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Metropolis Reality Forums Ť Protecting Our Children ť

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Topic: Protecting Our Children (Read 472 times)

Rhune
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Protecting Our Children
« on: Jan 7^th, 2003, 9:22am »

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There's a new story going around right now that I'll post as a follow up message to this one, but mostly I started this thread to talk about the important message within the tragedy.

That message, being said loud and clear to me is to make sure that we have written provisions as to who gets custody of our children if we were ever to die or become incapacitated for any reason. We have a choice in this if we make our wishes known in advance and we don't (and shouldn't) just let the state decide for us.

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Rhune
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #1 on: Jan 7^th, 2003, 9:23am »

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Woman sought after boys found in squalor
Two boys, another dead child, locked in basement
Monday, January 6, 2003 Posted: 10:12 PM EST (0312 GMT)

NEWARK, New Jersey (CNN) -- Police were seeking a woman Monday who abandoned three young brothers, one of whom died after they were locked in a basement in filthy conditions, officials said.

A 7-year-old boy was discovered dead in a locked room, Newark Mayor Sharpe James told reporters. The child was inside a plastic container, Newark police said.

The other children, Tyrone, 5, and Raheem, 7, were nearby in a locked room.

The dead child was Faheem, Raheem's twin brother, James said.

"The room was a nightmare: feces, you name it ... vomiting, all the ills that you'd think from two boys ages 7 and 5 having been locked in a room without any care or any treatment," James said. "There's a clear pattern of neglect."

James said the dead child had been wrapped in a neatly folded blanket.

Police issued an arrest warrant for Sherry Murphy, who was supposed to be looking after the boys while her cousin, the boys' mother, was in jail. Police were getting closer to finding her Monday, the mayor said.

"All of Newark's police are out looking for Miss Sherry Murphy," James said.

Authorities initially sought Murphy on child-endangerment charges, but they planned to upgrade that to homicide, James said Monday afternoon.

That decision was based on an interview investigators had with Murphy's three daughters and ex-husband, who is a Newark firefighter, James said. Information from the interview leads police to believe the boy's body might have been moved to the locked room after his death, the mayor said.

'Reaching out for love and caring'
Police were called Saturday by Shawn Slappy, who said he had been dating Murphy and had gone down to the basement to find shoes and boots. He found two children in a room "in a terrible state," James said.

When Raheem told authorities he had a twin brother, police returned to the house and discovered a child's body in another room.

Newark house where children were found

Officials do not know how long the boys were in the basement. Murphy moved into the apartment the first week of December, and neighbors said they did not recall ever seeing the children.

"Raheem couldn't talk about any school he's been attending," James said. "It could be a case where the children were moved from one locked condition to another. ... There's a real mystery unfolding here."

Tyrone and Raheem were being treated at The University Hospital in Newark. Where they would go after being released was unclear.

James said the younger boy had suffered burns from his neck down that affected his ability to walk.

Both boys were enjoying food and freedom to play, he said, noting that Tyrone was eating jelly from a jar.

"[They are] two kids with good manners, good spirit, suffering for no reason of their own," he said. "They're reaching out for love and caring."

Mother had given cousin custody
James said the boys' mother, Melinda Williams, 41, was being treated in a hospital in New York for serious injuries after being hit by a car last weekend.

Williams turned the boys over to Murphy in March, when she was jailed on an assault charge, the mayor said. When the mother was released in August, she was unable to find Murphy or her children.

She finally learned their whereabouts from an aunt and had been en route to see them when she was hit by the car, James said, adding that it was possible she may never walk again.

In another unfortunate twist, the Division of Youth and Family Services was supposed to be monitoring the boys when their mother went to jail, James said.

He said they closed the case for reasons that are not clear, and there are no records of DYFS following up on the boys after their mother went to jail.

"I'm not going to accuse anyone," the mayor said. "Probably there's a lot of blame, but even if we go beyond DYFS, no one can take the place of the parents and those who are entrusted to care for our children. So right now, Sherry Murphy and Miss Melinda Williams -- they too have to answer to the condition of these wonderful boys."

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MzzJoplin
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #2 on: Jan 7^th, 2003, 10:59am »

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"It's hard to be free, but when it works, it sure is worth it ... " ~ Janis Joplin

chickmama
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #3 on: Jan 8^th, 2003, 7:41pm »

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The more I hear about this story, the more sickening it becomes. It is just inconceivable that someone could do this to innocent babies. The news stories that I've been hearing say that child protective services have had people telling them that these boys were being abused for years. It didn't just start with the aunt, it started with the mom. They also haven't released how long the little boy's been dead. The report I heard said he could have been in that container for 3 months. This just really puts me in a bad mood....Furthermore, it makes me want to just hug my babies. I look at them and I have to wonder how anyone could hurt them.

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Rhune
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #4 on: Jan 9^th, 2003, 10:02am »

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Woman detained in New Jersey child abuse case
Thursday, January 9, 2003 Posted: 9:32 AM EST (1432 GMT)

NEWARK, New Jersey (CNN) -- The woman who police say was caring for a boy found dead and two others who were starved and beaten has been apprehended and is undergoing questioning by homicide detectives, authorities said.

Newark police said they had detained Sherry Murphy and said she probably would be arraigned later Thursday.

There are three charges of child endangerment against Murphy, but she may face more charges now that one of the cases has been ruled a homicide. The FBI has issued a warrant charging Murphy with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

Murphy, a 41-year-old barroom dancer, was apprehended in an apartment in Newark's Vailsburg section at 1:45 a.m. EST, police said.

She was hiding out with a male companion, and she did not resist arrest, The Newark Star-Ledger reported.

Murphy is a cousin of the biological mother of three boys found last weekend in a basement of a Newark home. Two of the boys, ages 5 and 7, were starved, beaten and burned. A third boy, the twin brother of the 7-year-old, was found dead in a plastic container, police said.

The surviving boys remain hospitalized in fair condition.

Newark police were called to a home Saturday to check out a report that two boys were found locked in a basement. During the search, one of the boys told police he had a twin brother and police returned to the basement and found the boy's body in a container.

Murphy was looking after the children while their mother, Melissa Williams, was in jail. After Williams was released from jail in August, she said she could not find her cousin or the children.

After Williams was told the children had been found, she was on her way to see them Saturday when she was hit by a car. She is now hospitalized.

On Wednesday, Joe Reese, the boyfriend of the biological mother of the boys was arrested on charges of sexually abusing one of the twins and later arraigned.

The judge in Reese's arraignment said a grand jury will review his case. Police said the charges stem from sexual abuse allegations while the boys were in the custody of their mother, who was living with Reese in Irvington, New Jersey, before the boys moved in with Murphy.

State Human Services Commissioner Gwendolyn Harris has declared a "state of emergency" in the Division of Youth and Family Services, which had closed the boys' case.

She announced several reforms at the division, including measures that would not allow caseworkers to close any case if there are allegations of abuse or neglect.

The reforms will require face-to-face contact in some 280 cases statewide in which abuse allegations have been made but the children have not been seen, and will require "extraordinary investigative measures" be used to find children in those cases who cannot be located.

Harris is taking action to suspend the supervisor who authorized the closing of the Williams case in February.

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Addams
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #5 on: Jan 9^th, 2003, 2:14pm »

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on Jan 7^th, 2003, 9:22am, Rhune wrote:

That message, being said loud and clear to me is to make sure that we have written provisions as to who gets custody of our children if we were ever to die or become incapacitated for any reason. We have a choice in this if we make our wishes known in advance and we don't (and shouldn't) just let the state decide for us.

Please have a will. Make the time and effort to have one prepared. THEN every 5 years review it with your spouse/family and lawyer. When we did our will we were required to go to family members and ask them if they would care for our child if we both were killed. This happened to my husband's aunt and uncle. There were three orphas instantly after a trunk fell on top of their car on the 401 highway.

You can have an impact on your children;s lives and know their friends and watch out for the other children in your neighbourhood that they too are safe. They are only kids.

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Rhune
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Re: Protecting Our Children
« Reply #6 on: Jan 27^th, 2003, 4:44pm »

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29043.html

Child porn list leaked to Sunday Times
By Drew Cullen
Posted: 27/01/2003 at 12:22 GMT

The Sunday Times has obtained Operation Ore's entire list of UK subscribers to child porn sites. Containing 7,272 names, the list includes 'at least 20 senior executives' and a 'senior teacher at an exclusive girl's public school, services personnel from at least five military bases, GPs, university academics and civil servants."

There's more: a "famous newspaper columnist is named, along with a song writer for a legendary pop band and a member of another chart-topping 1980s cult pop group, along with an official with the Church of England."

The 1000-page list contains names, addresses and credit card details of UK subscribers to an American child porn aggregator. Members paid Ł21 a month to Landslide Productions of Texas, for access to 300 child porn sites.

The list was compiled by the US Postal Service, which busted Landslide in 1999. Its sheer size has overwhelmed UK police. To date, only 1,200- 2,000 people have been arrested, depending upon which report you believe. And only 50 people, including Pete Townsend of The Who have been named in public.

Users or Abusers?

In our recent article Watch out! There's a chatroom paedophile about, we asked if reinforcement of deviant sexual fantasies, through exposure to child abuse material, could encourage some to turn their masturbatory fantasies into reality. We think this is a reasonable question: no-one yet knows the answer.

All paedophiles, it seems, have collections of child pornography. But not all, not most, child porn consumers are paedophiles - according to American research cited by child protection campaigners in the UK, up to one third of child porn users are concurrently abusers. We really must get a copy of this research. (In the case of Operation Ore, we did a quick calculation, that this could mean up to 2000 children at risk. Quick and wrong, as this reader demolition job shows.)

According to the UK police, up to a fifth of the Operation List could be child abusers, but then they won't know for sure until they have completed their time-consuming and expensive trawls.

Of course, this estimate may also be an exaggeration. And, of course, child porn users reject the accusations that they are paedophiles. Take, for example, Jim Bell, imprisoned in March 2002, for possession of child pornography and taking video shots of two girls.

Writing last week in The Guardian, he claims that in three years, "I never came across a website that took credit card subscriptions for its own photography that showed explicit sexual activity involving children."

All very plausible, but images accessible through Landslide included some very hard core material indeed on sites such as Child Rape.

Get the Producers

Bell argues that Operation Ore will "succeed in frightening people away from the credit card sites which offered the milder forms of child pornography. It will not affect the undercurrent of hardcore child porn, nor child prostitution, nor the appalling, frightening ways in which adults hurt children. It will replace informed understanding with mass hysteria, will claim some victims, and do little good. That is always the way with witch hunts."

We think that frightening punters away from "the milder forms of child pornography" is a Good Thing. According to US Customs service estimates, there are more than 100,000 child porn sites worldwide, generating revenues of $200m. Anything that chokes off their cash is to be welcomed.

But Bell is surely right in his point that Operation Ore will have no effect upon the amount of child porn in circulation on the Internet.

So rather than chasing low-level consumers, shouldn't we instead go after the porn producers instead, Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University and author of Beyond Tolerance: child pornography on the internet, asks.

Writing in The Guardian, Jenkins argues: "You can only suppress the child porn trade by focusing on people, and above all, on the highly skilled technical experts who run the boards and the websites, rather than the casual users. That kind of laborious work doesn't generate as many headlines as taking out a rock star or MP, but it may be the only way of putting this particularly loathsome genie back into its bottle."

Yes, yes, but is safe, or right, to assume that child porn subscribers are "casual users"? Soon the police may have little choice. Already, there are some mutterings that Operation Ore is putting children at risk, because of the diversion of the resources of child protection units into the case. Also there is another US-compiled list of UK child porn subscribers winging its way here, this one 10,000 strong. And there could be many, many more.

A senior Scotland Yard source quoted in today's Daily Mirror: "The forecast is that the Visa list may top 100,000 alone. Together with Mastercard and American Express customers, plus the other major credit card providers, the projection is the total number of British men who have been accessing these sites will exceed 250,000."

If this figure is in any way accurate, there will be a massive bottleneck in the judicial system for years to come, additional government funds or no. Ž

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