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If you're awake and you've been following this blog for any length of time, your probably know that during the past two years, victims of child pornography (represented by the Marsh Law Firm and pioneering attorneys Paul G. Cassell and Carol L. Hepburn ) have been seeking restitution in federal courts throughout the country.

Using a long forgotten passage in the Violence Against Women Act championed by then-Senator Joe Biden in 1994, child sex abuse victims are asking federal judges to award the mandatory restitution guaranteed by this law.

Unfortunately, the Justice Department has abandoned victims of child pornography on appeal by advancing a legal standard which the courts consider unworkable. The Justice Department's position is effectively preventing hundreds of child victims from receiving any money from the tens of thousands of child molesters and pedophiles who collect and trade child sex abuse images.

In October, the Justice Department filed a Supreme Court brief opposing child exploitation victims. Last month, the Justice Department asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to nullify a court-ordered million dollar award to a child sex abuse victim, arguing that the legal standard which resulted in the award is too easy.

Why is the Justice Department arguing for something which the courts of appeal say is unworkable and un-provable, while victims of child exploitation are left with nothing?

Now, just last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—at the Justice Department's urging—decided to reconsider a landmark decision in favor of victims of child pornography. The Justice Department has one more chance to do the right thing and support victims of child exploitation.

Please tell President Obama's political appointee to the Department of Justice Criminal Division, Lanny A. Breuer, to side with the victim in In re: Amy Unknown in the Fifth Circuit.

When Justice Department attorneys refused to even sit with Amy at last year's oral argument before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Chief Judge Edith Jones proclaimed:

"What I don't understand is why the government has switched sides. They were on Amy's side in the trial court, were they not? I'm not sure how they can switch sides now and say that the statute doesn't entitle her to relief. That seems very—if not duplicitous—very strange to me. And it's also in derogation of the obvious intent of that provision of the statute."

Amy and child victims like her need your help. Hundreds of victims are effectively shut-out of the federal courts by the Justice Department's wrongheaded policy.

Almost 20 years ago, then-Senator Joe Biden promised child victims that they would receive full restitution from criminals convicted of child exploitation. Ironically, Vice President Biden's own Justice Department is failing to live up to his vision in the Violence Against Women's Act.

You can help awaken the Justice Department lawyers in Washington with just a few clicks. Amy thanks everyone for their continued support. You can make a difference in her fight for justice!

For more information on this issue, visit http://www.childlaw.us/restitution/

A recently released report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals some sobering numbers: nearly 1 in 5 women have been raped in their lifetime. This statistic is widely known and almost universally accepted. But what do these numbers say about children?

According to the study, approximately 80% of female victims experienced their first rape before the age of 25 and almost half experienced the first rape before age 18 (30% between 11-17 years old and 12% at or before the age of 10).

When you crunch the numbers even more, you discover that approximately 400,666 girls under ten have experienced "completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration."

This translates into six girls in each and every elementary school in the United States.

In my town, with four elementary schools, that's 24 girls.

Exactly who are these girls in your community? Who is responsible for these crimes? And who is serving these victims?

Here's how I calculated these numbers. According to the CDC, "18.3% of women in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration." Of this 18.3%, 12% were raped "at or before the age of 10." Doing the math, 12% of 18.3% is 2%. According to the United States Census, there are approximately 152,925,887 women in the United States. Of these, 6.7% are under 5 years old and 6.4% are 5 to 9 years old. Add 6.7% and 6.4% and you get 13.1% of the population are girls ages 0 to 9 - the target population. This translates to 20,033,291 girls ages 0 to 9 in the United States. If 2% of those 20 million girls experience rape, that's 400,666 girls.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 67,148 elementary schools in the United States. 400,666 girls divided by 67,148 elementary schools equals 6 girls per elementary school who experience "forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration" before their tenth birthday.

Last week the United States Supreme Court ignored the extraordinary pleas of three nationally recognized child advocacy groups and granted the Justice Department's request to dismiss a child sex abuse victim's appeal for criminal restitution.

The case now returns to the district court which must follow the DC Circuit's holding that the victim in this case, Amy, does not have a clear and indisputable right to full restitution, but must instead trace precisely how her losses were “proximately” caused by each of the thousands of child molesters and pedophiles who collect and trade her child sex abuse images.

The Supreme Court's rejection means that a child pornography victim's right to criminal restitution in the federal courts will continue to be limited and denied in sixteen states and territories, including California, New York and Washington, DC. Only in the Fifth Circuit—encompassing the states of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi—is restitution still mandatory.

The Court's denial—and the Justice Department's stubborn refusal to abandon a legal standard which the influential Ninth Circuit concluded "present[s] serious obstacles for victims seeking restitution in these sorts of cases"—leaves child sex abuse victims like Amy with scant chance for justice in the federal courts.

Pedophiles, child molesters and the Justice Department are likely to seize on the high court's rejection as a sign that criminal restitution for child sex abuse victims is all but impossible in the federal courts except under the most egregious circumstances.

We continue to urge everyone to Make a Difference and ask the Justice Department to stop siding with convicted child molesters and pedophiles instead of child sex abuse victims!

Just go to http://bit.ly/ChangeJustice for full details on how you can help.

For the complete background on this issue, visit http://www.childlaw.us/restitution/.

In the best and most enlightening interview on the Penn State scandal to date, Dr. Eli Newberger, a renowned expert on child abuse and pedophilia, talks about what Sandusky said in his interview and the victims of Sandusky's alleged abuse.

Watch this great interview here.

The C-Span Video library is a tremendous resource. It has archived on the internet thousands of Congressional hearings and testimony available nowhere else.

Here is Masha Allen's testimony in May 2006 about her international adoption by pedophile Matthew Mancuso.

Unfortunately the explosive Congressional Hearing in September 2006 concerning so-called Follow-Up Issues to the Masha Allen Adoption (i.e., how a single adult male pedophile was able to adopt a five year old Russian girl with the approval of the U.S. State Department and the State of Pennsylvania) is only available in a boring old Congressional Report. Sadly, that revolution was not televised.

In a series of interviews last night, accused Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky was asked if he is “sexually attracted to underage boys?” He responded, “No. I enjoy young people.” When asked to explain Sandusky's alleged rape of a ten year old boy in the Penn State locker room on a Friday night in 2002, his lawyer Joe Amendola replied that “the kid was messing around and having a good time” in the shower with Sandusky:

“Jerry Sandusky is a big, overgrown kid. He's a jock,” Amendola told CNN's Jason Carroll. “The bottom line is jocks do that—they kid around, they horse around.”

Amendola told NBC's Today show the apparent person in question claims the alleged rape never happened.

“We believe we've found him and if we have found him, he's telling a very different story than Mike McQueary and that's big news,” Amendola said.

Clearly, the effort to whitewash the overwhelming evidence against Sandusky is in full swing. Unfortunately the willingness of otherwise honest and decent people to ignore and justify the actions of pedophiles and child molesters is nothing new and all too common.

Just last week in the New York Times, respected Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman referred to child pornography as nothing more than “dirty pictures.” This kind of flippant belittling effectively desensitizes and normalizes the collection and broad dissemination of pictures and videos of pre-pubescent children being raped and sexually exploited.

What Berman fails to recognize is that “in the context of children … there can be no question of consent, and use of the word pornography [let alone “dirty pictures”] may effectively allow us to distance ourselves from the material’s true nature. A preferred term is abuse images and this term is increasingly gaining acceptance among professionals working in this area. Using the term abuse images accurately describes the process and product of taking indecent and sexualized pictures of children, and its use is, on the whole, to be supported.” Sharon W. Cooper, et. al., Medical, Legal, & Social Science Aspects of Child Sexual Exploitation p. 258 (2005).

Not surprisingly, Professor Berman is a defense expert witness in child pornography cases and a critic of mandatory minimum sentences for inter alia producing, collecting and sharing child pornography.

In an interview with Cincinnati.com, Professor Berman claimed that “because the Internet has made this kind of material more readily available, it's not as obvious that someone who looks at these images will be a serious threat to do harm to a child.” Rationalizing the wide and ubiquitous availability of child pornography, Berman intoned “we're to a point now where it's just one click. There may be a lot of serendipity as to whether that one click gets you one picture or a thousand pictures.”

Berman is not alone in providing intellectual cover for child molesters. None other than the Administrative Office of the United States Courts has taken the position that “the only appropriate judicial role” is to deny restitution requests for victims of child molesters who are convicted of collecting child pornography.

That's right. In an illegal advocacy brief written by the federal court system itself, Assistant General Counsel Joe Gergits suggested that “even though federal law prohibits him from lawfully “engag[ing] directly or indirectly in the practice of law in any court of the United States,” his “legal advice” is something which might “coincidentally” be beneficial to judges around the country.

After its release in August 2009, Mr. Gergits' brief quickly became exhibit number one for child molesters across the country who were seeking to avoid paying criminal restitution to child pornography victims. The brief was reportedly distributed to the chief probation officer in every federal judicial district in the country.

By actively taking such a position, the United States federal court system itself injected bias and prejudice against child crime victims into the "independent, national judiciary providing fair and impartial justice."

New York University law Professor Amy Adler explained that since the legal war against child sex abuse images has already been lost, there is “the possibility that certain sexual prohibitions invite their own violation by increasing the sexual allure of what they forbid.” Adler argues that “the dramatic expansion of child pornography law may have unwittingly heightened pedophilic desire.”

In the Berman-Gergits-Adler justice system, the very existence of laws against child sex abuse images and the wide availability of those images creates unwitting offenders who are then prosecuted in a justice system which is biased against the “alleged victims” depicted in the images and who are ultimately given little or no criminal sentence.

Add to this mix yellow journalists like the New York Times' Erica Goode—whose recent article on an absurdly rare “life sentence” for child pornography gave carte blance acceptance to a defense attorney's proclamation that “a growing body of scientific research shows that that someone who looks at child pornography is not a child molester or will become a child molester”—and Debbie Nathan—whose so-called National Center for Reason and Justice is a wholly owned subsidiary of the pedophile defense bar and whose work for the movie Capturing the Friedmans vigorously advocated for the absolution of convicted child molesters Jesse and Arnold Friedman—and it's not a stretch to believe that Sandusky was just behaving like one of the boys.

Everything can be explained away. Things are not what they seem. A little fun in the shower never hurt anyone.

Sadly, the effort to silence, marginalize and de-legitimize victims of child sex crimes is alive and well in 2011.

To quote the Pope, again, approvingly:

In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained—even within the realm of Catholic theology—that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than.” Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today.

The rationalization and justification of child sex abuse in all its forms not only discredits the victims, it corrupts justice and society. Morality ceases to exist. Evil becomes a construct. Punishment disappears.

Understanding the sexual exploitation of children means accepting that evildoers actively exploit the naivete of youth by grooming victims, establishing trust, normalizing deviant behavior and enforcing loyalty. When caught perpetrators sow doubt and confusion.

No wonder Sandusky's victims feel sadness, shame and even complicity. As one of the Penn State victim's attorney, Ben Andreozzi, revealed yesterday on the Today show:

The eight victims currently involved in charges against Sandusky all became part of the Penn State football team’s inner circle and developed deep attachment to the program.

“I think it’s fair to say the victims could be thinking to themselves right now that as a result of (my) coming forward, look what’s happened to this football program,” Andreozzi said.

“These folks were involved in the Penn State football community—they were on the sidelines at football games, they were spending significant amounts of time travelling with the team and/or in the locker room with the team and getting to know members of that football team.”

Andreozzi added that his client, who is now in his 20s, is grieving. “To say that he’s torn apart, I think would be an emotion that would really explain where he’s at right now.”

As I wrote on this blog in July, “The Secret" is the key to understanding child sex abuse.

In my post Pedophiles Lobby for Acceptance I explain how politically motivated child molesters and pedophiles actively discredit social science research which indicates a substantial rate of recidivism by convicted child sex offenders.

Sandusky and his defenders fit into a well-established dialectic which minimalizes the crime and co-opts the victims. Let's hope that this time around, voices of reason and justice prevail.

A new front has opened in the battle to control child pornography on the internet. Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement have recently taken down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and revealed the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites.

According to Security News Daily:

The Anonymous campaign began Oct. 14, when members of the hacktivist group found a cache of child-pornography websites while browsing a secret website called the Hidden Wiki, a guidebook to hundreds of underground websites invisible to search engines and regular Internet users. The hackers singled out Lolita City, a file-sharing site used by pedophiles, and leaked the names of the site's 1,589 active members to Pastebin on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Examiner reported.

Member of Anonymous deciding to hack a website whose stance they don't agree with is by no means shocking news. In the past year, Anonymous-affiliated hackers have gone after the New York Stock Exchange, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Recording Industry Association of America and government sites in Malaysia, Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

However, in targeting child pornography sites, and in explaining its methods of attack, these Anonymous-affiliated hackers have revealed a deeply disturbing side of the Internet unknown to most people.

The so-called "darknet," from which this "Operation Darknet" hacking campaign takes its name, is any part of the Internet that is hidden from view — not just hard to reach, but deliberately concealed. In this instance, a darknet appears to have grown out of the free TOR routing service, which offers anonymous, encrypted Web browsing to any user.

The TOR-based darknet has reportedly grown into a private, encrypted constellation of websites offering a variety of shady and illegal services, from fake IDs and steroids to email hacking and tip on how to call in police raids as pranks. There's even a hidden site called "The Last Box" that bills itself as an "Assassination Market."

Not many people know about the "Darknet," and if you do you're probably up to no good. Anonymous' success in penetrating and disrupting Darknet is significant since only the most technically sophisticated hackers could perform such a feat. Unfortunately, given the scope and seemingly endless proliferation of child pornography, it is unlikely that Anonymous can or will have any lasting impact. Their actions do, however, demonstrate to law enforcement and others the possibility of a new approach to dealing with online child exploitation.

Read the entire story here.

Today's New York Times discusses the use of adoption as an act of war in Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s when the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

In a new twist to an old adage, "if you can't kill them, adopt them!" Unfortunately for many of these adopted children, their parents were killed and their identities destroyed.

Read the entire story here on the New York Times website.

From today's New York Times, a followup to their August article on international adoption trafficking.

But many parents saw China as the cleanest of international adoption choices. Its population-control policy, which limited many families to one child, drove couples to abandon subsequent children or to give up daughters in hopes of bearing sons to inherit their property and take care of them in old age. China had what adoptive parents in America wanted: a supply of healthy children in need of families.

As Mr. Mayer reasoned, “If anything, the number of children needing an adoptive home was so huge that it outstripped the number of people who could ever come.”

This narrative was first challenged in 2005, when Chinese and foreign news media reported that government officials and employees of an orphanage in Hunan had sold at least 100 children to other orphanages, which provided them to foreign adoptive parents.

Mr. Mayer was not aware of this report or the few others that followed. Though he knew many other adoptive families, and was active in a group called Families With Children From China — Greater New York, no one had ever talked about abduction or baby-selling.

“I didn’t even think that existed in China,” he said.

Again he paused.

“This comes up and you say, holy cow, it’s even more complicated than you thought.”

Read the entire article here.

Two years ago, the Marsh Law Firm filed the first-ever request for federal criminal restitution against a convicted child pornography collector. Since then, we have filed over 700 requests for restitution in every federal district court in the country.

Despite a few decisive victories, a child pornography victim's right to restitution is being curtailed in circuit after circuit. Recent federal Circuit Court decisions have effectively barred restitution in the Second and Ninth Circuit and the District of Columbia Circuit. Only in the Fifth Circuit—encompassing the states of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi—is restitution still mandatory.

When Congress passed the child pornography restitution statute in 1994, it made restitution mandatory for victims. In fact, Congress felt so strongly that every child pornography victim receive the “full amount” of their losses that it used the word mandatory twice in the statute. Despite this clear requirement, many federal courts have sought to limit the amount that convicted child pornography collectors pay their victims by forcing victims to prove precisely how much each individual defendant injured them.

The federal district courts are also severely divided on how to interpret the child pornography restitution statute. Some district courts have held that victims seeking restitution need not establish proximate cause. Other district courts have read a general proximate cause requirement into the statute and then concluded that proximate cause was not established.

Still other district courts read a general proximate cause requirement (or in some courts simply “causation”) into the statute and then find that the victim provided sufficient proof to obtain at least some restitution. The approaches are often arbitrary and have led to widely differing outcomes. For example, a few district courts have awarded “nominal” restitution in an arbitrary amount, sometimes as low as $100.

The Fifth Circuit got it right in March when it found that “[c]ourts are required to award victims of child sex abuse ‘the full amount of the victim’s losses.’” It held that “Congress abandoned the proximate causation language that would have reached all categories of harm … This change is consistent with the reasons for enacting a second generation of restitution statutes. The evolution in victims’ rights statutes demonstrates Congress’s choice to abandon a global requirement of proximate causation.”

Last month, in an effort to restore a child pornography victim's rapidly eroding right to restitution, the Marsh Law Firm filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court. Only the Supreme Court can conclusively resolve this issue and guarantee a victim's right to restitution under the child pornography restitution statute. A deepening split amongst the federal circuits and the district courts require a decisive decision and direction that only the Supreme Court can provide.

A coalition of child advocates recently filed three separate amicus briefs supporting our request for Supreme Court review. This rare occurrence will hopefully put the issue of child victim restitution squarely before the Court which is now considering whether or not to accept our case.

Thank you to all the amici who spent a significant amount of time and effort to get these uncommon amicus briefs filed during the summer months. Child victims are grateful for your tireless work on their behalf now and in the future.

Click on the links to read the briefs by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Crime Victim Law Institute and the National Association to Protect Children.

The Marsh Law Firm's Petition for Cert is here.

Two recent articles expose a political effort by pedophiles to gain acceptance and legitimacy. Last week FoxNews reported that a group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are lobbying for changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the guideline of standards on mental health that's put together by the American Psychiatric Association. According to FoxNews:

The organization, which calls itself B4U-Act says its mission is to help pedophiles before they create a crisis, and to do so by offering a less critical view of the disorder.

"Stigmatizing and stereotyping minor-attracted people inflames the fears of minor-attracted people, mental health professionals and the public, without contributing to an understanding of minor-attracted people or the issue of child sexual abuse," reads the organization's website.

B4U-Act said that 38 individuals attended a symposium in Baltimore last week, including researchers from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the universities of Illinois and Louisville. According to the group, which said to not endorse every point of view expressed, the speakers in attendance concluded that "minor-attracted" individuals are largely misunderstood and should not be criminalized even as their actions should be discouraged.

Speakers also argued that people who are sexually attracted to children should have input into the decision about how pedophilia is defined in the DSM, which they said is supposed to be a guide to promote “mental health vs. social control.”

Critics of the conference say it was a thinly veiled attempt to make children of any age sexually accessible to adults.

That same week, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled "Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs" The author, Professor Roger N. Lancaster, argues that:

Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective — guided by panic, not reason. It is time to change the conversation: to promote child welfare based on sound data rather than statistically anomalous horror stories, and in some cases to revisit outdated laws that do little to protect children. Little will have been gained if we trade a bloated prison system for sprawling forms of electronic surveillance that offload the costs of imprisonment onto offenders, their families and their communities.

This sounds reasonable until you consider that Lancaster ignores recent research which indicates a substantial rate of recidivism by convicted child sex offenders. According to Lancaster "only a tiny proportion of sex crimes are committed by repeat offenders."

A recently reported study of individuals incarcerated for possession, receipt and distribution of child pornography, however, found that these offenders were significantly more likely than not to have sexually abused a child via a hands-on act.

The study’s authors suggest that online criminal investigations, while targeting so-called “Internet sex offenders,” likely have resulted in the apprehension of concomitant child molesters. Upon being discovered these offenders tend to minimize their behavior. They may attribute their search for child pornography to “curiosity” or a similar benign motivation. They may “accept responsibility” only for those behaviors that are already known to law enforcement, but hide any contact sexual crimes to avoid prosecution for these offenses, or to avoid the shame and humiliation that would result from revealing their deviance to family, friends, and community. Only later do the majority of sex offenders who enter treatment acknowledge that they were not, as they initially claimed, merely interested in sexual images involving children; they were, and are, sexually aroused by children.

Further, as prior research and the current findings suggest, it appears that the manifestations of their deviant sexual arousal was not limited to fantasy. Rather, when an opportunity arose either incidentally or as a result of planned predatory efforts many offenders molested or raped children and engaged in a variety of other sexually deviant behaviors. Michael L. Bourke & Andres E. Hernandez, The ‘Butner Study’ Redux: A Report of the Incidence of Hands-on Child Victimization by Child Pornography Offenders, Journal of Family Violence (2009) 24:183-191.

In addition, one study of sex offenders found an overall recidivism rate of 31.7%. Kingston, Drew, et al., Pornography Use and Sexual Aggression: The Impact of Frequency and Type of Pornography Use on Recidivism Among Sexual Offenders, Aggressive Behavior, Volume 34 (2008).

The predicted odds of recidivism increased by 177% among the offenders that viewed deviant pornography such as child pornography. Moreover, the predicted odds of violent recidivism, including sexually violent recidivism, increased by 185% for this group. The predicted odds of any type of sexual recidivism increased by 233% for the group that admitted to viewing deviant pornography. This increased risk of recidivism among sexually deviant offenders has also been found in earlier studies, including a meta-study from 1996 (updated in 2004). See Hanson, R. Karl, et. al., Predictors of Sexual Recidivism: An Updated Meta-Analysis, Public Works and Government Services Canada (2004).

Indeed, a study slated for publication in December, followed 201 registered male child pornography offenders 5.9 years after release from prison. In this extended follow-up, 34% of offenders had new charges for any type of reoffense, with 6% charged with a contact sexual offense against a child and an additional 3% charged with historical contact sex offenses (i.e., previously undetected offenses). Predictors of new violent (including sexual contact) offending were prior offense history, including violent history, and younger offender age. Approximately a quarter of the sample was sanctioned for a failure on conditional release; in half of these failures, the offenders were in contact with children or used the internet, often to access pornography again. Angela W. Eke, Michael C. Seto & Jennette Williams, Examining the Criminal History and Future Offending of Child Pornography Offenders: An Extended Prospective Follow-up Study, Law Hum Behav (2011) 35:466-478.

And remember, these studies only count repeat offenders who were caught. Given the huge and well-documented under-reporting of sex crimes by children, the recidivism numbers are likely to be much higher.

Clearly, sound public policy should not be based on "moral panic," supposition or shoddy evidence. Unfortunately for B4U-Act and Lancaster, the research is all too clear. Criminals who represent a clear and present danger to our communities need continued incarceration and close monitoring. That's reason enough for everyone.

Brazilian bass fishing is more than big business, it's also apparently a vehicle for child sex tourism. For the past 20 years, U.S. fishing aficionados have been spending up to $10,000 for trips to remote lodges in the interior reaches of Brazil or Venezuela. American sport tour ads are filled with promises of "uncompromising luxury" in plush jungle lodges, complete with resort-like amenities, fine dining and satellite phones to keep in hailing distance of the office.

Now a federal investigation and two related actions — a parallel criminal inquiry in Brazil and an unusual lawsuit filed in federal court in Georgia — could provide a rare look at the business operations of the multibillion-dollar international sex tour industry, which has increasingly focused on Brazil. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of sports fishing expeditions in the Amazon that may have been used as covers for Americans to have sex with underage girls.

Four indigenous Brazilian women, allegedly sex trafficked as minors by an American fishing tour operator, Richard Schair, operating Wet-A-Line Tours in the Amazon for many years up until 2009, filed a lawsuit for damages in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Initiated and coordinated by international human rights organization Equality Now, the landmark civil case will be filed by Atlanta law firm King & Spalding. The case is noteworthy because it is the first time that the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) will be used by alleged victims of trafficking to seek damages from a sex tour operation.

The four women allege an American operating fishing tours in the Amazon lured girls onto his fishing boats with the promise of earning money and that they were then given alcohol and drugs and made to perform sexual acts with male customers. All four plaintiffs were minors when they were allegedly sold for sex.

For more background on this lawsuit, see these articles in the New York Times, ABC News, and the Dallas Morning News.

Here is the Complaint, Motion for Stay, and Answer filed in the federal civil case.