Child Abuse, Police | featured news

The allegations were almost too heinous and far-fetched to be believed. A New Hampshire lawyer who graduated at the top of her class and credited her success to Christianity was accused of using her 14-year-old daughter as a sexual pawn, at one point even engaging in a sexual act with the girl on camera.

A suburban Des Moines couple is under arrest after their adopted teenage children reported being locked in the basement and fed under a locked door as punishment. The 45-year-old father and 44-year-old mother are charged with false imprisonment and neglect or abandonment of a dependent person.

Police say Escalona was so mad that her daughter soiled her pants that, as punishment, she super glued the girl’s hands to the wall then beat her in front of her other siblings... Escalona’s kids told investigators their mother kicked the girl in the stomach and repeatedly hit her.

A severely malnourished 15-year-old Wisconsin girl told police her father and stepmother had forced her to live in the basement for years and that they beat her, starved her and even forced her to eat her own feces.

Law enforcement officials wound up looking into the question of a Penn State cover-up in the Sandusky case... A critical break in the investigation of Jerry Sandusky came via a posting on the Internet: a random mention that a Penn State football coach, years before, might have seen something ugly, but kept silent.

Penn State campus police and their counterparts in State College said Wednesday that they had no record of Mike McQueary reporting an alleged sexual assault by Jerry Sandusky on a 10-year-old boy in a campus shower. The details ran counter to McQueary’s claims in an e-mail to former teammates and made available to the Associated Press this week.

Police say they have rescued 230 child victims of abuse and arrested 184 suspects in a global investigation into a Dutch-based international pedophile ring.

A Dallas toddler has died after police say he was dropped in a pot of boiling water. Dallas police told The Dallas Morning News in a story Tuesday that 16-month-old Jabraylon Bables appeared to have been dipped in boiling water. The toddler died Saturday from injuries and infections, 36 days after police say he was deliberately burned.

Police say a Southwest Airlines flight attendant took a baby from her parents on a flight from Dallas to Albuquerque after the mother slapped the crying child.

The Vatican for the first time released guidelines that explicitly say that bishops and other high-ranking clerics should report cases of abuse to police if required by law.