Feds award $39 million for increasing adoptions

Last week the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded $39 million to 38 states and Puerto Rico for increasing the number of children adopted from foster care. States use the funds from this adoption incentive award to improve their child welfare programs.


"All children deserve loving, safe and permanent homes," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "It is gratifying that most states continue to excel in promoting the adoption of children from foster care. I sincerely thank every adoptive family that has welcomed a child into their home."


States receive $4,000 for every child adopted beyond their best year's total, plus a payment of $8,000 for every child age 9 and older and $4,000 for every special needs child adopted above the respective baselines. The year 2007 is the baseline.


This year's incentive award recipients completed more adoptions in 2009 than in the 2007 baseline year.


States and territories receiving today's funding are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Puerto Rico.


A list of each state's adoption incentive award amount can be found here.

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 receive the full range of protections, services and rights outlined in the TVPA."

Smith explained that victims of domestic minor sex trafficking - both girls and boys (whose average initial exploitation age is 13) - are frequently treated as juvenile delinquents or adult prostitutes. These children are trained by their pimps to lie to the authorities and are often provided with phony identification, which often boosts their age.


Also at the hearing, Criagslist announced that they were permanently suspending their "adult services" ads in the United States.


Visit the Committee's website for links to the witness list and hearing testimony.

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 investigation of the syndicate, which had operated via fake identities on the site.


''We are aware that Facebook knew of the existence of these pages and even went so far as to remove the profiles,'' said the director of the AFP High Tech Crime Centre, Neil Gaughan.


But despite closing down the men's pages after finding illegal material, Facebook did not contact police, Mr Gaughan said.


''Facebook deactivated the online accounts of the initial suspects but there were indications that, within hours, the groups were re-forming again under new accounts,'' he said.


After federal police arrested one of the Australian men, he stunned them by describing how he had sent up to 10 messages to Facebook, but the company failed to pass on the information to police.


Federal officers contacted a Facebook official in Australia to convey their concerns, and were told that he would relay their concerns ''to the boss''. But the AFP received no reply.

This failure by Facebook highlights our concern about the policy and practice in the United States that electronic communication services register exclusively with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline. According to NCMEC's website "there is a federal law, 18 U.S.C. §2258A which requires ESPs to report apparent child pornography to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's (NCMEC) CyberTipline." In the past, ECS's like News Corporation have been big donors to NCMEC.


I will state again what I said just last month: "As advocates for victims of child pornography, we have long believed, and continue to believe, that the detection, investigation and prosecution of child pornography offenses is solely a government responsibility. No private organization or entity, no matter how well-meaning or well-funded, should have any official or unofficial role in this essential governmental mission."


Returning to Facebook, there's much more of interest in the international news:

Mothers' group outraged after their Facebook campaign to expose paedophiles is removed from the internet from the Daily Mail (U.K.)


Six mothers who set up a campaign group on Facebook to track down and expose online paedophiles have been given a warning and had their page removed from the internet.


Leanne Moss, 33, set up the Mommies on a Mission group after claiming she stumbled across Facebook profile pages featuring images of child abuse.


The mother-of-four said she created the campaign page to ensure the offensive profiles were reported.


But the group, which attracted more than 300 people in two days, was later removed by Facebook, who sent Mrs Moss a message saying the content violated their terms of use.

Finally, there's this story out of Canada:

Charges against B.C. teacher linked to global child-porn network from Postmedia news (Canada)


One of the men arrested in Canada in relation to an international online child-exploitation network that used Facebook is a former Vancouver private school teacher, police say.

With the movie about Facebook just hitting the theaters, these articles might just be the perfect coda. Let the cameras roll!

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 time he was 3.


He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. “All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.”


More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration. Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.


A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

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