Category: Politics

Chris Bates was 16 years old when he started selling nude photos of himself on the internet to adult men who pressured him for more and more images.
The demands snowballed into riskier requests, and within months the gay Connecticut teen was trading sex for dinners out, designer sneakers and other luxuries.
Bates says he was lured by the attention and what appeared to be easy money. He secretly hoped his financially struggling single mother, or anybody, would notice what was happening and protect him.
No one did — and within two years, the tall, lanky youth was living alone in a dilapidated apartment, prostituting himself to get by. His home — and an array of hotel rooms in Connecticut and Massachusetts — became a “revolving door” of sex buyers.
“I really thought I was the bad person selling myself,’’ said Bates, now 26 and living in Worcester. “I didn’t realize that I was a victim.”

BC staff have been angered by a warning in an internal memo against using the word paedophile to describe a child sex predator.

The email sent by a senior producer told staff in the Tasmanian bureau to avoid the term paedophile even in cases where offenders had a long history of abusing children to avoid ‘marginalising’ anyone.
The justification used was advice from Tasmania’s Sexual Assault Support Service (SASS), which told an ABC reporter that use of the word could stop abusers seeking treatment therefore making it more likely they’d continue offending.

The Sports World Against Trafficking (SWAT) League announced today that it is launching the Blue B Safety Code, a simple, effective technology-based solution aimed at parents and caregivers to promote child safety. This is the first of many initiatives they are developing in their mission to eradicate human trafficking. Over 70% of survivors surveyed stated that this code would have allowed them to leave their trafficking situation sooner. Of this same group of survivors, 34% stated that they would likely have never been trafficked.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and Maggie Hassan (D-Catherine Cortez Masto Senator nevadaN.H.), and Representatives Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio-16), Annie Kuster (N.H.-02), Guy Reschenthaler (Pa.-14), and Lucy McBath (Ga.-06) in reintroducing the END Child Exploitation Act, legislation designed to extend the period of time that technology companies are required to preserve information about child sexual abuse images they report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).