Yesterday, a federal
judge awarded money damages to a victim of child pornography
using the federal anti-child pornography law named “Masha’s Law.” In one of the first cases of its kind, a
victim of sexual abuse and child pornography won a judgment for $240,000
against his former foster and adoptive parent, Gregg Alan Larsen, for injuries
relating to child pornography produced when the victim was a child.
News & Events
A federal judge has ordered former St. Paul teacher Gregg Alan Larsen to pay $240,000 to a man who was once his foster son for using him in the production of child pornography.Pierre Larsen, a foster child who was adopted by Larsen when he was 11, won the judgment on Wednesday, March 14.It was only the second time that a plaintiff has successfully used the federal “Masha’s Law” to obtain restitution for a victim of child pornography, said Pierre Larsen’s attorney, Patrick Noaker of Anderson and Associates. The law was named for a Russian orphan adopted by an American man who began abusing her …
Dozens of high school foreign exchange students have been raped,
sexually abused, or harassed by American host parents in towns and
cities across the country, an NBC News investigation has found.
Last year, the Irish Christian Brothers (ICB) became the 10th US Catholic diocese or religious order to declare bankruptcy to avoid public child sex abuse trials or depositions. In the case of the ICB, the order was faced with more than 50 lawsuits at one of its Seattle schools and had to act quickly before any of the cases went to trial. Our offices have handled hundreds of cases in these bankruptcies across the country, but there are some unique attributes of the Irish Christian Brothers bankruptcy that victims and the public need to know.1) It’s very hard to track the brothers. And the brot…
Parents
who want to protect their kids from sexual abuse need to reassess the
notion of “stranger danger” — the belief that children should be on
guard around strangers because they’re most likely to be molested by
someone unknown to them, experts say.In truth, at least four of
five cases of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by someone who knows
the child, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.”Parents
need to get away from that mythology and deal with the reality [that]
if it’s going to happen, it’s going to be someone within your circle,”
said Nancy McBride, nat…
Katherine Starr was at a crossroads last April, professionally and personally, when she says she began brainstorming: as a previous victim of sexual abuse in sports, how could she help make a positive impact on addressing the issue?This was months before the names Jerry Sandusky, Bernie Fine and other coaching/sports figures were strewn across the headlines, before the tidal wave of media coverage about horrific cases of alleged sexual abuse at Penn State, Syracuse and other iconic sports programs.”I was barely coaching,” says Starr, a former member of the British Olympic swimming team for the…
It’s fairly clear the federal investigation into Penn State University won’t be a duplication of the grand jury probe that led to charges of more than 50 counts of child sex abuse against Jerry Sandusky. Instead, federal authorities seem to be stepping into areas where the state attorney general’s office hasn’t gone.
When Bud Spillane was a school superintendent in New Rochelle, N.Y., he had to deal with removing an elementary school teacher suspected of sex abuse. “It was pretty evident he had done something,” Spillane recalls. The biggest obstacle to removing him from the classroom? “Parents came out of the woodwork…against me,” he says. They loved the teacher, the afterschool time he put in, and the weekend trips he liked to take students on, so they fought to keep him in school.
Under national scrutiny after a number of recent arrests of teachers and aides, the chancellor of the New York City public schools, Dennis Walcott, has ordered a review of cases of teacher misconduct. But his direction parallels yet another teacher’s arrest and for many is too little, too late. This week’s arrest saw Reserve Officers Training Corps teacher Darryl Lynch, a teacher at Manhattan’s High School of Graphic Communication Arts, taken from school and charged with sexually touching a 14-year-old female student. Mr. Lynch worked at the school since 1997.
Last week I wrote about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s failure to notify parents of reports of sexual abuse by teachers. Their failure to inform parents went to such an extreme that parents didn’t know that a teacher in their students’ school was suspected of abuse until the media reported on the arrests. The story is shocking and unacceptable, but these three incidents demonstrate failure on the part of one school district, so at least we can find solace in the fact that this is isolated, atypical behavior, right?
A teacher’s aide at a highly regarded public elementary school in Manhattan was arrested on Friday after an accusation that he had sexually abused a student at the school, the authorities said.The aide, Gregory Atkins, 56, had worked at Public School 87, on the Upper West Side, since November 2008, the Education Department said. A law enforcement official said a male student had accused Mr. Atkins of having him strip in the school’s bathroom and, at another point, offering money to fondle the boy. But many of the specifics of the case were not available. It is not the first time Mr. Atkins has…
When Los Angeles school officials choose to protect their own image over the protection of the children they serve, they are mimicking the long time behavior of Catholic Bishops who for years kept quiet about clergy predators in order to prevent “scandal”. Indeed, when will we ever learn? Clearly, when there is even the slightest chance that children could be in harm’s way, parents, and the community, must be informed when, and why, a teacher has been removed from the classroom because of child molestation.
Sealed documents filed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy identify at least 8,000 instances of child sexual abuse and 100 alleged offenders – 75 of them priests – who have not previously been named by the archdiocese, a victims’ attorney said Thursday. Archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf said she did not have enough information to respond to the assertion, made by attorney Jeffrey Anderson during a pivotal hearing before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley. Anderson represents about 350 of the 570 victim-survivors who have filed claims in the case. But Peter Isely of the Survivors N…
Milwaukee’s Roman Catholic archdiocese will ask a judge on Thursday to throw out hundreds of sexual abuse claims that have thrust it into bankruptcy, triggering a court battle and rekindling anger at the church’s mishandling of abusive clergy. The aggressive stance taken by the archdiocese reminds victims’ advocates how leaders of the U.S. church long resisted pleas to deal harshly with offenders…
A group of parents gathered across the street from an elementary school in a largely Latino neighborhood in South Los Angeles on Friday and took turns assailing its directors. Clutching a press release that had just been handed out by the school board, they were trying to process the news that a second teacher at their children’s school had been arrested on charges of sexual misconduct.