Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper
An Indiana law barring sex offenders from joining social and online networks like Facebook, Twitter and various chat rooms was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appellate court Wednesday. Judges with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said that the law, passed in 2008, violates the First Amendment in that it is too broad a ban.
Google today made a stunning, but welcome, U-Turn when they agreed to introduce changes which will prevent child-pornography images and videos from appearing for more than 100,000 different searches. The company’s chairman Eric Schmidt, writing in today’s Daily Mail ahead of a Downing Street summit on internet pornography, says, “We’ve listened. We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”
An 8-year-old’s cries for help after police say she was kidnapped from her bedroom probably saved her life and now authorities are asking the public’s help to find the suspect.
Operation Cross Country—a three-day nationwide enforcement action focusing on underage victims of prostitution—has concluded with the recovery of 105 sexually exploited children and the arrests of 150 pimps and other individuals. The sweep took place in 76 cities and was carried out by the FBI in partnership with local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as part of the Bureau’s Innocence Lost National Initiative. It is the seventh and largest such enforcement action to date.
The Spanish organization, ANAR Foundation (Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk), recently released a brilliant campaign that makes similarly powerful use of a special form of photography that takes advantage of the process of lenticular printing to send an offer of help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they’re walking together. Lenticular printing is a process that allows for different photos to be seen depending on the angle the image is viewed from.
A former Los Angeles Unified School District employee was arrested Wednesday on charges that he sexually abused “at least 20 children” and one adult co-worker, KTLA-TV reported Thursday morning. Police launched an investigation last year after two alleged victims came forward claiming that 57-year-old Robert Pimentel, who’s worked for the district for nearly 40 years, sexually touched them both over and under their clothing.
Forty-eight countries have joined forces to launch the most expansive fight ever against the spread of online child sex abuse in an initiative called the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), there are more than 1 million images of abused or exploited children online and that number grows by 50,000 new images each year.
Nearly three dozen states have failed to meet conditions of a 2006 federal law that requires them to join a nationwide program to track sex offenders, including five states that have completely given up on the effort because of persistent doubts about how it works and how much it costs.
Ethan Patz’s disappearance was thought to raise awareness of child abductions and led to new ways to search for missing children.
More than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members in the last 10 years, nearly four times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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