A missing California teenager appeared outside a local news station begging to share her story one week after she disappeared.
Alison Jillian Chao, 15, vanished on July 16 after leaving from her father’s house in Monterey Park to bike the four miles to her aunt’s home in San Gabriel.
The straight-A student was spotted this past Tuesday walking towards the ABC7 TV studio in Glendale by a woman, Rachelle, who recognized her from the missing poster.
Employees of a Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing to unaccompanied migrant children repeatedly subjected minors in its care to sexual abuse and harassment, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged in a new lawsuit.
From 2015 through at least the end of 2023, multiple employees at Southwest Key Programs, the country’s largest private provider of housing for unaccompanied children, subjected unaccompanied children in their care to “repeated and unwelcome sexual abuse, harassment, and misconduct,” the lawsuit said.
Minors housed in its shelters were subjected to severe sexual abuse and rape, solicitation of sex acts, solicitation of nude photos and entreaties for sexually inappropriate relationships, among other acts, according to the lawsuit.
The children range in age from as young as five years old to teenagers just shy of eighteen years old, and primarily come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Southwest Key employees allegedly discouraged children from reporting abuse, in some cases threatening them and their families, according to the lawsuit.
Our colleagues at National Missing and Exploited Children & NetSmartz Provide Some Easy Tips. Learn more here.
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law Assembly Bill 1955, a bill that takes the unprecedented and outrageous step of instructing school districts to lie to and keep secrets from parents about their own children.
Introduced by Assemblyman Chris Ward (D-San Diego), AB 1955 was pushed through the legislature as a “gut and amend” bill — outside of the normal legislative calendar — to invalidate the popular parental notification policies enacted by local school boards across the state. The policies require school administrators to inform parents if their child changes their name or gender on official school records.
Newsom’s new law does the opposite: It instructs school officials to lie to parents if their child changes their gender, name or pronouns at school. The governor’s action is a betrayal of the thousands of California parents and parent advocates who have spoken out against AB 1955 during the rushed committee hearings over the last several weeks.
“We are disappointed to see Gov. Gavin Newsom sign Assembly Bill 1955, legislation that unconstitutionally abrogates parental rights,” said Lance Christensen, Vice President of Education Policy and Government Affairs at California Policy Center. “Public schools are meant to support – not subvert – parents in their efforts to educate their children.”
Christensen warned that Newsom’s new “lie to parents” law violates federal law that guarantees parents’ right to access their children’s school records. He also advised districts against creating two sets of files for a student to keep parents in the dark.
“AB 1955 violates the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act which grants parents universal access to information about their child in their public school,” said Christensen. “Districts that create dummy files to ‘support’ a new gender identity for kids stand to lose federal funding.”
AB 1955 also opens the door to child exploitation. Creating a culture of secrecy from parents at school will lead to unsafe school environments where predators are able to more easily groom vulnerable children. Ward and other AB 1955 sponsors have disingenuously defended their bill as needed to protect students from “forced outing” to unaccepting and abusive parents.
“Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” Christensen said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”
| Our colleagues at the Parents Television and Media Council want all of to address this:
At the click of a button, 6-year-olds can be exposed to explicit sexual images, hundreds of jokes about m*sturb*tion, off-color references to genitalia, nonstop vulgar language, adults inciting sexual activity among children, and other offenses too disturbing to even mention. You’ll find all this filth—and more—in the Netflix cartoon Big Mouth. This animated series is a dangerous portal that exposes children to a dark world that no child should ever be exposed to. That’s why Jon Yasuda, PTC President is asking ALL of us to address this urgent request: Help Parents Television and Media Council (PTC) hold Netflix accountable for invading your home with Big Mouth! Today I am asking you to sign our petition to pressure U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate what I consider to be the criminal exploitation of America’s young. THANK YOU. #BeAWarrior
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Fairplay and the Phone-Free Schools Movement (“PFSM”) today announced a partnership aimed at helping K-12 students excel academically and socially by eliminating the harms and pressures caused by phones in schools.
The collaboration between Fairplay, the leading nonprofit committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture, and PFSM, the leaders of a growing movement to remove phones from the school day, is kicking off with the release today of the Phone-Free Schools Administrator Toolkit. This free toolkit is a comprehensive guide to help administrators transition to a phone-free environment for the entire school day.
Over the coming months, other offerings will emerge from the partnership, including a toolkit for “ambassadors” — community members who advocate for phone-free schools — and campaigns to aid educators and policymakers in making the change families are clamoring for.
The growing movement for phone-free schools has found that schools can reclaim the educational environment and eliminate the distractions and harms of phones in school, and educators and families are cheering the results.
Generative AI (GAI) has taken the world by storm. While it is undeniable that this innovative technology has benefits, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is deeply concerned about the dangers that GAI poses to the global fight for child safety.
In 2023, NCMEC’s CyberTipline received 4,700 reports related to Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) or sexually exploitative content that involved GAI technology (GAI CSAM). GAI CSAM portrays computer-generated children in graphic sexual acts and can be generated at will by the user of certain GAI platforms. GAI can also be utilized to create deepfake sexually explicit images and videos by using an innocent photograph of a real child to create a computer-generated one.
As if the creation of this imagery wasn’t terrible enough, NCMEC also has received reports where bad actors have tried to use this illegal GAI content to extort a child or their family for financial means. Furthermore, users of the technology to create this material have used the argument that, “At least I didn’t hurt a real child” and “It’s not actually a child…”
