News

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.

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.

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…

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.

For at least the last 10 years, Catholic dioceses across the country have created lists of priests credibly accused of sexual misconduct.The lists have long been kept private by church officials. But over the last decade, dioceses in San Diego, Chicago, Boston and other cities have released such lists, largely under pressure.None of the six dioceses in Minnesota have yet published the names of the priests credibly accused. But some want that to change.Among them is St. Paul Attorney Jeff Anderson, who is well-known for representing victims and alleged victims of sexual abuse…