Free Republic

Family photos line the walls of Raynard Brown's tidy Orange home. A good home, his mother calls it, with two working parents who believed in the value of education and the power of after-school activities to keep kids from hunting down trouble. But Cynthia Brown found she couldn't compete with another, more seductive influence in her son's life, not when it grabbed him up so young, molding his behavior since the age of 11. That's when Raynard Brown first came home wearing the signature colors of the Bloods street gang. Over the next eight years, Brown rose to the rank...

An 8-year-old boy accused of sexually assaulting a second-grade classmate last week at a St. Paul elementary school now faces expulsion. The incident happened on the playground at Four Seasons A+ Elementary, which holds classes year round, as students waited for buses just before the end of the day July 24. The boy is believed to have approached an 8-year-old girl on a slide, forced her to kiss his private parts and then simulated sex on her, according to school district officials and members of the girl's family. The slide was enclosed by a tube, making it impossible for the...

It's Saturday night, and as one group of 12-year-old girls prepares to head out for a night at an all-ages dance in Toronto's nightclub core, another group of preteens is busy fussing over their expensive gowns and shoes and wheedling their parents to arrange a limousine for their Grade 8 graduation. In the week that has followed an altercation involving a 12-year-old girl stabbed on the streets of Toronto's Entertainment District at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday, there has been an outcry over parental abdication of responsibilities, calls for a strict children's curfew, and considerable hand-wringing about what kind of society...

Urban teens are increasingly losing their virginity before they can legally drive. A new survey shows four out of 10 city kids say they have had intercourse before age 14, and have engaged in oral and even anal sex by 17. "This study makes clear that urban young adults engage in a variety of sexual behavior beyond vaginal intercourse," said Dr. Danielle Ompad, who authored the survey for The New York Academy of Medicine. Ompad said the findings raise concerns about the possibility of a boom in sexually transmitted diseases among teens who don't know about safe sex. "Sex education...

LAGRANGE — The boys looked like the worst trouble they could be facing was stealing ice cream bars or maybe breaking a window. Instead, the two fresh-faced 10-year-olds stood before a Juvenile Court judge Thursday, accused of forcing a 7-year-old neighbor into some bushes and forcefully sodomizing her. The testimony from a police officer was disturbing, causing one boy's grandmother to choke back sobs. She wore sunglasses to hide her tears, as did the other boy's mother. The two boys who were charged "approached her and asked her to perform some sort of sexual acts," LaGrange police Detective Robert Kirby...