor and 27 (64 percent) did not.”
MAIG’s analysis should help focus the national debate about curbing gun violence, whether the most horrific mass shootings or ongoing violence where 33 Americans are killed daily from guns (not counting suicides). The report strongly suggests that better background checks before buying guns are needed, as well as far more discussion of domestic violence and violence against women….
“Assault weapons or high-capacity magazines were used in at least 13 of the incidents (32 percent),” the report said. “These incidents resulted in an average of 14.8 total people shot—135 percent more people shot than in other incidents (6.8)—and 8.0 deaths.”
http://www.alternet.org/most-mass-shootings-target-women-and-families-study-finds-men-legal-guns-are-blame
How I Came To Talk About My Abuse, NCAA Penn State Sandusky Sanctions, Paterno Statue Removed
July 23, 2012 Comments Off on How I Came To Talk About My Abuse, NCAA Penn State Sandusky Sanctions, Paterno Statue Removed
also:
– NCAA could fine Penn State as much as $60M as part of Sandusky sanctions
– Nightly News | Aired on July 22, 2012 Coach Joe Paterno statue removed
How I Came To Talk About My Abuse
07/19/2012 Carissa Phelps – Attorney, Author
When Carissa Phelps was 14 years old she found herself in a last-chance rehab facility for young people, on the verge of becoming another casualty of the streets. What had started out as frequent sleepovers at friends’ houses to escape the wrath of her stepfather and her chaotic, impoverished home, grew into full-fledged running away, until her exasperated mother finally abandoned her at Fresno’s Juvenile Hall. She was 12 years old.
From this point, Carissa pinballed between the streets and various group homes or state run facilities. She experienced trauma that no child should have to endure at the hands of a brutal pimp, who made her walk the streets. But by some miracle she survived, and the child victim grew up to be a strong, successful woman, driven by her desire to pay it forward by helping kids in need.
RUNAWAY GIRL: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time (Viking, $26.95), by Carissa Phelps, co-authored with Larkin Warren, is her story. Here, she explains why she decided to tell her story, and how people misrepresent what she went through….
When we call sexual exploitation of youth something like “prostitution” we put all the blame where it does not belong. We focus on the youth, on the child, on their behavior. In the recent Sandusky hearing, the questions were not about the child’s “promiscuous” or “needy” behavior that led to their being easy targets for abuse. Today, the focus is not on what a child victim is wearing or that they may have admired or sought out the person that was abusing them. Thankfully for the Sandusky victims and for many other child sexual abuse victims we’ve gotten past that type of victim blaming when it comes to straight child sexual abuse. However, for the children and youth that are commercially sexually exploited we are still far off.
What I experienced was not prostitution. I was twelve. I was abused. There was nothing about it that made me feel like I was in control. It was the opposite. I belonged to someone. He controlled me. He played games with me to get me to obey him and to make sure that I knew he was the boss. Up until that point I had rebelled against all adults, so it was odd for me to follow his rules, but he made sure I knew that he was in control….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carissa-phelps/child-abuse-runaway-girl_b_1686791.html
NCAA could fine Penn State as much as $60M as part of Sandusky sanctions
By Jerry Hinnen | College Football and Olympics Blogger
July 22, 2012
The NCAA will fine Penn State at least $30 million and perhaps as much as $60 million for its involvement in the Jerry Sandusky scandal, industry sources told CBSSports.com’s Brett McMurphy.
The record fine will go toward an endowment for children’s causes, sources said.
“This is a fine like no fine before,” an industry source told CBSSports.com.
CBSSports.com’s Dennis Dodd has reported Penn State will face “significant penalties that could severely damage the football program’s ability to compete” when the NCAA announces sanctions against the football program at a 9 a.m. news conference Monday.
To put the fine in perspective, Penn State’s athletic department had $116 million in revenue for the 2010-11 school year, the most recent data available according to figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics.
A source told CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian that Penn State will suffer “unprecedented” punishment for its collective failure to report Sandusky, recently convicted on 45 counts of sexual abuse, to the proper authorities.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the source told Keteyian, indicating that both the football program and the school itself would face sanctions….
Bob Williams, the NCAA’s vice president of communications, said after the Freeh report was released that Penn State needed to answer “four key questions, concerning compliance with institutional control and ethics policies.”
Likely of particular interest to the NCAA were the report’s conclusions that the school had “decentralized and uneven” oversight of compliance issues – laws, regulations, policies and procedures.
“Certain departments monitored their own compliance issues with very limited resources,” the report found. Ensuring compliance with the federal Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes, was handled by someone with “minimal time.”….
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/blog/eye-on-college-football/19632027/ncaa-to-sanction-penn-state-source-says-school-may-prefer-death-penalty
Nightly News | Aired on July 22, 2012 Coach Joe Paterno statue removed
A statue of famed Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has been removed following the report that he knew Jerry Sandusky was being investigated for child sex abuse. NBC’s Michael Isikoff reports.
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/48278494
Matt Sandusky details alleged sex abuse by his father, Teen prostitutes rescued, pimps held, in FBI sweep
June 27, 2012 Comments Off on Matt Sandusky details alleged sex abuse by his father, Teen prostitutes rescued, pimps held, in FBI sweep
“He estimated that at least 100,000 minors were victims of child prostitution and trafficking each year….”
NBC exclusive: Matt Sandusky details alleged sex abuse by his father
By Michael Isikoff, NBC News
Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son Matt told police he was sexually molested by his father for years — and once fled in fear from the Sandusky home — during a secret police interview that took place in the middle of his father’s trial for child sex-abuse, according to a copy of the tape obtained by NBC News….
NBC News has exclusively obtained the 29-minute audiotape, which was recorded by police detectives on June 15, four days after the Jerry Sandusky trial began. At the time, the detectives were preparing Sandusky’s son to testify as a surprise prosecution witness at his father’s trial.
For years, Matt Sandusky had publicly stood by his father and even showed up on the first day of the trial, sitting with the rest of the Sandusky family. But after listening to the first day of testimony from a young man known in court documents as “Victim 4,” Matt Sandusky contacted police and volunteered to testify on behalf of the prosecution. The prosecutors’ plan was to use Matt Sandusky as a rebuttal witness if Jerry Sandusky took the stand in his own defense.
It turned out to be a crucial turning point in the Sandusky trial. When Jerry Sandusky learned that his own adopted son was prepared to testify against him, it was a “complete shock,” and it played a big role in his decision not to take the witness stand, according to one of his lawyers, Karl Rominger….
In his interview with police, Matt Sandusky was asked directly why he decided to change his previous denials of abuse and cooperate with police.
“I came forward, I mean, for different reasons,” he said. “But I mean for my family you know so that they can really have closure and see what the truth actually is. And just to right the wrong, honestly, of going to the grand jury and lying.”….http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/26/12417694-nbc-exclusive-matt-sandusky-details-alleged-sex-abuse-by-his-father
Teen prostitutes rescued, pimps held, in FBI sweep
Lily Kuo Reuters June 25, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Seventy-nine teenagers held against their will and forced into prostitution were rescued at hotels, truck stops and storefronts in a three-day sweep of sex-trafficking rings across the United States, law enforcement officials said on Monday.
The FBI said 104 alleged pimps were arrested during sting operations in 57 U.S. cities including Atlanta, Sacramento, and Toledo, Ohio. The operation lasted between Thursday and Saturday and involved state and local authorities as well as the FBI….
One of the minors recovered in the sweep reported being involved in prostitution from the age of 11, according to Kevin Perkins, acting executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch.
He said the cases were not “one-off” incidents, but evidence of “criminal enterprises” that lure minors in, often through social media, hold them against their will through threats to them or their families, and then traffic them through different U.S. cities.
Child prostitution is “a problem that happens in all kinds of American cities and it happens to American kids,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children….
He estimated that at least 100,000 minors were victims of child prostitution and trafficking each year but said assessments were hampered due to under-reporting and other data complications….
To date about 2,200 children have been rescued in the program, the FBI said, adding that its figures do not take into account children recovered by other state and local investigations. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-prostitution-childbre85o19h-20120625,0,1822308.story
The rights of children have collided head-on with the First Amendment rights of others in a suit filed by Backpage.com over a landmark law in Washington State
June 20, 2012 Comments Off on The rights of children have collided head-on with the First Amendment rights of others in a suit filed by Backpage.com over a landmark law in Washington State
2012-06-19
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing the Internet Archive in a fight against a Washington state law designed to prevent the sex trafficking of minors. EFF, which bills itself as “Defending Your Rights in the Digital World, is a Washington, DC special interest group and long-time supporter of near absolute Internet “freedom.”
This article in the august National Law Journal provides a good overview of the case. What the article doesn’t tell you is that the new plaintiff in the Washington litigation (which was brought by …Backpage.com and Village Voice Media Holdings), the Internet Archive, shares a board member with EFF, Brewster Kahle….
It’s also curious that the newly minted plaintiff, Internet Archive, is funded by the American people through “institutional support” from the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress….
EFF, which is funded by ….craigslist, also deserves a closer look….http://www.childlaw.us/2012/06/eff-joins-the-child-exploitati.html
Backpage.com Sues Washington AG Over Child Prostitution Law
By Sue Reisinger Corporate Counsel June 6, 2012
Update: U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez in Seattle on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against enforcement of a new Washington State law targeting child prostitution.
Martinez said Backpage.com “has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim . . . as well irreparable harm, the balance of equities tipping strongly in its favor, and injury to the public interest, justifying injunctive relief.”
The restraining order takes effect immediately and continues for at least 14 days. The court set Backpage’s motion for a preliminary injunction for a hearing on June 15.
—–
The rights of children have collided head-on with the First Amendment rights of others in a suit filed by Backpage.com over a landmark law in Washington State.
The online classified-ads site filed a complaint [PDF] against Washington State attorney general Rob McKenna and the state’s county prosecutors on Monday to try and stop them from enforcing a new law that would require providers like Backpage to verify the ages of people in ads offering “adult services,” which can include prostitution.
When the bipartisan bill passed the legislature in February, child protection advocates hailed it as the first of its kind in the nation. It is to take effect on Thursday, unless the U.S. District Court in Seattle grants Backpage’s motion for a temporary restraining order while the suit is heard…. http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202557433632
EFF challenges as overbroad Washington state law targeting child trafficking ads
By Sheri Qualters The National Law Journal June 18, 2012
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping an online library fight a Washington state law that could expose third parties to criminal charges for content related to sex trafficking of minors. EFF’s intervention comes on the heels of similar measures introduced in New York and New Jersey and poised to take effect in Tennessee. http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202559922324&sl
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