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 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 school in the United States. 400,666 girls divided by 67,148 elementary school equals 6 girls per elementary school who experience "forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration" before their tenth birthday.

Supreme Court Grants Justice Dep't Request to Reject Child Victims

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 Take Action 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/DOJustice for full details on how you can help.

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

Take Action! Here's how you can help child sex abuse victims

Why is the Justice Department siding with convicted child molesters and pedophiles instead of child sex abuse victims? Many have called and e-mailed asking "what can I do to help convince the Justice Department to change its unacceptable position on this issue?"

Now you can easily support child sex abuse victims by submitting a request to Congress and the President.

Just click on the Take Action button which will launch our petition at Petition2Congress.com. We've filled in all the details and it only takes a minute.

Just add your name and zip code and a pre-formatted letter will be created which asks your Representative, Senators and the President to immediately contact the Justice Department and ask why the Criminal Division is opposing the victims in In re: Amy Unknown in the Fifth Circuit and United States v. Shawn Crawford in the Sixth Circuit.

The letter also asks Congress to hold hearings to find out why the Justice Department is siding with convicted child molesters and pedophiles instead of child sex abuse victims.

You will be given a chance to make any changes or edits to the letter before sending. For maximum impact Petition2Congress.com can hand-deliver a printed copy of your letter to Capitol Hill and the White House.

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

Almost 20 years ago, then-Senator Joe Biden promised victims that they would receive restitution from criminals convicted of child sex crimes. 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 politicians in Washington with just a few clicks. Amy and Vicky thank everyone for their continued support. You can make a difference in their fight for justice!

Dr. Eli Newberger on Penn State

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.

Exploitation of Children Over the Internet Congressional Testimony

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.

Enjoying Young People in the Shower and Having a Good Time

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.

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 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.

Adopting Your Enemies' Children

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.

International Adoption: it's even more complicated than you thought

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.

Child Pornography Restitution Now Before the Supreme Court

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.

Pedophiles Lobby for Acceptance

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 Offers More Than A Good Catch

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.

Chinese Babies Kidnapped and Sold for Adoption

From today's New York Times:

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Read the entire story here.

The Free Market in Child Pornography

More than six years after the international law enforcement community began desperately searching for the child pornography victim known as the Disney World Girl, justice remains allusive for Masha Allen. Despite two Congressional investigations in 2006 and pressure from Nancy Grace and Oprah, none of the perpetrators involved with her international adoption have been brought to justice.

Despite the involvement of almost 30 lawyers since Masha was rescued from Matthew Mancuso in 2003 (including the prosecutor and lead investigator in the much-hyped Caylee Anthony investigation), not one of the many child welfare institutions and organizations who were involved with Masha's international and domestic adoptions have paid one dime for her care and recovery.

And despite a federal law named for her, not one case has been brought on her behalf under Masha's Law which guarantees $150,000 from each of the thousands of child molesters who collect and trade her images each year.

Neither a high-profile 2008 exposé in Wikileaks nor aborted investigations by ABC News in 2009 and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2010 have been able to shed any light on the abject failure of the American justice system to vindicate the rights of one of the most notorious victims of child trafficking in this country's history.

Ms. Allen will turn 19 in just a few days. With each passing year, her ability to collect anything from anyone diminishes substantially. The tolling she enjoyed as a minor under the Pennsylvania statute of limitations ended when she reached legal adulthood last year. Law suits for intentional torts typically must be brought within a year. Claims for fraud, personal injury or professional malpractice must be brought before Masha turns 20. This includes a lawsuit under the Notice of Claim relating to her failed domestic adoption by Faith Allen which we filed back in 2007.

Masha's millionaire father also has somehow escaped civil liability for what he did to Masha. And while other victims are collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in mandatory restitution in the federal courts, Masha has sought and received nothing.

Now Masha's Law itself is under attack. In 2009, Jesse Walker, the influential editor of Reason magazine (which espouses "free minds and free markets"), wrote an editorial entitled The Blurry Boundaries of Child Porn. Walker correctly summarizes Supreme Court jurisprudence which makes child pornography outside the scope of First Amendment protection when he recognizes that "[t]he viewing [of child sex abuse images], in this analysis, is itself a perpetuation of the abuse."

Walker continues:

Such arguments undergird Masha’s Law, named for Masha Allen, a Russian orphan who was held prisoner, raped repeatedly on camera, and advertised in the kiddie porn world as “Disney World Girl.” The measure, which became law in 2006, allows adults who were victimized by pornographers as minors to sue people who download the resulting images.

Emotionally, it’s a compelling concept. And where invasion of privacy is the concern, civil remedies certainly make more sense than criminal prosecutions. But the idea opens a can of worms. If the issue is privacy, shame, and being haunted by ineradicable images, wouldn’t the same argument apply to the abused prisoners photographed at Abu Ghraib? To hostages filmed by their captors and aired on the news? To anyone humiliated in front of a camera? Should an inadvertent Internet celebrity, deeply embarrassed that people are chuckling at a clip of his light-saber dance, have standing to sue the viewers?

That last example might seem absurd, but it actually veers close to the pornography debate. Because the child porn laws set the age of maturity so high, they cover not just the victims of coercion but exhibitionists who voluntarily put photographs of themselves online. There also are people who post pictures that are salacious but don’t include the “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area” invoked by the law. They do not necessarily intend for anyone but their friends to see the photos. But the Internet doesn’t always work that way.

After analogizing Masha's child sex abuse images to teen-aged girls in bikinis and equating them with a video clip of a "light-saber dance," Walker declares "Is it the role of the government to preserve her peace of mind? … I’m not convinced that’s reason enough to punish the people who merely see those recordings, as opposed to the people who actively participate in the abuse of prisoners like Allen."

Perhaps what Walker desires is a "free market" in child pornography which will "free the minds" of the tens of thousands of child molesters and pedophiles who actively collect and trade child sex abuse pictures and videos.

Walker's vision, however, is hardly "free" or fair to the victims. Until the legal system insures that victims like Masha Allen can recover for the very real harms caused by the horrific abuse inflicted on them by the production, distribution and collection of child sex abuse images, the "market" is neither free nor fair.

And as we've seen in the Masha Allen case, if Congress, Oprah and 30 lawyers can't bring justice to one victim, then deregulating the market for child pornography is hardly the answer. Sadly, Walker's unfettered "free market free mind" is currently much closer to reality than the victims' "peace of mind." Unfortunately, for Masha Allen and thousands of other victims of child pornography, justice remains long in coming.

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.)

­Francey Hakes, National Coordinator for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, talks a lot about prevention, hyping the oft-lauded "public-private" partnerships as a "solution" to these problems. I have yet to see any peer reviewed studies of programs or initiatives which can hinder or stop an adult pedophile child molester from raping and sexually abusing a child (often to produce child pornography).

In answering the question, "can we persuade them not to do this sort of stuff," Dr. Michael Bourke, U.S. Marshals Service Chief Psychologist, provides the most honest assessment when he states "I think the answer is fairly multifaceted, but the short answer is that there is no cure for pedophilia, there is no cure for these fantasies and these drives per se. There is however, for any of these individuals, a possibility of managing that behavior …"

In response, the moderator declares "so treatment does work, that's one of the things I did want to get across, treatment does work … treatment does work! We can meaningfully intervene." In response, Bourke explains "Right, well there are individuals who with those proper things in place, have a choice not to re-offend."

Sounds like a successful strategy to me. If you carefully consider Bourke's words: pedophiles cannot be cured, some of these guy might be able to manage their illicit behavior, and some of these might choose not to re-offend. Note he said "re-offend." Given the secretive nature of this crime, just how many of these perpetrators will get caught? And who would ever advocate or accept that an "incurable" murderer be released with the hope that they will successfully "manage" their homicidal urges?

Perhaps Ashley Natoli, Community Supervision Officer in the DC Sex Offender Unit, says it best when she notes that "a lot of these offenders, they are masters of manipulation and deception, and that's, in most instances, in a lot of instances, how they ended up offending in the first place, because they have an incredible ability to groom these victims and they have mastered the art of manipulation."

Thank goodness the probation officers get it.

Unfortunately most of federal judges don't. Each year thousands of white middle-aged men who produce, distribute and collect child pornography are arrested and sentenced in the federal court system. (Almost 100% plead guilty.) Most of these men will eventually be released. And most of them will not receive any peer reviewed treatment for their incurable pedophilia. Some of these men will be monitored at various levels by probation for a few years or for life.

The outcome of this social policy is untested and impossible to predict. Unfortunately, however, the federal justice system regards a few years of incarceration along with a determinate period of probation supervision as a "solution" for the child molesters and pedophiles who appear before them daily. And incredibly, there is a vigorous effort happening right now before the United States Sentencing Commission to REDUCE sentences for child pornography.

In truth, it's not really the judges' fault. There is scant information about these offenders and treatment in peer reviewed journals. (Unfortunately what few studies exist are often overlooked or ignored.) The "lock-up, release and monitor" paradigm—which is the only real option right now—is untested and unchallenged. Until we have more data and better answers on recidivism rates, treatment methodology and peer reviewed outcomes, the federal justice system will continue to engage in a dangerous social policy with offenders who everyone agrees are incurable.

The 'Secret' - the key to understanding child sex abuse

The 'Secret' is the bond established by the abuser with the child victim. It ensures that nobody knows of the abuse other than the abuser and the abused. It is kept in place by embarrassment, fear or respect.

Embarrassment that friends or family will find out what happened. An emotion sometimes secured with photographs.

Fear for the safety of the child and their family should they disclose anything - fear that the abuser will inform - parents - friends, about the behaviour their child has been pulled into and subjected to.

Respect or love for the abuser - strange as this may seem - for the attention and concern that they have shown the child that the child craves and does not receive at home. Over time, absent a good relationship between child and parents,
the abuser seduces the child, earning their trust and friendship.

For this reason the child will keep the secret intact out of a need for the attention received from the abuser and the fear of losing a friend should the abuser be caught.

Check out AbuseWatch.eu for more information on how to understand and stop child sex exploitation.

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 explanations offered for these downwardly expanding demographics are various, and not at all mutually exclusive. Dr. Sharon Cooper believes that “history is repeating itself, and we’re back to treating women and children as chattel,” she says. “It’s a sexually toxic era of ‘pimpfantwear’ for your newborn son and thongs for your five-year-old daughter.” Additionally, Cooper cites the breakdown of the family unit (statistically, absent or abusive parents compounds risk) and the emergence of vast cyber-communities of like-minded deviant individuals, who no longer have disincentives to act on their most destructive predatory fantasies.

Criminals have learned, often in prison—where “macking” memoirs such as Iceberg Slim’s Pimp are best-sellers—that it’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a “righteous” pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.

“There are basically two business models: manipulating girls through violence—that’s called ‘gorilla’ pimping—and controlling them with drugs,” says Krishna Patel, assistant U.S. attorney in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who prosecuted the case of New York-based trafficker Corey Davis, a.k.a. “Magnificent.” A high-living, highly educated pimp who kept the slave master’s manifesto The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave in his Mercedes, Davis, Patel says, made sex slaves out of, among others, a 12-year-old runaway and a university coed on a track scholarship.

Says Krishna Patel, “I’d always dismissed the idea of human trafficking in the United States. I’m Indian, and when I went to Mumbai and saw children sold openly, I wondered, Why isn’t anything being done about it? But now I know—it’s no different here. I never would have believed it, but I’ve seen it. Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.”

Read the story here in Vanity Fair.

Listen to an interview of the story's author here.

Child Welfare Response to Child Trafficking

Human trafficking is arguably one of the most disturbing human rights abuses of our time. The United States Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign men, women, and children are trafficked into the United States each year.

While estimates indicate that thousands of child trafficking victims exist in the United States, very few have been identified and recovered. Between 2001 and 2009, only 212 foreign minors were successfully recognized by U.S. authorities as victims of trafficking.

Human trafficking is a relatively new issue and emerging area of knowledge for most social service, legal, and law enforcement professionals. It was only in 2000 that the first federal anti-trafficking statute, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), was enacted.

Thousands of organizations and agencies are unaware of this law and other state laws that provide critical support and protect the rights of victims. Even fewer have been adequately trained or prepared to respond to child victims of trafficking, and fewer still have incorporated policies, protocols, and case management techniques to appropriately serve this population.

The protection of children has rarely been included in government-funded initiatives to combat human trafficking in the United States. The majority of victims are minors, yet support for this group has not been considered a priority.

The child welfare field is only beginning to recognize the need to prepare for and address the issue of child trafficking. For the past decade, child protection agencies across the United States have been unprepared to address the problem, despite laws requiring child welfare agencies to serve trafficked children.

In 2007, the International Organization for Adolescents (IOFA) developed and launched the Building Child Welfare Response to Child Trafficking project. The purpose of this project is to build the capacity of child welfare agencies and service providers to identify and respond to this often invisible and underserved population. The primary goals are to ensure that children are correctly identified as trafficked persons and that they receive the appropriate protections
and referrals to specialized services to which they are entitled under federal and state laws. This project, supported by funding from the Chicago Community Trust, takes place over a two year period ending in mid-2011.

To achieve these outcomes, IOFA is developing key resources and tools, including the Building Child Welfare Response to Child Trafficking Handbook outlined in this publication. The handbook is a critical resource for state child welfare systems and other service provider settings.

Harvard's Berkman Center Sells Out to the Man - AGAIN

Once again, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has sacrificed the public good for the large corporate interests which fund this so-called "academic research center." Fed at the special interests trough by some of America's most powerful Internet corporations such as AT&T, Google, Microsoft, and AOL, Berkman has been openly hostile to victims of online exploitation and child pornography. (See this blog's Cyber Conflict of Interest - Harvard Law School's Berkman Center Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown)

Not surprisingly, Berkman is at the forefront in criticizing French President Nicolas Sarkozy's effort to impose Internet regulation through the framework of the Group of 8 industrialized countries.

Early next week, G-8 leaders will urge the adoption of measures to protect children from online predators, to strengthen privacy rights and to crack down on digital copyright piracy. This effort is fiercely opposed by some Internet companies and apparently their main academic spokesperson, the not-so-independent Berkman Center.

Before an audience that included top executives of some of the world’s largest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay--all of whom underwrite the Berkman Center--Sarkozy explained: “The universe you represent is not a parallel universe. Nobody should forget that governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to risk democratic chaos and anarchy.”

Yochai Benkler, Berkman Center's faculty co-director, told Finance Minister Christine Lagarde of France that he thought the French approach to online copyright protection was “the wrong way to go.”

“You can make the Internet safe for Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, or you can make it safe for the next Skype or YouTube,” he said, asking her to relay that message to the G-8 leaders in Deauville.

Making the Internet "safe" for Skype or YouTube also means maintaining an unregulated and perversely open Internet where child molesters thrive and child sex abuse images--and increasingly movies--are widely available with little impunity for the perpetrators and consumers of such material. ISPs are free to delete logs and records of illegal activity, Facebook and other online content providers are immune from liability for assembling limitless archives of child pornography, and cutting edge technology like Google Hello is employed to facilitate the online exploitation of children.

France has gone further than many other Western countries in pushing for what Mr. Sarkozy has called a “civilized Internet.” Among his initiatives are a so-called three-strikes law that threatens persistent digital pirates with the suspension of their Internet connections. Another new French law authorizes the government to filter out Web sites containing illegal content like child pornography.

The G-8 communiqué, which is still being finalized by the G-8 leaders’ sherpas, or policy emissaries, is not expected to contain specific prescriptions like these. Instead, it will include broad pledges to deal with privacy, piracy and child protection, the people with knowledge of the talks said.

Berkman's presumed objection to such inherently broad and oblique international policy statements perhaps says the most about its true motives; a world in which its rich and powerful patrons can continue to act with impunity, free from regulation and the scrutiny that only democratically elected governments can provide.

Berkman, whose motto is "We seek to be an honest broker in the conversations about the future of the Internet and related technologies" is truly a gilded fox guarding a big and powerful chicken coop. Berkman underwriter Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, echoed his apparent lackey, Berkman's Yochai Benkler, when he argued that technology, rather than regulation, could take care of many of the challenges facing the Internet: “Before we decide there is a regulatory solution, let’s ask if there’s a technological solution,” Schmidt said. “We will move faster than any of these governments, let alone all of them together.”

Shame on you Berkman and all the esteemed academics who feed at your richly stocked table, including apparently the entire oligarchy of the Harvard Law, Business and Divinity schools listed here.

More on this issue can be found in the New York Times here.

Lesson 1 for Presidential Candidates: No daycare for sex offenders

The Minneapolis City Pages' reported yesterday that presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty pardoned sex offender Jeremy Giefer in October 2008 so his wife could open a day care center in their home.

This is the same home where Giefer was having sex with his daughter for six years prior to his pardon. He would often make his daughter have sex with him or perform oral sex on him as a favor before he would give her permission to do things. He put her on birth control when she was 15 years old so that she wouldn't get pregnant when he raped her without a condom. The abuse started when she was 9 years old.

This is the same wife who Giefer was convicted of raping in 1994 when she was 14 years old. (They later married).

This is the same daughter Giefer conceived through the statutory rape of a 14 year old girl.

Pawlenty's so-called "extraordinary pardon" was extraordinary in many ways.

Message to campaign staff: review Willie Horton ad, take two aspirins and call me in the morning.

At least Horton got a life sentence. Giefer only served 45 days.