87 girls sexually assaulted at school before
it's reported to police
News24 Correspondent
Johannesburg – A Mamelodi school is set to be investigated for the alleged rape of a student, Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi announced on Sunday.
"Lesufi will on Monday visit…a secondary school to receive a report on another alleged rape incident of a 17-year-old girl learner by a scholar patroller," his spokesperson Steve Mabona confirmed. The incident is alleged to have taken place on September 30 and a case was apparently opened earlier this month.
Lesufi brought up the incident while addressing a meeting between parents and officials at a primary school in Soweto. The school has been hit by revelations of wide-scale sexual abuse of students by a scholar patrolman.
The current confirmed number of students who are victims of the abused stands at 87 – but on Sunday Lesufi made it clear that "proper validation" still needed to be finalised.
87!!! 87!!!?? And they are just getting around to investigating now?
At the meeting, Lesufi apologised to parents angry about apparent delays in the reporting of the matter by the school principal for a "communication breakdown".
A criminal communication breakdown. The principal must be charged for allowing this to go on so long.
'We have failed your children'
"The entire sector, the department of education, including myself: we have failed your children. All of us have to take blame," he told the parents and guardians for whom emotion ran high at the meeting.
"We are not talking about one, two, twenty, thirty [abused students]. For God’s sake, we are talking about 87; This is a disaster and… we need to act decisively," Lesufi told them. "Something is wrong somewhere," he declared, saying the investigation would protect no "holy cow[s]".
Lesufi also offered various measures to parents which could help "protect, support and defend" the affected children.
Firstly, he said that if parents wanted to move their children to a different school, the department would accept that. "No child will be stopped or discriminated against."
The department also would ensure that if students were too traumatised to write exams, other arrangements would be made to complete an assessment of their progress.
Staff replacing those who had been suspended would begin work on Monday.
Principal removed, hero grandmother
Previously, the department chose to remove the school's principal and entire senior management team – who will now be at the centre of an independent investigation.
Looking into the future, new security cameras would be installed and various safety measures implemented at the school.
Lesufi also promised counselling would continue for as long as each child needed it.
The meeting was also addressed by officials from the Teddy Bear Clinic, who discussed with parents which signs of emotional and physical trauma to look out for.
Earlier, members of the school governing body vented their frustration that the principal allegedly withheld key information from them at first.
On Sunday, Lesufi paid tribute to a grandmother who was amongst the first to raise the alarm over the abuse – and who also spoke at the meeting. "That person is our hero," he declared to applause.
This week, news of the abuse broke to public shock. A security guard from the school, in his 50s, was arrested on Monday.
He appeared briefly in the Protea North Magistrate's Court earlier this week, and was remanded in custody until October 18, when he is expected to apply for bail.
8 Children rescued from pedophile ring
that included the mother
Philippines: Nothing observable about the undersized cement-rendered bungalow could have betrayed the acts of depravity hidden within.
One could have easily imagined an attentive mother sitting on the wooden bench outside, kids playing in the street, waiting for the evening rains to finally break the humidity.
But on one muggy, overcast morning in September last year this unremarkable house located on one of the many islands scattered throughout the Visayas archipelago would finally reveal its vile secrets.
A long investigation, initiated by the Queensland police taskforce Argos, had led an international joint operation to its doorstep.
Among a covert arrest team waiting to move in as dawn broke over the fishing village was an Australian Federal Police officer from the international liaison post in Manila.
Unable to be named because of an ongoing prosecution, the AFP officer had worked with the Philippines National Police to pinpoint the house and help secure the appropriate search warrants.
The Australian has learned a total of eight children were rescued from the house after the raid.
They had been enslaved by a pedophile ring with links to Australia, subjected to the brutality of child-sex tourism and used for the live-streaming of sexual acts with adults.
A woman arrested at the house on charges of abuse was their mother.
“It was horrendous,” the AFP assistant commissioner for the international operations command, Scott Lee, said.
“It was only going back a few months that we conducted a joint operation with the Philippines National Police that rescued three children from a house where they were being used to live-stream sex acts with adults. Children are being exposed to the most horrendous of crimes … it is disgraceful.”
Lee was referring to another operation involving the AFP, aided by intelligence from the FBI, which led to a raid by Philippines police to rescue three more children from a house in Cebu, the acknowledged epicentre of what is known as the “pay per view” trade in The Philippines, where children were being routinely raped and abused for the online entertainment of men in Australia and the US. The children, girls aged between 8 and 10, were forced into unspeakable acts of abuse, all streamed live via encrypted online video.
After new laws were passed to cancel passports of hundreds of high-risk sex offenders travelling to Asia — predominantly The Philippines and Indonesia — their sickening appetite has turned to the cyber underworld.
The AFP’s success in preventing pedophiles from leaving the country, and providing intelligence to foreign governments to refuse them entry, has presented a new challenge.
Lee calls it the displacement effect. “We see more of this move into live-streaming … with people now reaching in from all over the world,” Lee says.
“It is difficult to quantify (but) there is an alarming prevalence of people accessing child exploitation material in a range of communities that you would not expect.”
According to figures supplied to The Australian, last year the AFP Assessment Centre received more than 8000 reports of child exploitation. As of September 21 this year, it has received more than 6776 reports of child exploitation for the calendar year.
To get an idea of the scale of this problem, the interventions in just two years have produced hundreds and thousands of images and videos depicting child rape, abuse and brutality.
The majority of these reports come from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US, a not-for-profit partner of the AFP, and a member of the Virtual Global Taskforce dedicated to combating online and offline child sexual exploitation taking place around the world.
In June, parliament passed the federal government’s Passports Legislation Amendment (Overseas Travel by Child Sex Offenders) Bill 2017.
Its purpose is to prevent Australians who are “listed on a state or territory child-sex offender register with reporting obligations (a reportable offender) from travelling overseas to sexually exploit or sexually abuse vulnerable children in overseas countries where the law enforcement framework is weaker and their activities are not monitored”.
Expert: Drugs lead to abuse, neglect of children
There are so many stories on this blog that completely verify what the doctor is saying. Drugs are destroying children, turning their parents into monsters. Kudos for the doctor for giving kids a voice.
By CARA CHAPMAN Press-Republican
LAKE PLACID, NY — The prevalence of drugs in a home increases the potential for abuse and neglect of children.
Substances physically and neurochemically transform a person into someone he or she is not.
“Once addiction really changes the brain, you no longer make your spouse or your children a priority," said Dr. Michael Nerney, a substance abuse expert.
"You’re not able to do it.”
CANNOT THRIVE
Nerney addressed the effects of addiction on children's environments and safety in a presentation titled "Impact of Chemical Dependency on Families" as part of the recent Hope Changes Everything conference in Lake Placid.
When children aren't prioritized, he explained, that creates a negative emotional environment, and an unbelievable amount of stress and conflict within the home.
Children growing up amidst alcohol, crack or meth addiction are more likely to be abused, and use of opiates leads to high neglect of children that can even start prenatally.
Nerney showed attendees pictures of a normal infant's brain and one with stunted development due to extreme neglect.
“Humans cannot thrive without parents coming around."
ABUSE, NEGLECT
Statistics on adverse childhood experiences show boys are more likely to be physically abused than girls. And while girls are more likely to be sexually abused, sexual abuse of males is under-reported, Nerney said.
Sexual abuse of females is under-reported.
There are child fatalities every year that result from physical abuse, he added.
“All the years I’ve been doing this, it was an urban myth that some boyfriend put a 2- or 3-month-old in a microwave. But it has happened.”
And assaults can occur when older children intervene on behalf of younger siblings.
ACCESS
Factors that can put people at risk for addiction include genetics, epigenetics — which affect how genes express themselves — and their environments.
Access and involvement can lead children to use the drugs their parents use, Nerney said.
That was supported by studies in Spanish Harlem that showed kids started to use the illicit substances their parents asked them to buy and retrieve, and in Westchester County, where kids began smoking the cigarettes they would get from their parents' cars.
“If the family cannot pay attention and help with normal boundaries, the kids have free rein of the community,” Nerney said.
Children of those struggling with addiction see their parents “relentlessly deal with emotions with drugs or alcohol,” he continued. “If you see your family manage stress, anxiety or joy with alcohol or other drugs, that’s what you learn.”
OXYTOCIN
It’s politically correct to say dads have the same impact as moms, but not accurate, Nerney said. “Moms have a much larger role to play. They have various components not present in a dad’s brain.”
For mothers and the infants they carry, use of opiates or alcohol decreases production of oxytocin, a hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and plays a role in mother-child bonding, according to Psychology Today.
As a result, when the baby is born, those connections do not form.
“How is it someone can have a 5-pounder a month-and-a-half early and sign themselves out of the hospital with or without hospital approval?” Nerney said.
“If they don’t have the chemical bonds,” they go right back to looking for drugs.
Whenever a mother struggling with addiction gives birth, medical professionals should try to get her into treatment, Nerney said. “We want them in the hospital in the (neonatal intensive care unit); we want them touching their babies."
SEXUAL TRANSGRESSION
There are built-in boundaries that prevent parents from transgressing against their own children, Nerney said. But drugs like coke, meth and alcohol diminish those boundaries.
“They say, ‘We would kill for our spouses, but we would die for our children.’ That’s not the case with this.”
With opiates in the picture, you’re more likely to see a paternal figure prostituting out a daughter, he said. “Any kid in a family over the age of 10 is at a high risk for sexual transgression."
BUILD TRUST
Parents struggling with addiction use their money to fuel their habits instead of to feed their children, Nerney said. “There won’t be any clothes; there will be an absence of furniture. Whatever is sellable, they sell.”
Nerney urged caseworkers to be cautious when working with these families. “If it looks dangerous, it is dangerous."
Kids can’t trust people who are doing drugs or going through withdrawal and scrounging for dollars to buy more, Nerney said.
So, he encouraged caseworkers to develop reliability, predictability and faith for the children they work with in order to build trust.
Group Condemns Sexual Abuse, Molestation Against Women In Ondo State, Nigeria
90% of women in Nigerian society have experienced molestation
BY SAHARA REPORTERS, NEW YORK
A group of youths in Akure, the Ondo State capital, held a demonstration on Friday in which they condemned sexual abuse and domestic violence against women in the state and in Nigerian society as a whole.
The group, mostly undergraduate students, rallied in a peaceful march through the popular Oba Adesida Road asking women to speak out against sexual molestation.
Moyinoluwa Adeshipe, the founder of Kick Against Molestation Initiative, said 90 percent of women in Nigerian society have experienced molestation.
“I was a victim of sexual molestation at the age of 9 and now I am a living testimony and have been sharing my stories with these young girls so that they can also learn from it,” she said.
In his words, Comrade Olumide Adabayo, noted that domestic violence is a serious crime and should be rightly condemned by Nigerian society.
He called on women to report any case of sexual abuse to the authorities rather than staying quiet.
Another activist, Ewatomilola Emiola Owoye, said the government at all levels should work to prevent violence against women.
Ms. Owoeye explained that the reported cases of sexual molestation against women have become rampant and queried why the government has refused to come out with concrete laws that could punish the abusers.
“Enough is enough of all these forms of abuse. Our women should always speak out rather than hiding because of shame or victimization,” she added.
She advocated for the passage of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act (VAPP) and also called on the government to implement the Child Rights Act.
Ahmed Kehinde, another activist at the protest, said the group would continue to sensitize women to always speak out in the face of molestation and abuse.
Ondo State, Nigeria
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