Role of church in branding kids  witches

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Children accused of witchcraft…

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Changing tradition of child marriage.

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Pediatrician accused of molestation; ‘multiple victims’ cited

(CNN) — A Delaware pediatrician is facing numerous charges in the alleged sexual abuse of his patients, authorities said Wednesday, and there may be “multiple victims.”
Dr. Earl Bradley, 56, who has had a practice in Lewes, Delaware, for more than 10 years, is charged with eight counts of first-degree rape; four counts of second-degree rape; 14 counts of sexual exploitation of a child; and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden told CNN.
A prosecutor in Biden’s office estimated that Bradley may have had as many as 100 victims. Biden stopped short of that, saying only authorities think there may have been multiple victims, and the investigation is ongoing.
As of Wednesday, seven victims had been identified, said Jason Miller, spokesman for the Delaware Department of Justice. CNN affiliate WBOC-TV reported Bradley is being held in lieu of $2.9 million bond.
Read local coverage from CNN affiliate WBOC-TV
He was scheduled for a preliminary hearing Wednesday in the Sussex County Court of Common Pleas, but his attorney requested that it be continued until January 14, Biden said. WBOC reported that concerns about Bradley’s mental health prompted the postponement and said the doctor is under suicide watch at Sussex Correctional Institution.
The charges against Bradley, and any additional charges that are filed, will be presented to a grand jury “at some point,” Biden told CNN.
He would not give specifics of how Bradley came to authorities’ attention “over the course of recent months.” Police believe the abuse goes back “for several years,” with victims as young as 2, he said.
Additional charges were filed earlier this week after “preliminary forensic investigation of a computer” seized by Delaware State Police, authorities said in a release.
Police said they have seized photographic and video evidence showing Bradley abusing victims, WBOC said. Court documents provide graphic details about the evidence, the station said.
Bradley also has medical licenses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida. Biden said authorities in those states have been contacted.
Biden urged parents or others who have concerns regarding Bradley to contact his office, where a hot line is staffed with people who can provide information including counseling referrals.
“We’re taking this incredibly seriously,” he said.

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Study: Thousands of Haitan children work as slaves – CNN.com.

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(CNN) — As many as 225,000 children in Haiti live and work as unpaid domestic servants, the first study to closely examine the issue concluded.

The existence of these arrangements are not new, but the scope is larger than previously thought, a new study by the Pan American Development Foundation found. The foundation conducted the largest field survey of human rights violations in Haiti.

Known as restaveks, these extremely poor children are sent by their families to other homes.

“In principle, parental placement of a restavek child involves turning over child-rearing responsibility to another household in exchange for the child’s unpaid domestic service,” the study says.

Video: Helping Haiti’s child slaves Video: Ben Stiller helps Haiti

The majority, two-thirds, of restaveks are female, and all are prone to abuse and rape by their host families, the study says.

The movement of the children is from poor homes to less poor homes, sometimes within the same family. In addition to boarding, families often send their children to become restaveks because of schooling opportunities in their new homes.

To determine how widespread this practice is, the foundation conducted 1,458 door-to-door surveys in some of the more troubled neighborhoods in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

According to the U.N. Office for the Special Envoy for Haiti, unemployment reaches 70 percent nationally and 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2 a day.

Given the dire economic condition, child trafficking and organized violence has been a problem in Haiti.

The study’s aim was to answer the question: “What is the scale of the victimization?”

What researchers found was that 22 percent of children surveyed were living away from home, and that 30 percent of households had restavek children.

Using census projections for 2010, the study extrapolated that as many as 225,000 children in Haiti’s urban areas could be living as restaveks.

The recruitment of such children is “intimately linked” with poverty, said the study, which recommended that the government and foreign aid be used in poverty alleviation programs and more widely available education services, especially in rural areas.

The placement of restavek children has traditionally been a movement from rural Haiti to urban areas.

Another key find to the study is that they are increasingly coming from other urban areas, the study found. In many cases, children are placed in homes of relatives, but kinship ties did not guarantee better treatment, according to the study.

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Stepfather’s bizarre ritual

The stepfather of a two-year-old boy found with 42 needles in his body has confessed to jabbing them into the toddler during a month of rituals with a lover who he claimed received instructions through trances.
Roberto Carlos Magalhaes, a 30-year-old bricklayer, told detectives the woman went into trances and would “command him to stick the needles in the boy’s body,” police inspector Helder Fernandes Santana said.
The woman, Angelina Ribeiro dos Santos, paid to have the needles measuring up to 5cm blessed by a woman who practices the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble and convinced Magalhaes that inserting them into the boy would somehow allow them to be together, Santana said.
Police, however, believe she was out for revenge on the mother.
The two held sessions every few days over a full month in which Magalhaes stuck the needles into the boy several at a time, Santana said.
“According to his confession, he acted under influence of the woman, but it was he who stuck the needles in the boy’s body,” the inspector said. Magalhaes and dos Santos were arrested, though no charges have yet been filed.
Dos Santos is not believed to be a member of any religious or occult group, and authorities believe she came up with the idea of the rituals on her own, Santana said.
Authorities also detained the woman who blessed the needles so she could be questioned, but Santana said he expects she will be released without charge because she did not know how they were being used.
Magalhaes denied involvement when he was first questioned on Monday, but confessed after police detained him on Wednesday, Santana said.

An enraged crowd of more than 100 people surrounded and hurled rocks at the police station in the small northeastern city of Ibotirama, where the suspects were held on Wednesday night. Santana said they broke out a window of his own car because they wrongly believed the suspects were in it.

Extra police were called in to restore order and protect the suspects. They were then taken to an undisclosed lockup for their own protection, and it was not immediately clear whether they had legal representation.

The child was airlifted to a hospital in northeastern Brazil on Thursday because two of the needles are close to his heart, but it was not immediately clear when doctors might be able to remove them.

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Surgeons in the city of Barreiras in Bahia state, where the boy had been hospitalised since Sunday, had decided not to try to remove any needles immediately for fear they could cause more damage.

Doctors located 42 needles in the boy, who was in stable condition after a 390km flight to the hospital in the coastal city of Salvador that has a special heart unit.

Hospital spokeswoman Susy Moreno said an evaluation of when to perform surgery on the boy probably would not be finished until Friday.

He was in an intensive care unit but was conscious, had undergone a battery of X-rays and was receiving antibiotics, a hospital statement said. While the boy was admitted with some internal bleeding, the blood was drained and he did not appear in imminent danger of more bleeding.

The boy’s mother, a maid, took him to a hospital in Ibotirama, population about 25,000, on December 10, saying he was complaining of pain.

After X-rays revealed the cause, the mother told police she didn’t know how the needles got inside her son, whose name was not released because of his age.

Police and doctors concluded it would have been impossible for the boy to have ingested the needles – which have been also been found in a lung, his left leg and spread throughout his abdomen.

Afro-Brazilian religions practiced in Brazil have no ceremonies, rituals or practices involving harm to people, said Nelson Inocencio, director of African-Brazilian studies at the University of Brasilia.

He worried that the incident could hurt the image of the religions, of which Candomble is the most popular, and concentrated most in Bahia state.

“African religions in Brazil suffer from prejudice and discrimination,” he said. “What happened to this boy without a doubt could feed into the prejudice against Afro-Brazilian traditions.”

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Bricked in by debt, Pakistan’s

child ‘slaves’

Forced labour — you can say it’s the worst form of slavery.

15.09.2009

Identifying & Preventing Child Molestation Educational Video

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