Free Republic

".....There are good reasons why society admires courage and despises cowardice. Fear is one of the primary subjects taught in primary and secondary schools both public and private. Teaching fear to young people is a kind of collective child abuse. We are raising a generation of paranoid neurotics. Our children are being taught, erroneously, that individuals and the environment are delicate and fragile. ....Those who are the most paranoid seem to know the least about the objects of their anxieties. For example, fear of genetically modified foods, glutens, and hydraulic fracturing are based almost solely on complete ignorance of these...

A draft UN report has revealed that UN peacekeepers routinely flout a ban of the international organization and pay for sex with money, dresses, jewelry, perfume, cell phones and other items in a flagrant exploitation of poverty-stricken populations they are meant to protect. Reuters received a copy of the draft report, which was conducted by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), and detailed how UN forces bought the sexual services of hundreds of women in Haiti and Liberia who said they were forced to sell their bodies due to hunger and poverty. "Evidence from two peacekeeping mission countries...

The U.N. peacekeepers arrive; months later, some leave infants behind. Now the United Nations has quietly started to offer DNA testing to help prove paternity claims and ensure support for the so-called “peacekeeper babies.” It’s a delicate step, as countries that contribute U.N. troops might not welcome a practice that could prove not only fatherhood but wrongdoing. Of the dozen paternity claims received last year, four were associated with alleged sexual abuse of a minor.The new effort comes a decade after a groundbreaking report on sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers suggested that the U.N. secretary-general be authorized to “require...

I don't know if these horror stories about parents being arrested for allowing their kids to play unsupervised are becoming more numerous or if we're just hearing about them more often because of social media.  But it's hardly relevant to a couple in Florida who found themselves arrested and charged with felony neglect when they couldn't get home in time after work to take care of their 11-year-old son. Hit and Run: One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I'll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into...

In discussing the scandal engulfing former House speaker Dennis Hastert, who is due in court this week, one thing must be made absolutely clear. What he is alleged to have done to young boys has absolutely nothing to do with being gay or gay rights. * Almost immediately after the news broke of Hastert’s indictment, folks looked to Congress for signs of hypocrisy. Former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, made an assertion during an appearance on Huffington Post Live last Monday that was flat-out inappropriate. “Dennis Hastert twice as speaker tried to get the house to pass a...

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar built their custom home with a number of measures that physically separate their sons - including molester Josh - from their daughters, Daily Mail Online can reveal. The couple, who have 19 children, moved into the sprawling 7,000-square-foot house they designed and helped to build in January 2006 - four years after their eldest son confessed to his sordid actions. Strikingly, they built their daughters' shared bedroom at the opposite end of their home's second floor to their sons' room - with their master bedroom situated right in front of the girls' one, 'blocking' it....

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., allegedly told his tenth-grade students to find their parents’ sex toys and condoms and take selfies with them for extra credit. A local CBS affiliate reports that two of the students’ mothers, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, had heard about the assignment from a counselor at the school. “It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” Cobene said. According to CBS, the school administration has tried to play off...

Dr. Joy DeGruy Clearly Describes A Potentially Life-Scarring Mental Condition Experienced By Many Kids Who Are Victims of Child Abuse/Neglect.Hello. I try to calmly relate my experiences providing uniform and investigative police services for more than a decade to a Brooklyn, NY, Rap Hip Hop influenced community. Though I am told my writings are not always sensitive. I apologize if my frustrations seep into the my accounts of personally witnessing child abuse, as well as how abuse/neglect adversely impacts the lives of developing infants, toddlers, children, teens and their communities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRnctOyS8w While doing online research into child abuse I came...

In the past few weeks we've learned that Josh Dugger was a child molester, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a child molester and the Methodist Church in the UK has apologized for 2,000 cases of abuse dating back to 1950. Child molesters can be found in the highest reaches of politics. Molesters can be television celebrities. And molesters can ply their abuse under the cover of the church. With abusers that pervasive it makes sense to learn more about the perpetrators. Thanks to an excellent article in The Jewish Woman we can. The really bad news in...

A West St. Paul man is accused of beating his young children and forcing two of them to take shots with him until they were drunk. Officers were called at 11:56 p.m. Friday, May 29, after a woman reported a domestic assault. The woman said she is married to 28-year-old Oscar Oswaldo Cruz of West St. Paul and that they have been together for five years. They have a 1-year-old and 4-year-old together, and she has a 6-year-old and 9-year-old from a previous relationship. All of them live together in West St. Paul. The woman said Cruz called her at...

June 1, 2015, Charles Blow, NYTimes, "It can take decades, or even a lifetime, to recover if recovery is even emotionally available for the survivor."Can the same can be said for child/teen victims of emotional and physical abuse they experience when their unskilled, immature single moms irresponsibly introduce them to a life filled with struggle and pain in a community populated by depressed people? Quoting a January 2011 LAWeekly interview with 2015 Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar: "Lamar's parents moved from Chicago to Compton in 1984 with all of $500 in their pockets. "My mom's one of 13 siblings, and they...

Why Police Love/Hate American Drug Dealer/Rapper Shawn 'Jay Z' Carter Brooklyn, NY - Marcy Houses - Hi. During the 80s-90s there were hundreds of Brooklyn cops and investigators who loved/hated Shawn 'JayZ' Carter and his crew of drug dealers. Thanks to Shawn and the anti-social activities his crew of teens/adults engaged in, including selling highly addictive drugs to his neighbors and shooting his competitors from the nearby Tompkins and Lafayette Houses, hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime were generated while investigating the murders, shootings and armed robberies resulting from the drug activity Shawn proudly raps about. Yup,...

The parents of the famous Duggar family will answer questions about the Josh Duggar molestation scandal in an interview on Fox News this week. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar will speak with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly at their home in Arkansas, and the interview will air on Kelly's 9 p.m. program on Wednesday, Fox announced on Saturday. Josh Duggar and the other children on the family's reality show "19 Kids and Counting" will apparently not be a part of the interview.

UNITED NATIONS — The boys said they approached the French soldiers because they were hungry. Some were so young that they didn't quite understand the acts the soldiers demanded in return. One boy, 8 or 9 years old, said he did it several times to the same soldier, "until one day an older kid saw him and told him what he was doing was bad." Another boy, 9, said he thought the soldiers had been urinating. United Nations investigators heard such stories of sexual abuse from several boys in May and June 2014 in Central African Republic, where French soldiers...

A 2006 police report detailing Josh Duggar’s molestation of his sisters has caused a media firestorm, yet the document has also revealed another detail that the Duggar family has yet to address: namely, the assertion by one of their children that Jim Bob and Michelle use a rod to spank them. The allegations surfaced in the police report, which was released in a redacted form last week by In Touch Weekly. The report includes a summary of a conversation which occurred between an investigator and one of the Duggar children, who remains unnamed. “Inv. Taylor asked [redacted] about getting spanked....

As we’ve all heard by now, the Duggars have some skeletons in their family closet. While the news is buzzing with the very bad things Josh Duggar did to some of his sisters over a decade ago, what people aren’t talking about is the fact that the girls have recently been victimized … as recent as today. You’ve seen it in your own social media news feed — and you may even have participated. Before I go on, let me explain that this isn’t about Josh. This isn’t defending Josh. I don’t even want to talk about what Josh did...

When 8th grade student Jared Marcum got dressed for school this morning, he says he had no idea that his pro-Second Amendment shirt would initiate what he calls a fight over his First Amendment rights. … It was the image of a gun printed on Jared’s t-shirt that sparked a dispute between a Logan Middle School teacher and Jared, that ended with Jared suspended, arrested and facing two charges, obstruction and disturbing the education process, on his otherwise spotless record. Jared’s father Allen Lardieri says he’s angry he had to rush from work to pick his son up from jail...

Racist Kentucky Judge Olu Stevens should be removed from office for his mistreatment of the parents of a small child who may have at least a borderline case of PTSD. On March 21, 2013, two armed black men [Gregory Wallace and Marquis MacAfee] broke into Jordan and Tommy Gray’s home near Buechel, Ken., while their 3-year old daughter was watching SpongeBob Squarepants and robbed the couple at gunpoint. “Two years later when Gregory Wallace was about to be sentenced, Jordan wrote in a victim impact statement that her daughter was still ‘in constant fear of black men.’”

A photograph of a baby in Islamic State territory has emerged online, purportedly released by an activist in Syria.The sleeping baby is swaddled and covered by the Islamic State flag. It is surrounded by a handgun and a grenade, propped up on a pink pillow. There appears to be a camouflage bag lying on the same pillow. Anti-Islamic State activist group, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, reported on the photograph’s existence.Abu Ward Al-Raqqawi, a founder of the group, tweeted an earlier picture of a newborn next a purported Islamic State birth certificate, handgun and grenade in April. Raqqawi wrote, “#ISIS...

Washington (CNN)Rep. Mike Honda this week became one of the first lawmakers in Congress to support the idea of a gender spectrum and publicly announce a family member, his granddaughter, is transgender. The California Democrat urged acceptance of transgender individuals in a profile of his 8-year-old granddaughter Malisa, who was born a boy, in the San Jose Mercury News. READ: House Dems press Boehner to postpone Netanyahu speech People may say, "It's just a phase or they'll grow out of it," Honda told the paper. "But we have to be a little bit more in tune with what youngsters are...