Newswire
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Linda Kelly’s Failure to Report |
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Tuesday, 15 November 2011 11:21 |
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By Grier Weeks
The Attorney General prosecuting Penn State officials for failure to report child abuse is herself hiding evidence of thousands of child sexual predators in Pennsylvania, and for the exact same reasons Penn State did: money and reputation.
In charging Penn State officials criminally, Attorney General Linda Kelly alleges (fairly) that their actions led directly to the rape of Pennsylvania children. “The failure of top university officials to act on reports of [Jerry] Sandusky’s alleged sexual misconduct… allowed a predator to walk free for years—continuing to target new victims,” Kelly said in a statement issued by her office.
But Penn State officials are rank amateurs in the cover up business, compared to Attorney General Kelly. And if their inaction is responsible for dozens or scores of new victims, Kelly’s own dirty little secret is now resulting in the entirely predictable and preventable rape of thousands of Pennsylvania children.
Evidence of Kelly’s child predators is stored in the Roundup law enforcement database, a national system designed, built and maintained in large part by Pennsylvania state police, in conjunction with their counterparts in Massachusetts. The database holds information on approximately 20,000 Pennsylvanians identified trafficking in child rape videos and other crime scene recordings.
Pennsylvania law enforcement not only helped create the database for these child predator suspects, it routinely plots the suspects’ locations on maps of their state. Yet, the vast majority remains at large, free to (as Kelly says) target new victims.
Make no mistake (because Kelly doesn’t): Roundup is not just a database of “child pornography” suspects, which should be cause for emergency action in and of itself. The point is that thousands of predatory pedophiles in Pennsylvania have given up their locations and identities by openly trafficking in illegal child abuse material online. Sandusky might very well have been one of them.
But it gets worse. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 40% of possessors of child pornography are hands-on offenders with local child victims. The Roundup data provides Pennsylvania state police with abundant evidence indicating which ones those are. Simple investigative analysis tells them which possess “grooming material” aimed at child victims, sadistic torture videos, “how-to” manuals or material emanating from inside the state.
Pennsylvania police go home every night with the screams of children in their heads, knowing that little boys and girls are being left out there without help because law enforcement has not been given the resources it needs to act.
Attorney General Linda Kelly could follow the evidence back through the Internet right to the door of thousands of Jerry Sanduskys tomorrow. But she has failed to report.
If Kelly did act, prosecution would not depend upon mandated reporters or the strength of young victims to testify. Kelly could circumvent all of the failures represented by the Penn State case and bring thousands of swift and sure prosecutions for child exploitation immediately.
Why hasn’t Linda Kelly acted?
For the same reason Penn State officials didn’t. To act now would be to admit a terrible failure, a failure that resulted directly in the rape of children. The thousands of suspects known to Linda Kelly are not on record as unsolved crimes, they are unacknowledged crimes. They are being kept off the board for a reason.
More to the point, action would cost Kelly’s department and the State money. Big money. For Penn State officials, the financial impact will come in the form of lawsuits. For Kelly, it means making the protection of children a budget priority. Blue ribbon panels to do post mortems are far more “cost-effective,” and we can expect these any day.
The National Association to Protect Children briefed Kelly’s predecessor, current Governor Tom Corbett, on the implications of this database and the need for urgent action in 2009. Now, as the state’s top law enforcement officer, it’s Kelly’s turn.
If Kelly does not—or claims she cannot—act, Governor Corbett should use the emergency powers available to him under state law to immediately mobilize state law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to arrest these criminals and locate and help their child victims. Emergency powers have been used for far less.
Pennsylvanians can be proud of those Penn State students who organized a candlelight vigil for the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky. But they should remember that for every one of those children, there are thousands more living in hell, with no college football scandal to call attention to their plight.
There will be no candles lit for them as long as Linda Kelly fails to report what she knows.
Grier Weeks is Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children (www.protect.org)
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said the NAPC met with Tom Corbett in 2008. The correct date was 2009.
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Circle of Trust Abuse |
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Tuesday, 15 November 2011 09:00 |
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“Once an offender within the circle is exposed, that circle begins to fold in around itself, acting as a protective barrier for the offender.”
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Read more...
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Operation SpiderWeb nets 50 arrests |
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Tuesday, 08 November 2011 09:00 |
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49 men and 1 woman were arrested across the state of Florida as a result of the week-long “Operation SpiderWeb”.
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Read more...
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ORNL software finds child predators |
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Monday, 07 November 2011 09:00 |
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On November 7, 2011, Scientific American (online edition) published a story about our work with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
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Read more...
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Judge William Adams: Our View |
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Thursday, 03 November 2011 09:04 |
Texas family court Judge William Adams is on paid leave, after his adult daughter Hillary released video of him savagely beating her when she was 16. Now CBS reports Adams “dealt with at least 349 family law cases in the past year,” including “nearly 50” child protection cases. Our reaction? Hillary showed more guts than millions of Americans who claim to be “outraged” on her behalf.
If news reports are accurate, Hillary Adams didn’t make the story all about herself in releasing the video, as many might have. Instead, she made it about holding a judge who makes life or death decisions over children’s lives accountable.
Like every victim of an emotionally and physically abusive parent who speaks out, she says she is now dealing with conflicted feelings about exposing this family secret. But if Judge Adams is held accountable, her actions will have protected countless Texas children from this human’s “judgment.”
Will that be the end of the story? One rotten judge is removed from the bench and thousands of Americans get to go on newspaper message boards and declare how “outraged” they are, conspicuously fantasizing about what they’d like to do to him if they had the chance?
That sure will be the end of the story, until American voters actually care enough to demand transparency and accountability in their court system.
Doing that takes more than five minutes of fake outrage, it takes actual commitment. The kind of commitment that liberals show every day when they fund and operate a huge network of nonprofits devoted to “sunlight” in government and politics. The kind of commitment conservatives show every day with well-oiled think tanks and political action committees. They care, and they prove it. Why shouldn’t pro-child, anti-crime voters?
If family court judges like William Adams made rulings that took money out of corporate pockets… or rulings that offended the ideological priorities of the wine and cheese set… you better believe they’d be under microscopes and targeted at election time.
But they don’t, so they get the biggest free ride in all of American politics.
Since PROTECT and the National Association to Protect Children began in 2002, we’ve always said that the greatest strategic prize of all in the war for child protection will be true transparency and accountability in the social service and criminal justice systems. Shine the bright light of accountability on the people failing to protect children, and you will give citizens the tools they need to demand and get real change. And these citizens will do the work wherever they are, wherever we can’t be. But that’s a challenging undertaking. It’s complicated, doesn’t get much financial support and takes time.
Our Sunlight and Accountability campaign has made tremendous progress over the past year. Landmark legislation in Virginia—which we believe will become a model for the nation—has dislodged unprecedented amounts of data on the performance of judges, prosecutors, police and social service agencies. Our Freedom of Information Act requests have added to this trove of information.
In one jurisdiction, our work has led to an incredible pilot project involving every public agency responding to child abuse: social workers, police, prosecutors and the courts. These agencies have agreed to change the way they do business, to share data they’ve never shared and to create what one of our expert advisers Alice Vachss calls the key to real accountability: a universal tracking code that allows children to be followed as they are moved from one bureaucracy to another, enabling actual outcomes and overall performance to be seen for the first time. Without this innovation, it’s all just a swamp of statistics.
After all, if Walmart can track a pair of sneakers from the factory in China to the cash register, shouldn’t bureaucrats be forced to get their act together and keep track of vulnerable children in their care?
How would all of that get a judge like William Adams off the bench and away from children? One of the first reports we expect to come out of an analysis of court data now underway is a judicial report card, showing citizens in one state how their judges ruled in cases of crimes against children, and how they stack up next to their colleagues.
Who knows what outrages that might turn up? |
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The PROTECT Lobby
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Our Mission
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The National Association to Protect Children is a national, pro-child, anti-crime membership association. We are founded on the belief that our first and most sacred obligation as parents, citizens, and members of the human species is the protection of children from harm.
PROTECT is a bipartisan pro-child, anti-crime lobby whose sole focus is making the protection of children a top political and policy priority at the national, state and local level.
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