Child Pornography in School – Private School Reveals Teacher’s Collection After 10 Years
Minnesota Public Radio reporter Madeleine Baran released this story today on whether private boarding school Shattuck-St. Mary's should have told police about an accused teacher's child
pornography in 2003.
Child pornography is increasingly being produced in schools with the resulting child pornography collection being stored on school-owned computers and servers. Teachers, administrators, coaches and volunteers have all been implicated in school-based child pornography in recent years.
The Marsh Law Firm has been involved with several of these cases involving child ...
Sexual Abuse of Children with Disabilities
According to the 2010 Administration on Children Youth and Families (ACYF) report, more than 3 million reports of child maltreatment were made in 2009. Of those cases, 10 percent involved sexual abuse, and 11 percent of sexual abuse victims reported having a disability.
The Vera Institute of Justice's Center on Victimization and Safety recently partnered with the Ms. Foundation for Women to research factors contributing to the sexual abuse of children with disabilities and determine possible action steps for prevention.
The project released a research brief that begins by ...
Are child porn viewers less dangerous than we thought?
This recent commentary, by Slate.com columnist and journalist writer Emily Bazelon (who earlier this year wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story on the Marsh Law Firm's groundbreaking work on restitution for child pornography victims), is a reaction to the United States Sentencing Commission's recent report to Congress on federal child pornography offenses.
Making child pornography is abuse. What about possessing it? As a group, these offenders—the ones who look but don’t abuse children to create new images—are serving increasingly long prison ...
10th Circuit Fires the Series-Qualifier Canon Across the Restitution Bow
Earlier this month, in an uninspired decision in United States v. Benoit, the Tenth Circuit held that "showing only that defendant participated in the audience of persons who viewed the images of the victim…may be sufficient to establish that defendant's actions were one cause of the generalized harm victims suffered due to the circulation of their images on the internet, but it is not sufficient to show that they were a proximate cause of any particular losses."
In other words, "generalized harm" = no foul and no restitution for victims of child pornography.
Acc...
Behind the Cover Story: Emily Bazelon on Pornography and Punishment
Emily Bazelon discusses her New York Times Magazine cover story, The Price of a Stolen Childhood, about the Marsh Law Firm's groundbreaking work representing victims of child pornography.
Behind the Cover Story: Emily Bazelon on Pornography and Punishment
"It's a common refrain in child pornography cases to say that it is a victimless crime. The person who downloaded the image was quote unquote just looking. Restitution helps force them to see that they are part of a market that depends on hurting real children."
Penalties for Falsely Reporting Child Abuse
The Jerry Sandusky criminal trial is over; the civil lawsuits are in active settlement mode. Undoubtedly, the entire country is more tuned into child abuse than it ever was. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that about 105 bills on the reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect have been introduced in 2012 legislative sessions in 30 states and the District of Columbia. 1 All of them include a penalty for failing to report suspected child abuse.
Oregon is one of the states which recently enacted child abuse reporting legislation. It added to the ...
Ending the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in California
Today the National Center for Youth Law released a new report, Ending Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: A Call for Multi-System Collaboration in California.
Report author Kate Walker, an Equal Justice Works Fellow and Attorney at the Center, commented that "Every day, the unthinkable happens: thousands of America's children are coerced into performing sex for hire. Exploitation can start as young as age ten. Some exploited children are brutally beaten and raped. Others are isolated, drugged, and starved until they become "willing" participants. Yet, ...