SANTA ANA, CA — A Santa Ana man is behind bars, after police say he and an accomplice tried to kidnap a 15-year-old girl walking to school. Police are still searching for the alleged accomplice. It happened around 8:25 a.m. Wednesday as the girl was walking in the 1200 block of South Sullivan Street on her way to Valley High School.

A family doctor raped a vulnerable schoolgirl from the age of 10 after secretly medicating her with an anti-depressant, a court heard. Dr Stephen Hamilton, 45, from Altrincham, Greater Manchester, is alleged to have given the girl the drug citalopram before subjecting her to degrading sexual abuse. Manchester Crown Court heard how he would put his hands around the girl’s neck as he attacked her and told her ‘you deserve to die’. The historic offences are alleged to have occurred over two-and-a-half years between 2006 to 2009.

Katie Taylor was drugged and raped for two years – and endured pregnancy and abortion – after being abducted by a predatory gang aged 13. When the Rotherham child abuse scandal exploded last year the nation hoped that the sordid story was a horrifying one-off. But in the wake of the revelations came allegations of more Asian gangs sexually abusing white girls – some as young as 12 – in cities across the north of England. For Katie Taylor (not her real name), the sickening tales of sexual abuse came as no surprise, because as a 13-year-old, she too had been a victim of predatory gangs.

Child Abuse is defined as the mistreatment of children or minors, resulting in a variety of harmful and damaging results with regard to both the safety and wellbeing of the victim. Child abuse can range in the details and circumstances in which the offense takes place; child abuse can take place in a direct, physical fashion, which includes attacks and sexual assault – however, child abuse can take place verbally and psychologically. Regardless of the nature of the child abuse offense, results of this kind of abuse may result in negative aftereffects, both short-term and long-term in nature; a wide variety of Facts About Child Abuse exist, which state that victims of child abuse are prone to physical injury, bodily harm, the development of mental and psychological disorders, and in certain cases – death.

Police in Plaquemines Parish have arrested a man for allegedly having sex with his teenage daughter. “Sheriff Lonnie Greco announces the arrest of a 37-year-old father for having sexual intercourse with his 16-year-old daughter,” Commander Eric Becnel said in a news release. “Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office 1st District Patrol Division responded to an incest complaint in Belle Chasse. Upon arrival, responding deputies learned that a 37-year-old father had been coercing his 16-year-old daughter to have sexual intercourse with him for the past year.” Becnel says that the father got the daughter drunk and had sex with her on multiple occasions.

Federal authorities tracked down Eric Toth – a 31-year-old former elementary schoolteacher convicted of producing child pornography – to Nicaragua and extradited him to the U.S. for trial. According to The Washington Post, Toth had fled authorities back in 2008, after officials at the Washington National Cathedral’s Beauvoir elementary school found disturbing footage of his students on a camera that had been assigned to him from the school.

Defense lawyers for a doctor accused of killing four babies in a Philadelphia abortion clinic by snipping their spines have rested their case without calling a single witness. The high-profile murder trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, has been underway for almost six weeks, during which time the jury has heard from a plethora of former employees who have shared startling stories of the practices they allegedly witnessed. He is charged with killing four infants during botched abortions as well as a 41-year-old woman who died of an overdose after the procedure at his Women’s Medical Society clinic in urban West Philadelphia. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

PONTIAC, Mich. – Sandra Layne, the 75-year-old Detroit-area woman convicted of murder in the fatal shooting of her teenage grandson, was sentenced to at least 22 years in prison Thursday, despite a plea from her lawyer that she may not survive a long stay. Layne got a minimum sentence of 20 years for second-degree murder, along with a mandatory two-year sentence for using a gun to kill 17-year-old Jonathan Hoffman.

ESCANABA, MI — A 15-year-old boy was kept inside a home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for four years, rarely leaving a room made from tarps while being tortured and abused, police said Thursday. The teen’s mother and her boyfriend were arrested last week and are in the Delta County jail, charged with torture, child abuse and criminal sexual conduct, Escanaba police Capt. Jamie Segorski said.

Educating young people about traditional “stranger danger” is failing to equip them for new “emerging threats” on social networking sites and through phenomena such as “sexting” or cyberbullying, it warns. Meanwhile the report, billed as the comprehensive study of risks to children in the UK, also warns only a small a fraction of abuse or neglect in the home is being detected. Only around one in nine of the estimated 520,000 children mistreated in their own home every year is under formal protection plans by their local authority, the charity calculates. Even on official figures, children are twice as likely to suffer mistreatment in the home than outside, but the report concludes that abuse is “more often than not undetected”.

A Kenner man has been arrested and booked with aggravated incest and molestation for allegedly raping two of his stepdaughters and fathering at least five children with the girls.NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune is not identifying the 51-year-old suspect to protect the identities of the victims, who are now 22 and 26, according to Sgt. Brian McGregor, spokesman for the Kenner Police. The sisters contacted authorities in early March to report the more than 13 years of abuse. The oldest victim told investigators she was 13 when her stepfather began raping her, McGregor said. The youngest girl was 9 years old.

A former New York City high school librarian and a Department of Veterans Affairs police chief from Massachusetts are accused in a plot to kidnap and torture women with tools including a taser, a meat hammer, pliers and speculums, officials announced Monday. The librarian, Robert Christopher Asch, used to work at Stuyvesant High School, officials said. The other man, Richard Meltz, is the chief of police at the Bedford VA Medical Center. The FBI says the men responded last October to online solicitations. A man said he wanted help him kidnap, rape and kill his wife and sister-in-law and her children. Federal prosecutors say Asch met with undercover FBI agents several times in recent months to carry out what he thought was a plan to kidnap and torture a woman, and twice brought a bag of items he thought would be useful, including a black ski mask, a taser, handcuffs, a hammer, pliers, and forceps.

Some journalists are asking why the murder trial of a Philadelphia abortion doctor isn’t receiving more coverage. In 2010, police raided Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic, called the Women’s Medical Society, in a low-income neighborhood of West Philadelphia and found what a grand jury report called a “baby charnel house” where illegal and late-term abortions were performed under dangerous conditions. Now on trial, Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one patient and seven babies allegedly born alive during abortion procedures; eight former employees — none of whom were certified doctors — may also face prison time.

In November 2005 a South African-born United States citizen, Lauren Mummy (37), was trampled to death by an elephant in a Limpopo game park. A diary she left behind – discovered in a dusty bag 18 months later, with claims of rape and incest – has triggered a feud between her South African and American families so bitter that it has taken a US appellate court to end it. Last month, the California Court of Appeal ordered that Mummy’s South African parents, Ivor and Joan Jacobson, be barred from visiting their grandchildren, aged nine and 13, for whom they are also co-trustees.