Free Republic

Los Angeles County plans to pay $4 billion to settle nearly 7,000 claims of childhood sexual abuse that allegedly occurred inside its juvenile facilities and foster homes, dwarfing the largest sex abuse settlements in U.S. history.The mammoth settlement, which still needs to be approved by both the county claims board and county supervisors, is a billion dollars more than what county officials had anticipated as the worst-case scenario to resolve a flurry of lawsuits — and far more than other organizations notorious for allowing unchecked sex abuse have paid victims. The Boy Scouts of America, by comparison, agreed to pay...

You Have Only 3 Guesses To Figure Out What Got This Man Arrested! LOL! White man busted for ???

Parens patriae is the legal principle, about four centuries old, that lies behind cases like Marie’s. It lies behind the child-welfare investigations into the families of three and a half million children in the United States in 2004 (the last year for which statistics are available). Each year around 300,000 children are temporarily removed and 65,000 to 70,000 of those children are ultimately taken from their parents forever, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Customs, schooling, food become issues for Muslim children put in Christian home The controversy surrounding four Muslim children placed in a Christian foster home in St. Catharines, Ont., has exposed a child-welfare system in culture shock. When Family and Children's Services of Niagara plucked the children from their parents last November and placed the four in a foster home with little knowledge of their religious and cultural practices, an outraged local Muslim community condemned the agency for its cultural insensitivity and even staged a vigil outside its offices in protest. But the children's aid society had only one Muslim foster...

The 17-year-old lives in isolation, in a room created just for him. His visitors are therapists and teachers, and, of course, there are the round-the-clock guards. The cost to keep him at the state's Green Hill Training School in Chehalis: $1,000 a day, $30,000 a month. Last year, the teen became the youngest person ever to be considered for incarceration as a "sexually violent predator" at McNeil Island's Special Commitment Center. As a ward of Washington and a minor, the state has little choice but to try to treat and educate him. And until he turns 18, he cannot...