Police, Child Sex Abuse | 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.

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.

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.