The victim accused 62 people of blackmailing and sexually abusing her over five years. The case came to light after her teachers noticed behavioural changes and alerted child welfare authorities
The survivors, aged 13 and 16 at the time, endured years of abuse that came to light after one came forward as an adult
Britain's government said on Thursday that it will support a series of local inquiries into cases of organised child sexual abuse in the wake of a furore largely stoked by the world's richest man Elon Musk. In a statement to lawmakers, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government has also authorised what she called a rapid audit of the current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country and make recommendations. The issue of so-called grooming gangs", also called rape gangs" by some, has risen up the political agenda in the UK after Musk recently took to his X platform highlighting the problem and condemning British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk criticised Starmer for not backing a national inquiry into the matter following a request from the local authority in the northern English town of Oldham, where police found girls under 18 were sexually exploited by groups of men in the 2000s and 2010s. Musk also alleged that Starmer failed to bring perpetrators t
Grooming gangs scandal: The ruling Labour Party criticised the Conservatives for attempting to derail the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill
A number of Indian diaspora groups in the UK have strongly objected to the use of the generic term Asian with reference to a historic child sexual abuse scandal across different parts of England, largely involving gangs of men of Pakistani heritage. Defending his record, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday that he had reopened such cases and brought the first prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in Rochdale, north-west England, during his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) between 2008 and 2013. The Network of Sikh Organisations (NSO) reacted to Starmer's statement to highlight that the charity had first complained about the use of vague terminology referencing the country's wider South Asian community in connection with the crime back in 2012. This use of the vague reference to Asian' grooming gangs is extremely disappointing from the Prime Minister, NSO said in a statement. Part of the problem with this issue has been a fear of not speaking ..
Pope Francis' child protection board called Tuesday for victims of clergy sexual abuse to have greater access to information about their cases and the right to compensation, in the first-ever global assessment of the Catholic Church's efforts to address the crisis. The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors issued a series of findings and recommendations in its pilot annual report, zeroing in on the church in a dozen countries, two religious orders and two Vatican offices with detailed analysis. In its most critical note, it called for greater transparency from the Vatican's sex abuse office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. It said the office's slow processing of cases and secrecy were re-traumatising to victims, and its refusal to publish statistics or its own jurisprudence continues "to foment distrust among the faithful, especially the victim/survivor community. The 50-page report marks something of a milestone for the commission, which in its 10-year ...
A child psychiatrist who altered a first-day-of-school photo he saw on Facebook to make a group of girls appear nude. A US Army soldier accused of creating images depicting children he knew being sexually abused. A software engineer charged with generating hyper-realistic sexually explicit images of children. Law enforcement agencies across the US are cracking down on a troubling spread of child sexual abuse imagery created through artificial intelligence technology from manipulated photos of real children to graphic depictions of computer-generated kids. ustice Department officials say they're aggressively going after offenders who exploit AI tools, while states are racing to ensure people generating deepfakes and other harmful imagery of kids can be prosecuted under their laws. We've got to signal early and often that it is a crime, that it will be investigated and prosecuted when the evidence supports it, Steven Grocki, who leads the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and .
Sean Diddy Combs was hit Monday with a new wave of lawsuits accusing him of raping women, sexually assaulting men and molesting a 16-year-old boy the first time he's been sued by a person alleging they were abused as a minor. At least six lawsuits were filed against Combs in federal court in Manhattan, adding to a growing list of legal claims against the indicted hip-hop mogul, all of which he has denied. The lawsuits were filed anonymously to protect the identities of the accusers, two by women identified as Jane Does and four by men identified as John Does. Some of the Does, echoing others who've accused Combs in recent months, allege that he used his fame and the promise of potential stardom to entice victims to lavish parties or drug-fueled hangouts where he then assaulted them. Some allege that he beat or drugged them. Others say he threatened to kill them if they didn't do as he pleased or if they spoke out against him. The lawsuits describe alleged assaults dating to the ...
The new allegations have been made by 60 men and 60 women, including victims who were minors at the time of the alleged incidents
The Bombay High Court has raised serious concerns about the police's account of the fatal shooting of Akshay Shinde, a sex assault accused, while in custody
The crime branch and cyber police team have been searching for both the Trustees
A female actor in Malayalam cinema levelled sexual abuse allegations against four prominent male actors, including M Mukesh, on Monday, causing further upheaval in the film industry already reeling from the Justice K Hema Committee's explosive findings of harassment and abuse of women professionals. Hours after the actress levelled the allegations against Mukesh, a CPI(M) MLA, in interviews with news channels, workers from Yuva Morcha and Mahila Congress organised separate marches towards his residence in Kollam, demanding that a case be registered against him and that he resign as a legislator. The Kollam MLA has not responded to the allegations. The female actor also levelled sexual abuse allegations against three other prominent actors in the Malayalam film industry. Meanwhile, actor Maniyanpilla Raju has called for an investigation into the allegations surfacing in the Malayalam film industry. He told reporters that many more revelations will come out, and there will be multipl
'If schools are not a safe place, then what is the point of talking about right to education?', Bombay High Court questions authorities in Badlapur assault case
Protests on Badlapur sexual assault case escalate in Maharashtra - Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition calls for a Maharashtra-wide bandh on August 24
The Badlapur school, where two young girls were allegedly sexually abused, preferred to cover up the crime instead of helping their parents file a police complaint, said Susieben Shah, chairperson of Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, on Wednesday. The alleged crime by a male attendant created a volatile situation in the town of Thane district on Tuesday, with protesting parents and locals crippling rail services and clashing with police. Shah stressed the urgency of the matter, saying that the alleged sexual abuse of the two kindergarten students is a clear case under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offence (POCSO) Act. After learning about the incident, the state child rights panel chief said, she contacted the Thane District Child Protection Unit about the parents' concerns. They (child protection unit) took them to the police to file the complaint. When I asked the school management about the case, they tried to cover it up. I even asked them wh
Two four-year-old girls were allegedly sexually assaulted by a cleaning staff member in Thane's Badlapur school last week
Alice Munro, celebrated for her literary prowess and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, is often regarded as one of the greatest short-story writers. Read on to find out why she is in the
The Allahabad High Court has directed that in cases of sexual offences against children, police must ensure that a medical report determining the victim's age is drawn up at the outset and is submitted to the court without any delay. The court said discrepancies in the victim's age in POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) cases can substantially affect the rights and liberties of the accused. It granted bail to Ghaziabad-resident Aman, alias Vansh, who was lodged in the jail since December 5, 2023 last year in a POCSO case. "False depiction of a victim as a minor in POCSO Act cases is an abuse of the process of court." Justice Ajay Bhanot said on Tuesday. He observed that the victim's age as mentioned in the prosecution case is often found to be at variance with the age determined by the expert medical boards in a large number of cases. "At times there are multiple contradictions in age-related documents available with the prosecution. Numerous cases of false implica
Senator Amy Klobuchar on Wednesday questioned what she said was inaction in the tech industry, comparing it to the response shown when a panel blew out of a Boeing plane earlier this month
Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence image-generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse, according to a new report that urges companies to take action to address a harmful flaw in the technology they built. Those same images have made it easier for AI systems to produce realistic and explicit imagery of fake children as well as transform social media photos of fully clothed real teens into nudes, much to the alarm of schools and law enforcement around the world. Until recently, anti-abuse researchers thought the only way that some unchecked AI tools produced abusive imagery of children was by essentially combining what they've learned from two separate buckets of online images - adult pornography and benign photos of kids. But the Stanford Internet Observatory found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that's been used to train leading AI image-makers such