15-year-old British schoolgirl Megan Stammers, reported missing on 21 September, was located by French authorities this Friday strolling arm in arm with lover Jeremy Forrest, her 30-year-old married math teacher. The unwitting pair were traipsing the Rue Sainte-Catherine, Bordeaux’s prime shopping district, when they were apprehended at 11:15pm French time. Their brewing, months-long romance was evidenced over Twitter, fervent text messages to one another and fellow students’ testimonies after the two had been spotted holding hands on the flight home from a school trip to Los Angeles in February.

“I just want to runaway forever,” Megan had tweeted in late June.

“Me & you Let’s just run away,” Forrest had responded. And on July 1: “I want to go everywhere with you baby; for the record you never look anything less than absolutely beautiful.”

According to the Daily Mail, Megan had used her 37-year-old mother’s passport to make the ferry crossing from the UK to France incognito. A distraught Megan was taken into protective custody; meanwhile, Mr. Forrest, an amateur musician who taught at the Bishop Bell School in Eastbourne, UK, has been arrested for “the taking of a minor against her parents’ will,” French judicial authorities confirm.

Megan’s parents rally for her return

Megan’s parents reported her missing when she failed to appear at school last Friday. As Sussex Police scoured for clues to Megan’s whereabouts, a CCTV recording surfaced showing Megan and Mr. Forrest holding hands while boarding a ferry destined from Dover to Calais at 9:20pm BST on Thursday.

“Megan was last seen wearing a white vest top and a silver necklace,” said a post on her website, www.meganstammers.com, which her panic-stricken parents had dedicated to her search. The CCTV images were released to the French Missing Persons Bureau and circulated in European media. A dedicated Twitter and Facebook account was also set up, garnering followers in the thousands. Another to-watch signpost was Forrest’s black Ford Fiesta, which the fugitive duo were said to have boarded the ferry with.

Four witnesses had reported sighting the illicit couple this week, the most recent tip-off coming 48 hours prior to their apprehension. Forrest, it was revealed, had been seeking job vacancies at bars in the days before his arrest. Aside from a single text message to a friend last Friday, informing that she and Forrest had reached France safely, Megan had remained silent in the face of her and even Forrest’s parents’ desperate appeals for them to come home. Forrest’s job-seeking further indicates that the pair had every intention of starting a new life in France as a couple.

The allegations of their hand-holding during a school trip came just three months shy of Forrest’s first wedding anniversary to wife Emily Forrest, who has kept silent regarding the debacle. On 27 September, two days before his arrest, her runaway husband updated his Facebook relationship status from “Married” to “It’s complicated”.

Though there has been no evidence of a sexual liaison, one of Megan’s peers confided to the Daily Mail: “They would always text each other. He would send her messages saying things like ‘I miss you’ and ‘I can’t wait to hug you’. She would tweet about being in love and show us his texts.”

The impact on child protection

Bishop Bell’s staff had long been cognizant of the budding teacher-pupil romance, and child protection campaigner Lucy Duckworth from the National Association for People Abused in Childhood had written the school several times, requesting to see its child protection policy. The reception, she said, was “extremely hostile.” What’s more, the school had not informed Megan’s parents of the county council’s ongoing investigations into their daughter’s relationship with a man twice her age before her disappearance.

Child protection campaigners have called for the suspension of Bishop Bell’s head teacher, Terry Boatwright, for failing to act when fellow students first reported Megan’s out-of-line relations with her math teacher. “Policies are still not in place to foster a culture where safeguarding is a priority – as it should be in any institution where adults act in loco parentis,” Duckworth told the BBC.

An unapologetic Boatwright insists, “Bishop Bell School has a robust safeguarding policy in place,” citing its “outstanding” rating by Ofsted, the UK’s official government body for school inspection.

Too relieved to leave room for fury, Megan’s birth father, Barry Wratten, 41, said in a statement, “The past week has been absolutely terrible. I’m not angry with her at all – we all do silly things when we are young without thinking about the consequences.”

Megan flew home to the UK on Saturday afternoon to her overjoyed parents.

Image Courtesy of  MeganStammers.com

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San Diego, U.S.A – The subject of pornography is not a common topic of conversation in the K-12 industry, but Gaggle is changing that at ISTE (National Educational Computing Conference) 2012 with talk of their Anti-Pornography Scanner (APS). The APS is a sophisticated tool used to detect pornography in electronic communications and on websites. The scanner looks at embedded and attached images and URL’s to determine whether an image is pornographic. In 2010, Gaggle set out on a major effort to improve the accuracy of the APS and reduce the incidents of false positive results.

Gaggle offers the highest degree of CIPA compliance of any collaboration tools provider and is the only system that meets the CIPA requirement to block “visual depictions that are obscene; child pornography; or are harmful to minors.”  With the sophistication of the APS, Gaggle is able to weed out the majority of the offensive material that is shared peer-to-peer. This enables students to focus more on their class work using the tools within the Gaggle system.

Just over half of the current Gaggle student users are between the ages of eleven to fifteen, and unfortunately there is sharing of inappropriate content between these users. Gaggle Senior Software Engineer, Jeremy Loss says, “At Gaggle, we have our finger on the pulse of the K12 market and what they are sharing. We are constantly filtering millions of images and with that we are able to define inappropriate content in this domain.”

Gaggle developers are now working to refine the filtering of mirror shots, personal photographs taken by cell phone camera in a mirror. These pictures, referred to as “sexting” are often taken in an inappropriate context and shared between young adults. This type of behavior may be inevitable, but the Gaggle APS is constantly evolving to improve cyber safety, protect students from bad decisions, and help them learn to be a good digital citizen.

“Computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and creating software that does something as intuitive as detecting inappropriate content is a great challenge,” explains Jeremy. “The combination of sophisticated technology and Gaggle’s decades of experience with K-12 has allowed us to create something that can contribute enormously to providing a safe environment for learning.”

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The attorneys for Dinizulu Law Group on Tuesday filed litigation on behalf of the victim in a 1997 molestation investigation in which the 11-year-old girl’s attacker went free, because Harvey, Illinois, police failed to submit the rape kit to the state crime lab for testing.

As a result, the accused, Robert Buchanan, who was working as a Cook County corrections officer at the time, returned to the family home and continued the abuse. He was subsequently charged in the attack last fall after the rape kit – discovered with some 200 untested rape kits at the Harvey police station during a raid by law-enforcement in 2007 – provided overwhelmingly evidence of his guilt.

The victim, now 25, is seeking unspecified damages in a seven-count lawsuit that names Buchanan and the City of Harvey. Specifically, the complaint accuses Harvey officials of failing to protect her rights under the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986; infliction of emotional distress; willful and wanton neglect; and fraudulent concealment.

After telling her mother of the abuse, the victim was examined that same day at a local hospital. Doctors followed protocol, collecting DNA samples for the Illinois State Police Sexual Assault Evidence Kit and handing it off to Harvey police. The victim was notified by an investigator for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office last spring that the kit was never tested.

“After being failed at home, this young woman should have been able to trust that local police would follow through with their most basic levels of investigation,” said her attorney, Yao Dinizulu. “The abuse could have ended there had police done their jobs. There is a pattern of gross negligence in the City of Harvey that has led to the suffering of countless other victims. We’re asking a jury to send a strong message that such egregious malfeasance won’t be tolerated.”

The victim is identified in court documents as “Jane Doe” to shield her identity. She has been diagnosed with suppressed memories and is currently receiving therapy, Dinizulu said.

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The upcoming election in New South Wales (NSW) Australia is set to be a memorable one, with many of the polls predicting a Liberal government will be in power for the first time in decades.

Current Labor Premier Kristina Kinneally has been campaigning in a series of interviews, advertisements and public policy announcements.

Opposition Liberal leader Barry O’Farrell has recently received positive publicity from two high profile charities in NSW with an announcement that a Coalition government would begin policies to bring children out of care homes.

Ms Jane Woodruff CEO of UnitingCare Burnside said that the removal of children from their homes can often be highly traumatic.

“We welcome an approach that aims to work closely with families to reduce
the number of children in care.

“It is important, however, that policy changes do not provide any obstacles to
removing those children in need of care and protection. Any child that needs
to be removed from their home should be – that is not negotiable,” Ms
Woodruff said.

The Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies (ACWA) also expressed its strong support for the proposed policy changes.

ACWA CEO Andrew McCallum said that reducing the number of children in care should be a priority for the government.

“Reform in this area is long overdue.

“Increasing the non-government sector’s role in service delivery, combined with a significant investment in prevention and early intervention services, will go a long way to  breaking the cycle of child abuse and neglect in our community and ensuring that removing a child from their family remains a solution of last resort.”

The election will be decided in NSW at the end of March.

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