Congress Holds Hearing on Child Sex Trafficking

On Wednesday, the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on DOMESTIC child sex trafficking. At the hearing, former Congresswoman Linda Smith testified that more than 100,000 children are exploited in the sex trade in the United States every year: "Domestic minor sex trafficking is the name we have given to the sexual exploitation of U.S. citizen children through prostitution, pornography and sexual entertainment," she said. "The name reflects the fact that this exploitation is human trafficking as defined in the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. The crime therefore is a federal crime of trafficking and the victims should ...

Move over Wikipedophilia, Facebook is in the house

It should come as no surprise that Facebook is now in the world-wide spotlight for harboring and tolerating child pornography and online child exploitation. Of a recent rash of articles about the popular site (none of them by the U.S. media), the following is the most serious: Facebook fails to alert police on child porn from The Age (Australia) The management of Facebook repeatedly failed to reveal the activity of an international child pornography syndicate operating on the social networking site and ignored continuing admissions by one of the ring's Australian members. The failure was uncovered during an Australian Federal Police-led international ...

NYTimes: Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young

Now just imagine if this child were in foster care (a topic I have written about frequently on this blog). At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums. Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the ...

A Lawyer’s Guide to Luzerne County’s Kids for Cash Scandal

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is a coal-mining town along the Susquehanna River, in the Wyoming Valley. A town of about 40,000 people, it is the county seat for Luzerne, in the northeast part of the state. It is also the epicenter of one of the most scandalous stories about the justice system in the country, involving allegations of bribery and kickbacks to judges from the operation of private juvenile detention facilities. Its implications for juvenile justice will likely set the tone for reforms for the next several years. Kids for Cash Mark A. Ciavarella, Jr. was a juvenile court judge who had been presiding over the juvenile court for the county ...

NYTimes: After Haiti Quake, the Chaos of U.S. Adoptions

Excerpts from this article tell it all: On Jan. 12, a devastating earthquake toppled Haiti’s capital and set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored. Leading the way was the Obama administration, which responded to the crisis, and to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them, by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans. Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell ...

Facebook “Facts”

A Long Island judge has dismissed a $6 million defamation action filed by a teenager against four former classmates who set up a Facebook page on which they joked that the teen used heroin and contracted AIDS by having sex with animals in Africa. The judge ruled that no reasonable person could believe that the allegedly defamatory statements were facts. "A reasonable reader, given the overall context of the posts, simply would not believe that the Plaintiff contracted AIDS by having sex with a horse or a baboon or that she contracted AIDS from a male prostitute who also gave her crabs and syphilis, or that having contracted sexually transmitted ...

Constitution Cannot Keep Special Ed Students in School

In a recent little noticed unpublished First Circuit decision, former USSC Justice Souter held that "whatever the scope of a school’s responsibility towards its students . . . there is no apparent constitutional obligation to impose physical restraint upon teenagers not at immediate risk of harm to themselves or others." This case was brought by mothers of teenagers who were not physically restrained by school officials from leaving their schools during instructional hours. The mothers brought action under state law as well as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and § 1988 seeking monetary and injunctive relief for violating Fourteenth Amendment due process, ...

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