Children For Sale

This had been a topic few have wanted to address. It's too painful. But now our lost children are coming home. 

The FBI in conjunction with the Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children launched the Innocence Lost National Initiative. Their combined efforts were aimed at addressing the growing problem of domestic sex trafficking of children in the United States.

To date, these groups have worked successfully to rescue over 575 children. Investigations have successfully led to the conviction of more than 300 pimps, madams, and their associates who exploit children through prostitution. These convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences including multiple 25-year-to-life sentences and the seizure of real property, vehicles, and monetary assets. Read on..

Download innocence_lost.pdf

Brain Scan Shows Bullies Enjoy Others' Pain

When youths with aggressive conduct disorder watch an individual intentionally hurting another (like closing a piano lead), regions of the brain that process painful information are activated, as well as the amygdala and ventral striatum (part of the neural circuit involved in reward processing. (Jean Decety, University of Chicago/Handout/Reuters)

Download brain_scans_show_bullies_enjoy_others_pain.pdf

Violent video games linked to child aggression.

About 90 percent of U.S. kids ages 8 to 16 play video games, and they spend 13 hours a week doing so ( more if you're a boy). Now a new study suggest virtual violence in these games may make kids more aggressive in real life.

Kids in both the U.S. and Japan who reported playing lots of violent video games had more aggressive behavior months later than their peers who did not, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics. The researchers specifically tried to get to the root of the chicken-or-egg problem -- do children become more aggressive after playing video games or are aggressive kids more attracted to violent videos? Read on...

Download violent_video_games_linked_to_child_aggression_cnn.com.pdf

Tuck in your shirt! Concealed weapons?

I saw a demonstration similar to this video clip from UTube. Take a moment to see how easy it is to conceal weapons and why a dress code in your school should reflect tucking in a shirt.

Tuck in your shirt!

Young children are better than adults at detecting sociopathic people.

   

 "The Power of Nice, How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness" by Linda  Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval has a section titled "Fine Tune Your Instincts"  has  a powerful reminder about our children and reinforcing their “trusting their feelings.”

 For some people, reading body cues is a professional necessity.  Poker players, for  example, will tell you that if a person looks down and to the left, they're lying. We might not all have the skills of a professional poker player, but deep down we all have solid instincts that enable us to detect when someone isn't being straight with us. 

"Harvard psychologist Martha Stout says that because young children don't have fully developed language skills, they're much more reliant on nonverbal cues, like body language and tone of voice.  It's for this reason that young children, as well as dogs, are much better than adults at detecting dishonest, and even sociopathic, people." 

There's more that's very interesting in this section (including how brain-damaged people read others. Martha Stout is the author of "The Sociopath Next Door" and "The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.