The US Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a federal pornography law that makes it a crime to have computer-generated pictures that look like real children engaged in sexual acts, ruling the law violates free-speech rights.
(Washington)
When are we finally going to put children first? There’s a war being waged against them, and itis being manifested through psychical and emotional abuse, through neglect and through sexualexploitation.
In 1999 alone, child protective services substantiated an estimated 826,000 cases of childmaltreatment, including neglect, and physical and sexual abuse, according to a US Department ofHealth and Human Services report.
The case of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children, ages 6 months to 7 years, in thebathtub, is a bleak reminder that children are brutally murdered at the hands of those
According to documents, which were unsealed this month, the Rev. William Effinger admitted to Archbishop Rembert Weakland in 1979 that he had molested at 13-year-old altar boy on Easter that year. The archbishop, who established a model program for handling sexual abuse by clergy transferred the priest who was a known sex offender from one parish to another in 1979 and did not remove him until 1992. Weakland, who heads the Milwaukee’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, said in a sworn deposition that he didn’t think it should be divulged to the
Since the priest sex scandal was revealed donations to the charitable wing of the Catholic Church have dropped by more than $800,000, almost 20 percent of the $5 million generated from direct fundraising. This city’s poor and needy are already among the casualties of the escalating backlash against the Archdiocese of Boston and Cardinal Bernard Law. Maureen March, spokeswoman for the Catholic Charities, the parent organization for 150 social service agencies in the Boston area said, If people take out their anger by not sending money, the only people who
Sexual abuse of minors by priests is once again making national headlines. Common wisdom, outside the church hierarchy at least, is that priests’ sexual issues, their struggles with celibacy and the pervasiveness of homosexuality in a culture of celibacy, must have led them all astray. The tendency is to conceal sexual misconduct by persons in positions of authority occurs all the time in many different venues – in families, the workplace, schools and doctors’ and therapists’ offices. Neither the abuse nor the cover-up is really so surprising.
The Diocese of Brooklyn yesterday began giving authorities the names of priests accused of molesting children. The Queens office received eight typed, singled page outlines of basic details of each allegation. The Brooklyn office got seven. A law enforcement source said, There were multiple allegations in some of these cases.
(New York)