Free Republic

Abandoned by their families in hospital wards or on roadways, the kids at HaitiChildren have been diagnosed with a variety of disabilities, including Down syndrome, multiple sclerosis, autism and brain injury from seizures. At least one little boy is HIV positive. Those who do not use a wheelchair have difficulty walking. They are conditions that not only require specialized care but also make them outcasts. Stigmatized, they are called kokobe, meaning “cripple” in Creole. A gang invaded the orphanage last week, pointing their guns and searching the place as they taunted the kids in wheelchairs. “The gangs have been shouting,...

The U.S. Marshals Service recently launched a nationwide effort to recover missing and exploited children. Three major operations rescued over 100 children, many of them from sex traffickers. But a disturbing trend discovered during the operation should launch a nationwide investigation into the American child welfare system. PJ Media reached out to USMS for details on the rescued children and was told that the majority of them came from foster care. This information was ignored in the initial media reports on the operation. Dave Oney, press contact at the USMS, responded via email to questions about the rescued children.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is planning to build homes in Morocco as places to deport underage unaccompanied migrants who have broken the law, or who want to return voluntarily. A BAMF document leaked to the TAZ newspaper shows that two homes have been planned for now, each with 100 places, at a cost of €960,000 ($1,050,000) per year. The orphanages would include medical facilities, as well as some sort of schooling and vocational training, the plans said, and would also be available to local homeless children and young people. […] The homes are supposed to “create...

On Friday, I published at Breitbart the horrifying reminiscences of a British woman who suffered repeated gang rapes, beatings and abuse from a Muslim rape gang, while police dismissed her complaints with total indifference. Now this courageous woman has revealed to me more details of what she and other girls have suffered at the hands of these rape gangs: After awhile, the worst thing was not what happened for me – as horrifying as it was, I got used to it. What was worst for me was seeing the other girls they did this to. I was used to it,...

Schools that do everything parents should are not schools. They're orphanages. The city fathers of Buffalo, New York are considering what they call “public boarding schools,” “where students as young as first or second grade would be assured proper meals, uniforms, after-school tutoring and activities.” “We have teachers and union leaders telling us, ‘The problem is with the homes; these kids are in dysfunctional homes,'” Buffalo school board member Carl Paladino told the Huffington Post. The “Buffalo Institute of Growth would supplement a college-style academic schedule with life skills and social activities that would keep students on campus seven days...

Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC and former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville said that children belong to all of us. No, they donÂ’t. IÂ’ve seen what happens to children when they are owned by the state. State ownership of children leads to neglect. It cripples children, so donÂ’t do it. That is so glaringly obvious that I wonder why Harris-Perry and Reville say otherwise.IÂ’ve cleaned up the mess of state owned children. My son came from an Eastern European orphanage. Many children died there. He was examined by a foreign doctor before he was given an immigration visa. His medical...

As of Wednesday morning, Compassion International reports that they have not yet made contact with their Haiti office, which is near the epicenter of Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake. The quake has produced many aftershocks, including two of significant intensity - over 5.0 in magnitude. Communication to Haiti is virtually impossible with widespread damage to cell towers and communication lines. Compassion shared on Twitter that their reach in Haiti involves 230 churches helping 65,000+ children/families, 2,200 Child Survival Program moms and babies and almost 100 leadership students. “Based on the epicenter, media reports and our center locations, we expect centers have been...

Isabelle Redford is a 7 year old little girl who loves to draw, but her art is more than just kid stuff. She is an artist. Her drawings are good enough to earn some real money but she isn’t spending it on toys or candy. Isabelle draws cards and raise money to help the orphans. It all started when Isabelle was 5, her mother Kelly Redford told her a story about twin girls in Haiti whose mother died during childbirth. Isabelle immediately asks her mother, “What can we do, we have to help.” Isabelle brainstormed and thought of a way...

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up. Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing. The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage. The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children...

A congressional committee has included a local Islamic charity in a new round of inquiries into suspected ties between not-for-profit groups and terrorists. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee has requested the financial records of 25 Islamic charities, including the Columbia-based Islamic American Relief Agency, or IARA. In particular, the request included donor lists that are reported to the IRS but protected under a privacy statute. The request comes two years after FBI, Department of the Treasury and other federal agency investigations into charities suspected of having ties to international terrorists. Since 2001, the United States has frozen more than $136...

5/16/2006 - CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti, Africa (AFPN) -- Since 2003, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa servicemembers have visited local orphanages with the hopes of learning new cultures, establishing friendships and building better futures. Currently, about 200 CJTF-HOA servicemembers visit three different orphanages each week volunteering an average of 600 hours. U.S. Navy Religious Program Specialist Richard Stoneking, CJTF-HOA chaplain's office, and Lt. Cmdr. Angie Walker, CJTF-HOA meteorology and oceanography officer, lead visits which include going to orphanages for boys, girls and infants. Commander Walker and Specialist Stoneking became involved with the program for different reasons, but both get the...

Twenty years ago, C. J. Cherryh wrote a series of science fiction books, the Faded Sun trilogy. In it, she introduced beings called the regul – cannibalistic frog-like creatures who brought forth the best in their race by ritually chasing down and eating their own children. Whatever children were quick enough and clever enough to survive to adulthood were thereby vindicated as the best. When one of the human characters asked how the regul could be so bloodthirsty, the regul’s reply upset my teenage worldview. The regul pointed out that their methods of winnowing the population was really no different...

An apparent shift toward more institutional care of foster kids has some child-welfare advocates worried that America is straining against 100 years of research. These are no angry behemoths hulking on downtown streets or rising on the hills of distant railroad towns. Often, today's American orphanages look so unlike their Dickensian predecessors that you could almost believe the brightly colored cottages were sets for some Disney fairy tale. The children, too, seem distant from the privations of old. They have food, clothes, and a measure of stability - most even have parents, beyond the wilds of the foster-care system. Look...

<p>Mary Jo Copeland got the big victory she wanted Tuesday night when the Eagan City Council voted 4 to 1 to approve her proposed children's group home for rezoning and development.</p> <p>After the vote, a packed council chamber erupted in applause. A tearful Copeland hugged her husband, Dick, as well-wishers lined up to greet her.</p>

The Eagan City Council is set to vote tonight on a proposed children's home. Mary Jo Copeland, founder of the Sharing and Caring Hands homeless shelter near downtown Minneapolis, is sponsoring the home. Several other suburbs -- Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Victoria and, most recently, Chaska -- have rejected her proposed children's home, but Eagan Mayor Pat Awada has welcomed it. The group home could house up to 200 children and would have a private school on the site. On May 28, the Eagan Planning Commission decided to allow rezoning of more than 35 acres for the home. The 4-3...