Free Republic

The FBI has recruited three girls to teach agents how to pose as teenagers on the internet. The 14-year-olds have been teaching agents how to communicate like young girls, by using written quizzes on celebrity gossip and clothing trends. The training is part of the FBI's Operation Innocent Image, which aims to track down paedophiles and child porn peddlers who prey on teenagers on the internet, according to the San Fransisco Chronicle Best friends, Karen, Mary and Kristin were recruited after one of their fathers - an agent involved in the paedophile investigations - watched her instant messaging a friend...

When the news headlines bizarrely announced that “Pete Townshend says he is not a paedophile”, my first reaction was to wonder if there was anything sad celebrities would not do to get their picture in the papers. We don’t know (and some of us are not much interested in) exactly what The Who guitarist has done, or what was going through his head while he was completing his “research” into child pornography on the Internet. The only thing he has been found guilty of so far is idiocy, for using his credit cards to access child porn websites. But it...

A Catholic priest who has admitted interfering with a 17-year-old youth has been allowed to keep his post despite tough new church guidelines, it was disclosed today. The case comes after Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, attempted to draw a line under recent scandals. At the weekend the Cardinal urged Catholics to stand firm in the face of "attack" over child abuse allegations. But the Cardinal faced claims that the case had breached the supposedly tough new guidelines he has championed. The BBC Radio 4 Today programme reported that the victim was 17...

The Roman Catholic Church is backward, superstitious, morally conservative and bigoted. Yet it needs defending in the face of a barrage of accusations, on both sides of the Atlantic, of paedophilia among the priesthood. For much of the motivation of these attacks is an assault on commitment and authority per se — a new front opened in the culture wars. Atheists who believe in reason and progress should be concerned that the Church of Rome is under threat from a regressive culture of cynicism, low expectations and relativism. Why else have the present scandals captured the public imagination? After all,...

The lawyer for 86 alleged victims of a defrocked paedophile priest in the United States has confirmed that they have tentatively agreed to a $10m legal settlement with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. "My clients feel as though it's time for closure. They want to remove themselves from this darkness and try to heal," Mitchell Garabedian told Reuters news agency. The judge handling the sex abuse allegations concerning John Geoghan - currently serving a six-year prison sentence for molesting a 10-year-old boy - is due to conduct a hearing on Thursday. An offer of $30m to the victims in...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul (news - web sites), formulating his own zero tolerance policy on child abuse by priests, told American Catholic leaders on Tuesday that paedophilia was a crime that had no place in the Church. Addressing a crisis meeting of top U.S. churchmen and Vatican (news - web sites) officials, he also offered comfort to victims of paedophile priests and said he hoped the scandal that has rocked the United States would lead to "a holier priesthood". "The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime...