Concept illustration for changing laws: a pencil sketches half of the scales of justice.

Human Rights Report and Age of Consent for Sex Laws

By Katherine Drabiak

Recently, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) published a report advocating for significant revisions to criminal law, such as decriminalizing prostitution; intentional transmission of HIV; and purchasing and possessing drugs for personal use. Most notably, the report also calls to reexamine laws relating to consensual sexual conduct involving children under the age of majority and people with disabilities who ordinarily cannot “consent.”

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Adoptee Rights and Adoption Annulment

By Gregory Luce

Annulling or legally ending an adoption is not a new concept, but it has rarely applied to the benefit of adopted people. Instead, informal practices, as well as specific legal frameworks dating back more than 100 years, have long-supported a “right of return” policy for adoptive parents who no longer feel an adoption is beneficial or even desired.

Activists within today’s adoptee rights movement, however, are working to establish a right to end a person’s own adoption by building on what has long existed in the law for adoptive parents, but refocusing it on the specific demands for autonomy of adopted people, particularly those who do not view adoption to be in their best interests.

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Child safeguarding: the National Health Service (NHS) can do much better

By John Tingle

Our children are our future and we need to look after them well. There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that we are failing our children in a number of key health areas. UNICEF in a report put the UK in 16th position – below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal – in a league table of child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report considers five dimensions of children’s lives – material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – as well as children’s subjective well-being.

There are a number of health and other child well-being challenges for the UK to meet. The UNICEF report provides some useful context from which to view the recently published Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the arrangements for child safeguarding and healthcare for looked after children in England.The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.Whilst the report does contain some positive findings, when read as a whole, these seem subsumed by the large number of negative findings, some of which are very worrying. Read More

Technology and The Horrors of Child Pornography

By Michele Goodwin

A recent spate of arrests in New York emphasizes the potentially dangerous connection between technology and sex crimes.  In a landmark police bust, authorities tracked down and arrested more than seventy people in the New York City area who were trading child pornography.  Among those arrested were a rabbi, police chief, nurse, architect, and nanny.  Police infiltrated chat rooms where traffickers made available images of children engaged in sex acts with each other and adults.

What is the role of technology in the arrests and distribution of these images?  While technology helped officers track down child pornography traffickers, the internet also facilitated the trading of those harmful, illegal images of children.  On line chat rooms and other social network spaces provide for the broad-spread, easy distribution of child pornography.

Importantly, the children whose images are trafficked are re-victimized each time their images are shared, bought, and sold.  The frequency at which this can occur is intensified over electronic media, opening a horrific floodgate as demonstrated in the New York arrests where thousands of obscene, pornographic images of children were collected from dozens of confiscated laptops. Clearly, solutions to this problem must necessarily emphasize examining technology’s  unwelcome dark side.

Taking Allegations of Child Abuse Seriously: Former Penn State President Spanier Charged

By Michele Goodwin

Penn State’s former president, Graham Spanier, is the latest person to be charged in the fallout involving Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on the Penn State campus.  A year ago, I blogged about Spanier’s curiously timed defense of his former staff members following the horrific allegations involving the former, popular football coach.

Jerry Sandusky’s crimes are deplorable. He was convicted of molesting boys from a charity he helped to found (Second Mile) and will serve 30-60 years in prison; he will likely die there.  Yet no less problematic were Spanier’s statements immediately following the release of the grand jury’s presentment.  Last year, the statement released by Spanier could only be described as cavalier and irresponsible.  Spanier claimed that the perjury charges against his former athletic director, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, his senior vice president for finance and business, were “groundless,” and that he has “complete confidence in how they… handled the allegations” against Sandusky.  Stunning.

Remember the grand jury report?  Schultz said that the allegations were “not that serious” and that he and his colleague “had no indication that a crime had occurred.”  What we know now from the Freeh Report is that there were emails between Spanier, Curley, and Schultz about allegations of Sandusky’s showers with boys in the Penn State football locker room. Spanier claims that there may have been emails that he received, but he can’t remember them.  He told Jeffrey Toobin in a New Yorker article: “I was apparently copied on two emails…I didn’t reply to them.”  A few years later, Michael McQuery (a former graduate student) reported witnessing Sandusky sexually abusing a child in the shower; he also testified before the grand jury.

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