Pennsylvania parents reminded of safe haven law

Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare yesterday reminded expectant and new parents that the State has a “Safe Haven” law which allows them legally and confidentially to ‘turn over’ unwanted infants to any hospital, up to 28 days old, as an alternative to abandonment.

While it sounds a very harsh way of putting things, it’s much kinder to both mother and baby in a situation where they feel they simply cannot keep the child, to be able to hand the baby, unharmed, to a responsible organisation without fear of prosecution.
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US CyberTipLine tops 500,000 suspected child exploitation/pornography reports

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has announced that it’s received its half-a-millionth report of suspected child pornography or child exploitation crime.

The half-million mark comes nine years after the CyberTipline was mandated by the U.S. Congress to serve as the nation’s “9-1-1″ for reporting incidents of child sexual exploitation. NCMEC’s Exploited Child Division (ECD) personnel analyze and develop the leads, which are then referred to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution. Since its creation, the number of reports to the CyberTipline has shown significant increases in many of the reporting categories.

“Here’s what we know, an estimated 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys will be sexually victimized in someway before they reach the age of 18,” said NCMEC President and CEO Ernie Allen. “The constant growth in reports to the CyberTipline is staggering. Even more disturbing is that these figures don’t reflect the true number of children being victimized because sex crimes involving minors are grossly underreported.”

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Violence on TV: Legislation or parental responsibility?

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA has concluded that Hollywood isn’t doing enough to protect children from viewing violent programming on cable and satellite TV, and that Congress should authorise government action.

Unsurprisingly, the TV networks aren’t keen to bend to this kind of pressure.

There’s plenty of talk on both sides about what the right thing to do is.

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UK Conservative party say marriage is good for society

Last year, the British Cnservative party said that the church should promote marriage, and now former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith is heading up the social justice policy group and speaking out on marriage and society.

There’s a link between families breaking down and gun crime, he says
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Oklahoma ‘covenant marriages’ aim to lower divorce rate

The Daily O’Collegian has posted an interesting article questioning a new bill introduced into the Oklahoma legislature that recommends couples who are to be married go through premarital counselling, enter a so-called ‘covenant marriage’, and then be unable to divorce based on grounds of incompatibilty.
It doesn’t exclude other grounds for divorce, such as abuse, and presumably actual adultery, but it does suggest that couples who have undergone this counselling are somehow immune from problems later on in their marriages.

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