When police refused to investigate a man who was harassing a young girl, her parents tracked him down and arrested him—now they are the only ones facing charges.
The post After Police Ignored Her, Mom Catches Child’s Attempted Rapist Herself—Then Cops ARREST HER appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
State lawmakers are arguing that parents who choose to homeschool their children are more likely to become child abusers and should be subjected to involuntary home visits to prove to the government that they are acceptable parents.
The post State Now Assumes All Homeschoolers Are Child Abusers, Reveals Plans for Involuntary Home Visits appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A 36-year-old man will face no jail time for brutally raping a 13-year-old girl after his status as "legally blind" apparently set him apart from the dozens of nonviolent offenders who are serving life sentences without parole.
The post State Gives Confessed Child Rapist ZERO Jail as They Imprison Dozens Over Drugs—FOR LIFE appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A teen who was forced to masturbate in front of police officers while they recorded him, sued the officers for manufacturing child pornography.
Multiple high-level government officials—including a CPS official—were arrested and charged with horrific child pornography offenses.
A man who admitted to repeatedly sexually abusing a 12-year-old escapes jail as a father and son are sentenced to years in prison for selling a plant.
A police sergeant was found guilty of using his work equipment to produce and access child pornography while he was on duty.
A former Clinton Foundation executive has ties to a NYSE-traded company now embroiled in a sexual assault scandal involving young children.
President Trump issued his first official pardon on Friday, sparing former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of criminal contempt after he violated a court order in a racial profiling case by continuing to target illegal immigrants.
While both Trump and many of his supporters have applauded Arpaio, who refers to himself as “America’s toughest sheriff,” there is one thing he is not always tough on—pedophiles.
In fact, according to a report from the Associated Press in December 2011, Airpaio’s office failed to investigate “more than 400 sex-crimes” that were reported in Maricopa County from 2005 to 2007, “including dozens of alleged child molestations—that were inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all.”
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The report cited current and former police officers familiar with the cases who claimed that victims of the horrific crimes were as young as 2 years old. In El Mirage, the city where Arpaio’s office was providing contract police services, officials reportedly discovered at least 32 reported child molestations, and even though suspects were known in all but six cases, Arpaio “failed to follow through.”
While Arpaio made headlines for his infamous Tent City Jail, a camp in which nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants were forced to live outdoors in Arizona’s sweltering 120-degree heat, he did not make headlines for his treatment of the children of illegal immigrants. According to the officers who worked with him, many of those children were victims of sex crimes, which Arpaio ignored, as he let their American citizen predators run free.
READ MORE: Cop Accidentally Shoots Pistol Inside Airport While "Practicing his Quick Draw Skills"
After Arpaio’s contract ended, and his office was no longer required to provide police services for El Mirage, Detective Jerry Laird told the AP he found that an overwhelming majority of the cases he received from the office hadn’t been worked, which meant that “there were no follow-up reports, no collection of additional forensic evidence and zero effort made after the initial report of the crime was taken.”
While some of the cases Arpaio’s office neglected were turned over to prosecutors, the report noted that the El Mirage Police Department claimed “most were no longer viable—evidence dating as far back as 2006 had grown cold or wasn’t collected in the first place, victims had either moved away or otherwise moved on.”
Arpaio held a news conference in response to the 2011 report, in which he said, “If there were any victims, I apologize to those victims.”
As The Free Thought Project has reported, a number of cases involving pedophiles have come to light under the Trump Administration, such as a pedophile ring investigation that resulted over 900 arrests in May, and a sex-trafficking investigation that resulted in over 1,000 arrests earlier this month. This raises the question—why aren’t Arpaio and other members of his office being held to the same standards?
Joe Arpaio’s harsh treatment towards illegal immigrants has stirred up controversy, but his outright neglect of children who are victims of sex crimes seems to have slipped under the radar.
Children have no control over which country they are born in, and they are the most vulnerable to predators. If a child is a victim of a sex crime, the question of whether the predators are “illegal aliens” or “legal American citizens” should not keep officials like Sheriff Arpaio from holding them accountable for their actions, and he should be held accountable for his failure to do so.
(ANTIMEDIA) The Catholic Church and government agencies in the United Kingdom have developed a new argument to avoid paying out settlements to victims of pedophilia and sex abuse: they’re claiming the children consented.
As the Telegraph noted over the weekend:
“Lawyers who represent some of the victims have told the Sunday Telegraph that the defence is more frequently being used by private schools, religious groups and local authorities when trying to defend compensation claims.”
Though news of these recent attempts to avoid paying settlements emerged last month, the Telegraph recently viewed documents from two court cases in which defense attorneys used the “consent” argument.
“One claimant was told by lawyers for the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark that his abuse, which included rape and began when he was 15, ‘actually occurred in the context of a consensual relationship (albeit one the Claimant in retrospect now appears to regret),’” the Telegraph reported.
“I was below the legal age of consent anyway and there’s a grooming element to that kind of situation. It was totally disregarded and it made me feel really small,” he said.
According to Siobhán Crawford, a lawyer with London-based Bolt Burdon Kemp, the strategy is usually used when a child turns sixteen during the abuse. Sixteen is the age of consent, though the Telegraph notes that “[f]or adults in a position of authority, it is illegal to have sex with a child under their care, even if the child is 16 or 17 at the time.”
Even so, in one case, the Cambridgeshire County Council, a government entity, claimed a student whose abuse started when she was under 16 consented:
“On her own account the Claimant voluntarily sought out contact with [the teacher] and considered that she was in a relationship with him. If that is correct, after she had obtained the age of 16, the Claimant consented to sexual acts with [the teacher] and those acts ceased to be assaults.”
The victims in these two cases were eventually compensated.
Despite claims from the Church and government that consent was issued, Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, disagrees. “No child ever gives their ‘consent’ to being abused, and the increased use of this line of defence, although still quite rare, is worrying,” she said.
While the defense is rare, it is being employed more often. Crawford told the Telegraph that her firm had dealt with ten cases and that “there had been an increase in the past two years as authorities became aware that it was an option.”
Barnardo’s, one of the children’s charities objecting to this new line of defense, said in July that since the CICA was established in 2012, “nearly 700 child victims of sexual abuse have been refused payments ranging between £1,000 and £44,000, according to a freedom of information request by the charity coalition,” which also includes Victim Support, Liberty, Rape Crisis and the National Working Group (NWG).
One case in which the victim was not compensated, the Telegraph noted in July, “involved a 12-year-old girl who was plied with alcohol, led into the woods and sexually assaulted by a 21-year-old man.”
“This was because she had gone into the woods ‘voluntarily,’ had not been a victim of violence, she emerged ‘happily’ from the woods and that she had recently had sexual relations with another child around her own age,” the outlet summarized.
The coalition of charities has called for a change in rules. According to a press release Barnardo’s issued in July:
“The coalition is calling for the rules to be changed so no child groomed and manipulated into sexual abuse is denied compensation because they complied with their abuse through fear, lack of understanding, or being brainwashed into believing their abuser loved them and developing feelings for them.”
This is only the latest controversy surrounding the Catholic Church, which has been defending alleged pedophiles and child abusers within its ranks for years. The government agencies in question are also under fire now, too.
As Dawn Thomas, co-chair of Rape Crisis England & Wales, said last month:
“It’s not only bizarre but also inappropriate and harmful that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority applies a different definition of consent from the law and, as a result, routinely tell victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and exploitation that they consented to the sexual violence perpetrated against them.”
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