400,666 US Girls Under Ten Are Forcibly Raped
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 approxima...
Hacking Child Pornography
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 ...
DOJ Video – Sexual Exploitation of Children
More PR than facts, this Department of Justice video discusses the Department's national strategy to prevent and combat the sexual exploitation of children. (For some bizarre reason, the video's imagery exclusively shows Black males as offenders. In reality, the vast majority of defendants who produce, distribute and collect child pornography are White males between the ages of 35 and 60. The video also mixes child prostitution, the online solicitation of children, and child pornography; they are all very separate problems with different perpetrators and victims.)
F...
Sex Trafficking: The Girls Next Door
Vanity Fair has a great story about child sex trafficking and prostitution in All-American Hartford, Connecticut. Here's an edited excerpt of this excellent piece:
There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life.”
The ...
Wikileaks on Masha Allen
Long before Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange became the planet's most hunted man for releasing hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents, he published a eerily prescient exposé on Masha Allen entitled One Child's Unending Abuse - From Disney World Girl to Drifter
In March 2008, Assange and business reporter Christopher Witkowsky, released what would become journalism's epitaph on what had been an international story influencing everyone from Senator John Kerry to Oprah to President Putin.
Masha's rapid ascent to worldwide fame in 2005 and ...
Protect NCMEC?
The National Association to PROTECT Children, which describes itself as "a national pro-child, anti-crime membership association. . . . committed to building a powerful, nonpartisan force for the protection of children from abuse, exploitation and neglect," recently issued this rare rebuke of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children:
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) paid its CEO over $1.3 million in salary and compensation in 2008, the St. Petersburg Times reported last week, in an article now drawing fire from the group.
"In ...
The Rights of Foster Children – legal update
Appellate decisions regarding foster care are rare and decisions that focus on foster children are rarer still. So when two decisions appear in the space of about a week they deserve some commentary. One is from the Maryland Court of Appeals, Maryland's highest court, and addresses an issue of great interest: under what circumstances and to what extent does a foster child's attachment to foster parents impact the rights of the biological parents when such parents are confronting the termination of their parental rights? The other case, from the New York Appellate Divisi...