This relates to a post I made four weeks ago. At the time I wanted to build a single, simple press backgrounder that would assemble information about sexual abuse of children in foster care.
The point was to refute the claim often made that "if something so bad was going on, we would know". Since kids from foster care are being sexually abused and trafficked in pretty much every one of the 50 states, and since the mainstream media have actually reported on these cases (in piecemeal fashion), it seemed like a very useful tool to have on hand.
Unfortunately, my research bogged down as I realized just what a huge amount of information is out there -- hundreds of news stories. I've been picking away at the task, but it will take a long time.
In the meantime, I have fleshed out the concept of the press backgrounder a little bit. Here is a list of backgrounder topics, with some description for each one. Feedback and suggestions would be appreciated.
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The supply and demand of child pornography are both exploding. -- online traffic in CP is growing exponentially, and about half of all CP servers are located in the U.S. Producing ever-growing quantities of CP requires ever-growing numbers of victims.
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State-level agencies are failing dismally to protect children, especially foster kids. In virtually every state, there are recent cases of foster children being sexually abused by their guardians, as well as cover-ups and gross incompetence by the responsible authorities. The sheer scale of this story is daunting, as noted above.
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National-level monitoring and enforcement is suspiciously disorganized and lax. Why is a known child sex trafficker, Laura Silsby, employed by a company supplying technology for Amber Alerts? Why are half of the children who have gone missing in Virginia not identified with a photo in the NCMEC database? Why did the FBI create 24 different child pornography sites and collect information on some 50,000 subjects, if they are not going to prosecute them? Why does the Children's Bureau report that abuse of foster children is 1/3rd to 1/2 the average level of abuse for non-fosters, when all other observers report that abuse of foster children is at disastrously high levels?
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In recent years there have been repeated, documented cover-ups of child sex abuse. These include the State Department covering for one of its ambassadors, Clinton's intervention for Laura Silsby, the Franklin cover-up, the Glenn Beck episode of 2013, the termination of a big Pentagon CP probe, and almost uncountable numbers of lower-level cover-ups from Vancouver to Maine.
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Since the 1990s, several investigators into child sex trafficking have died in suspicious circumstances, or disappeared. The list includes Max Spiers, Monica Peterson, Nancy Schaefer and her husband, two investigators and two relatives of witnesses in the Franklin case, and others. (These will need some careful research work, since for example Peterson's family don't think the Clintons were responsible for her death.)
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National news media have not only not done their job, they have been suspiciously indifferent to the point of normalizing pedophilia. Again, a big topic. I've left this one at the bottom of the list because it's even harder to research than sifting through reports of child sex abuse from local newspapers and TV. Instead of just quoting what a local reporter says, you have to show what a national reporter COULD have said, but didn't. Worth doing but something has to come last, and this is a logical candidate.
SoberSecondThought ago
Alabama, Mar 2017 (Alabama Media Group) Two former foster parents have been charged with torture, rape, and human trafficking of 11 Alabama children, and are also facing charges of sexual abuse of children in Florida.
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2017/03/florida_foster_parents_charged.html
Arizona, Jan 2014 (ABC News) The Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer (R), officially abolished the state's Child Protective Services agency, replacing it with a new agency. The story began in early 2013, when ABC interviewed a whistleblower from CPS, who alleged that caseworkers routinely engaged in "drive-by" case management, in which they never even knocked on the family's door. ABC also found that caseworkers sometimes took children from parents if the parents "ticked them off," an allegation that was confirmed in court documents. The ABC report spurred an internal investigation, which found that CPS had ignored more than 6,000 reports of child abuse, and this led to Brewer abolishing CPS. The backlog of cases was dealt with by a special task force of police and social workers. Throughout her 2009-2015 term in office, Brewer paid particular attention to the rising trend of child sex trafficking, calling it "modern-day slavery" and tightening laws against it.
http://medicalkidnap.com/2014/11/17/cps-caseworker-in-arizona-turns-whistleblower-reports-on-abuse-of-power/
Arkansas, May 2016 (Arkansas Times) An Arkansas truck driver who had maintained a foster home between 1998 and 2014, sheltering 35 children, was charged with raping or abusing at least eight of the children. Numerous complaints had been made to the Arkansas authorities, starting in 1997, but the man and his wife continued to receive foster children. The man pled guilty to five counts in Oct 2016.
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2016/10/25/federal-investigation-uncovers-foster-parents-abuse-of-five-children
Connecticut, May 2016 (Hartford Courier) The state's Department of Children and Families fired two of its managers for failing to remove children from a foster home in which children were exposed to prior sex offenders. In a subsequent investigation, the DCF acknowledged that it had numerous cases in which children were resident in homes with prior sex offenders present, or even that foster parents were prior sex offenders themselves; it also acknowledged that it had no centralized list showing which of its 4,000 children under care were at known risk from a parent, relative, or other resident in the home with a record as a sex offender. In one 2013 case, a gay couple in Glastonbury who had adopted nine boys were convicted of raping two of them.
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-sex-offender-children-0513-20160514-story.html http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/gay-conn-couple-accused-rape-face-trial-article-1.1310010
New York, Feb 2017 (CBS News) A grand jury report called the New York State foster care system "woefully inadequate" after a long-time foster parent was charged with sexually abusing 8 boys who had been in his care. The man had been the subject of 18 previous child-abuse investigations, including one previous allegation of sexual abuse, always with no result. Authorities said he had sexually abused as many as 100 of the 140 boys who had stayed in his house over the past twenty years, but the statute of limitations prevented charges being brought for many of those past cases. The grand jury recommended that the statute of limitations be changed for child rape cases.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/02/15/new-york-foster-care-system/
Texas, Dec 2015 (Houston Press) U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack ruled that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services must be radically restructured to address its chronic failure to protect the roughly 12,000 children in state-sponsored foster care who have no expectation of being reunited with their families. Jack said that these long-term wards of the state were exposed to "physical, sexual, and psychological abuse," noting that the department had a catastrophic 75 percent error rate in investigating abuse claims, and that expert witnesses on behalf of Texas DFPS manipulated data and violated the judge's orders.
http://www.houstonpress.com/news/there-s-little-outrage-for-12-000-kids-suffering-in-the-texas-foster-care-system-8161341
California, Dec 2016 (Huffington Post) Because of a shortage of qualified candidates, the state's Child Protective Services have granted more than 5,000 waivers on criminal record checks for prospective foster parents. In one notorious 2013 California case, a foster mother with a prior record killed a two-year-old in her care with a hammer. This problem extends to other states. In New York, a man previously found guilty of sexually abusing a foster child in 2005 (and registered as a sex offender) was approved to foster a 16-year-old girl in 2014, and assaulted her as well.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evey-rosenbloom/where-do-the-children-go_1_b_8728758.html
Hawaii, Dec 2014 (Hawaii News Now) Two victims of prolonged sexual abuse by their foster father have brought suit against the Department of Human Services. Among its failures, the state accepted the man as a foster parent when he was actually homeless, and never noticed that payments for fostering were his only income.
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/27691604/former-foster-kids-sue-the-state-after-sexual-abuse-by-foster-dad
Texas, Jan 2015 (Austin American-Statesman) A six-month newspaper investigation of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services found that between 2010 and 2014, 655 child-abuse-related deaths were not publicly reported, even though the department had previously confirmed mistreatment. About 20 percent of recent child abuse homicides remain unsolved. Since more stringent reporting requirements were introduced in 2009, more than 50 CPS employees "have been caught lying to prosecutors, ignoring court orders, falsifying state records or obstructing law enforcement investigations". At least four are facing criminal charges relating to their misconduct.
http://projects.statesman.com/news/cps-missed-signs/
anonOpenPress ago
This backgrounder seems great. Reliable sourcing especially in 4. and 5. is challenging (1. and 6. being the easiest), but I'd guess not an impossible challenge. I'm happy to help with fact checking on this project, it really seems worth it! Maybe we could start with your list of sources for the 4th point above (please share a list)
anonOpenPress ago
ps. If you need some other help than fact checking, check my another subverse just put up: /v/pizzagateTeamwork
Your interesting project would fit there well
SoberSecondThought ago
Thanks for this. I'm afraid my contributions tend to be slow and erratic. I know what needs to be done, just not enough hours in the day.
I'll put the list together for #4 and post it here in a few days. I do have sources for the specific items I mentioned, it's just tedious going back and getting URLs for everything.
Where I think there is still enormous fertile territory is in putting together successive items to show a bigger pattern. As an example, I'll post my work-in-progress on #2. What I want people to focus on, is that there are cover-ups going on in practically every state. Sometimes the cover-up takes place in court, sometimes it takes place at CPS, but if you put successive stories together from the same region, the pattern becomes clear.
Take for example the Congressional pages scandal. It started with Mark Foley, a fairly junior Congressman, being accused of sexually harassing or abusing pages. Then, years later, we found out that Dennis Hastert was also abusing pages, and covered for Foley. See the Chicago Tribune story. The cover-up is much more important than the individual charges. Why did nobody pursue the Foley story? Why was Hastert's effort to cover for him so successful?
The same is true of, for example, of the Jerry Sandusky story at Penn State. First, Sandusky is arrested, and there's some noise about how certain people knew, and did nothing, and so Penn State gets sanctioned. But then a few years later, Sandusky's son is ALSO arrested on similar charges. The original investigation into who knew what was clearly not very thorough!
This is why I say there are literally hundreds of cover-ups to be researched. Basically every time a government official or a cop or a well-connected individual gets nabbed, there's a cover-up. There's always someone in the supply chain, providing the kids or the porn, who has to be protected. We don't realize it at the time, but then in a certain percentage of cases, the cover-up falls apart because there's someone too stupid to restrain himself (we're looking at YOU, Anthony Weiner) and when they get caught it becomes apparent that we never got the full story the first time.
Anyway, that's my thinking. I'll be interested to see what you make of my draft for #2. I've pulled together stories from nine states so far, but there's an ocean of stuff out there.
EDIT: It was actually eight states, there are two stories from Texas.
anonOpenPress ago
I like how it's made more "local", should wake up some people on those states. The texts seems great too in each. Keep up the good work!