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Archives > Volume 8 Issue 9 - February 2, 2010 Who are you? Pete Townshend, sex offender...Pete Townshend may be one of the greatest guitar players of all time, but more than one organization wants to stop him from strumming along with The Who at the Super Bowl in Miami. ABC News story here 
The reason? A past incident with child pornography. The 64-year-old rocker was reprimanded by British police in 2003 and placed on country's sex offenders' register for five years after he admitted that he paid to view images on a child porn Web site in 1999. According to Townshend, it was all in the name of research: in a 2003 statement, he said that while it was wrong for him to visit the site, he did so because he needed information for a campaign he was launching against Internet child porn and for his autobiography. (In the past, he has said he believes he was sexually abused as a child.) Townshend's 1972 rock opera, "Tommy," the title character is sexually abused by his Uncle Ernie. In 2002, Townshend wrote a report about child porn and posted it on his Web site. He compared the path to free "pedophilic imagery" to a "free line of cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally uncurious can resist." Townshend subsequently removed the report from his site; it still lives on TheSmokingGun.com. After a four-month-long investigation in 2003, in which police examined more than a dozen computers Townshend used, officials decided neither motive served as a defense to access the images. As part of an official cautioning procedure, Townshend's fingerprints, photograph, and a DNA sample were taken and he was placed on Britain's sex offender registry for five years. His listing on that register expired in 2008. That was the same year Townshend and The Who were lauded by then-President George W. Bush at the Kennedy Center Honors. But for Kevin Gillick, president of Protect Our Children, Inc., a child protective charity in Brevard County, Florida, Townshend's penance and endorsement isn't enough. "The NFL shouldn't have picked him in the first place," Gillick told ABCNews.com. "The damage was done when they picked him. And apparently, they didn't even consider this." Gillick dismissed Townshend's excuse for accessing child porn and questioned his motives. "[Research] is one of the most common excuses given by people who visit kiddie porn sites," he said. "These sites are most often visited by people who have a sexual attraction to children, just like people who go to grocery stores most often do so to get food. And of course, he paid for this, so he supported the industry when he did that. When you pay for child porn, you place an order for its next victim. I'm sure Mr. Townshend is intelligent enough to understand that." Gillick's organization has distributed hundreds of flyers around Miami's Sun Life Stadium protesting Townshend's participation in the Super Bowl. Some Baptist "trafficking victims" weren't orphans... As a group of U. S. Baptist charity workers waits to hear if they will be tried on child trafficking charges for attempting to take 33 children out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, the Associated Press has learned that not all of the children they were transporting were orphans. CBS News story here 
"One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, 'I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.' And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that," George Willeit, a spokesman for SOS Children's Villages, said. SOS, an Austrian-based charity working in Haiti, now has custody of the children. Willeit said the children arrived "very hungry, very thirsty." A 2- to 3-month-old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said. Workers were searching for their families or close relatives. Child welfare groups expressed outrage over Friday's attempt to move the kids to a hotel in the Dominican Republic, saying some of the children had parents who survived the January 12 earthquake. Prime Minister Max Bellerive denounced the group's "illegal trafficking of children" in a country long afflicted by the scourge and by foreign meddling. But while the church workers may be viewed as "traffickers" in Haiti, they say they came armed only with good intentions. They were "just trying to do the right thing," said Laura Silsby, a spokeswoman for the Idaho church group. She conceded that amidst the chaos, she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents for the children. The Baptists' "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" was described as an effort to save abandoned, traumatized children. Their plan was to scoop up 100 kids and take them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic. The 33 kids ranged in age from 2 months to 12 years. Meanwhile, Haiti's prime minister said Monday it's clear to him that the 10 U.S. Baptists who tried to take 33 children out of his quake-ravaged country without permission "knew what they were doing was wrong." CBS News story here But Prime Minister Max Bellerive also told The Associated Press his country is open to having the Americans go before courts in the United States because his own nation's judicial system was devastated by the January 12 earthquake. CNN found and interviewed parents of some of these children, who sent them away with hopes of a better life. CNN News story here On Monday, Haitian Information Minister Marie Laurence Lassegue appealed to Haitians to not give up their children to strangers. "We're talking about people who are coming to countries in distress, after a hurricane, after a tsunami, after an earthquake," she said. "You will never see the children again." In other news... 
An American accused of sexually abusing boys he was supposed to help in Haiti now faces additional charges, federal court records show. CNN News story here Douglas Perlitz, 39, was arrested in September after a federal grand jury indicted him on 10 counts related to the abuse of nine boys over a period of 10 years. Last week, a superseding indictment brought an additional nine counts against Perlitz, and alleges he abused a total of 18 boys. Perlitz founded and operated a home and school for needy children in Haiti, known as Project Pierre Toussaint, which has since closed. He is accused of enticing the boys with promises of food and shelter and with gifts such as cell phones and cash, in exchange for sexual acts. According to the new indictment in federal district court in Connecticut, Perlitz provided money and told one of the boys that he would not be kicked out of the school even if he failed his classes. He allegedly offered another boy and his family money and other benefits, and in another case, gave a television, shoes, clothes and meals to another boy, all in exchange for sexual acts and their silence. Those who did not cooperate with Perlitz were denied benefits, the indictment states. For more on this story, see vol7_iss51 and vol7_iss63.
CNN takes a look at self-injury ("cutting") among teens. CNN News story here Almost 400,000 adolescents and young adults were treated medically for self-inflicted injuries in 2006, the most recent year for which these injuries were counted. One recent study revealed that the number of children and adolescents in the U.S. who were hospitalized for depression, which is sometimes accompanied by self-injury among youth, increased by 27 percent between 1997 and 2007. Self-injury is associated with crippling psychiatric distress. Girls who engage in such behaviors score lower than their peers on almost all measures of positive psychological adjustment, such as sociability, and higher than their peers on almost all measures of negative psychological adjustment, such as depression and delinquency. Adolescent self-injury is linked to adult borderline personality disorder - a chronic and difficult to treat mental health condition characterized by impulsive behaviors, difficulties self-regulating emotions, mood instability and high rates of suicide. Self-injury is the single best predictor of suicide. Intentional self-injurers are about 75 times more likely to kill themselves than others in the population, an especially alarming statistic. Scientists are not sure why rates of self-injury appear to be on the rise, or how to stop the trend. Recent studies conducted at high schools and universities reveal that almost 20 percent of individuals self-injure at least once, and about 11 percent self-injure repeatedly. For more on "cutting" visit http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/feeling_sad/cutting.html. See eGuide/depression for more information on depression.
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