RAF investigates 1980s child abuse claims, Reporting abuse: A call can save a child’s life

RAF investigates 1980s child abuse claims

Alleged offences committed at base in Germany
James Legge  Saturday 09 February 2013

Military police are questioning a former serviceman over allegations of child sex abuse at a former RAF base in Germany.  The alleged offences were committed between 1981 and 1989, and involve a former RAF serviceman who was stationed in Berlin at the time.

The Ministry of Defence said yesterday that RAF Police Special Investigations and Intelligence Branch had interviewed a man from the London area....
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/raf-investigates-1980s-child-abuse-claims-8488169.html


Reporting abuse: A call can save a child’s life
A woman did what many shy away from. Because of her, a frail teen handcuffed to a pole in his family’s basement was rescued.
February 9
By LAURA BAUER and JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star

Crystal Anderson’s friends told her not to call. Don’t get involved. None of your business, they said.

The situation next door, though, nagged at her. Something didn’t seem right with the 17-year-old neighbor boy.

When she first met him in August after she moved into the cluster of townhomes in Kansas City, North, he was outside all day, sometimes until way past dark. But in recent months she’d barely seen him.

Then one day in late January she saw him chained to his family’s basement door. The teen’s stepbrother told her the family sometimes had to restrain the teen so he wouldn’t hurt anybody.

Just to make sure the neighbor boy was OK, Anderson on Monday called Missouri’s child abuse and neglect hotline. She told of how the timid young man no longer walked the neighborhood for hours a day and said she had recently seen him chained. Police were there within an hour, she said. An ambulance followed.

Authorities and child advocates say Anderson was the boy’s savior. She did what too many people, including other neighbors in her Northland complex, have shied away from doing, not just in this alleged abuse case, but in many others.

She picked up the phone.

“That was a lifesaving call,” said Debby Howland, coordinator of the Kansas City Child Abuse Roundtable Coalition. “Too many people don’t want to get involved. But thankfully someone did. It’s as simple as a phone call.”

In Kansas City, this is the third time in eight months that a child has been found locked away by parents or guardians....
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/02/09/4057662/reporting-abuse-a-call-can-save.html