Sexting, Schools, and Law Enforcement: Where Does Child Protective Services Fit In?

Sexting. You won’t find the word in any 20th century dictionary. A combination of “sex” and “texting,” sexting is the exchange of explicit pictures via cell phone. Sometimes the photographs are shared voluntarily. Often, an element of coercion is present. In either case, once the photographs are sent, they can subsequently be used to embarrass, intimidate, or bully.

CPS employees, in conjunction with law enforcement and school officials, are the key officials making tough legal and ethical calls. And, as we know very well, citizen, legislative, and legal oversight is, and should be, omnipresent. Particularly from a legal perspective, making the right call on a consistent basis is a matter of understanding, training, and attention to detail.

Sexual abuse by a cousin is incest

James R. Marsh Appointed to Blue Ribbon Commission Examining the Larry Nassar Scandal

CHILD USA, the University of Pennsylvania-based think tank focused on child abuse and neglect, with $300,000 in funding from the Foundation for Global Sports Development (GSD), today announced the establishment of an independent Blue Ribbon Commission to examine the institutional responses to sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. The announcement came at the Athletes and Abuse Symposium hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, where leading national experts on sports, law enforcement, child sexual abuse, and child development convened to examine the repeated abuse of athletes across the spectrum of sports and ages.

“Game Over: Commission to Protect Youth Athletes” led by Marci Hamilton, CEO of CHILD USA and Fox Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, will have 16 members, and will immediately engage in a fact-finding exercise, before conducting public hearings to bring greater light to what happened and what went wrong in reporting. The commission expects to release a full, public report, in the beginning of 2020 with the goal of preventing abuse in the future.

Towards a Global Indicator on Unidentified Victims in Child Sexual Exploitation Material

Ground-breaking research released by INTERPOL and ECPAT International into the online sexual exploitation of children suggests that when online images or videos of child sexual abuse depict boys or very young children, the abuse is more likely to be severe. Other messages from the study:

• Law enforcement officials face multiple challenges in identifying victims and offenders, even with powerful tools such as the ICSE Database;
• A significant proportion (61 percent) of analysed series contained images and videos that were both abusive and exploitative in character, and in the vast majority of the analysed series from child modelling sites, both abusive and exploitative material was visible;
• Accurate determination of core characteristics of victims such as age is a challenge, particularly across ethnic groups;
• Even though most offenders were male, there are some females involved in the abuse and exploitation of children – and more needs to be understood about this phenomenon; and
• The phenomenon of ‘youth-produced sexual imagery’ appears to present a challenge to international law enforcement, both in terms of the detection and integration of this imagery with international image databases, and the identification and classification of its victims.