Legal News

Readers of our blog focused upon child sexual abuse — its identification and prevention, as well as just outcomes for victims and due punishment for perpetrators — might reasonably believe that there is a strong federal program in place that helps systematically catalog problem teachers across the country and ensure that relevant information is shared…

Whose interests are being served? That is a fundamentally important question to consider in any comparative examination of criminal and civil court cases, respectively. As we implied in our immediately preceding blog post, it is conceivable that the best interests of a child victimized by sexual assault are not advanced at all — in fact,…

The high-profile O.J. Simpson litigation that played out in Southern California courts some years back likely engendered a bit of confusion for many people regarding the mechanics of the judicial system. Some of our readers, for example, might have reasonably posed this question: Why was he tried twice? We bring that up today because the…

“[T]he light bulb is going off that this is the right thing to do.” So says a principal with one victims’ advocacy group in discussing the growing movement in many states across the country that is focused upon the mass testing of rape kits assembled in sex crime cases. In the context of what she…

There is really no reasonable excuse these days for any California parent to be in the dark regarding their children and the potential for sexual abuse. And the reasons for that are obvious. For starters, it is simply a stark and long-noted fact that acts of sexual abuse committed against children do occur and have…

So-called “group homes” that serve to house thousands of neglected and abused California children who cannot be readily situated with relatives or foster families have always been envisioned by state officials as temporary venues. In other words, the goal has been to place children in such places only for very limited periods, and only when…

Where to draw the line? That certainly seems to be the seminal question that courts — and society in general — must address and answer with some clarity regarding what FBI Director James Comey calls “the hardest question I’ve seen in government.” That question concerns privacy expectations on the one hand and the government’s need…

“You know nothing.” So says the mother of a man who died last year after losing a long-term battle with alcoholism to people who pass judgment on matters relating to child sex abuse without having personally dealt with it in their families. “Wait until you’ve walked in our shoes,” she says. The grief that personally…