If a person has reasonable grounds to suspect that a child is or may be in need of protection, a report must be promptly made and shall include the information upon which it is based. You do not need to be sure that a child is or may be in need of protection to make a report to the Agency. “Reasonable grounds” are what an average person, given his or her training, experience, exercising normal and honest judgment would suspect. Once a report is made to the Agency, a determination will be made as to whether a protection investigation will be commenced. The person making the initial report should bear in mind that the duty to report is an ongoing obligation.

A five-year-old boy has been beaten to death and his mother and her boyfriend arrested for murder, authorities said. Dashawn Harris was discovered by police in the early hours of Saturday, his body covered with bruises, cigarette burns and belt marks. The child’s mother Lashay Patterson, 23, and her 25-year-old boyfriend Christian Patrick were charged with murder in Philadelphia a few hours later.

A teaching assistant who had sex with teenage boys after grooming them on Facebook and bombarding them with illicit text messages was today jailed for 32 months. Mother-of-two Emma Webb, 42, performed sex acts on four boys, with a fifth groomed via “sexual texting”, which included sending him photographs of her. She preyed on the boys, aged 15 to 17, performing sex acts at locations including a school’s premises, public woodland and her home in Berkshire, while her husband and children were out, Reading Crown Court heard.

An 11-year-old British girl was allegedly pimped out as a prostitute by her ex-pat parents for £12 a time. Police arrested the couple on the holiday island of Majorca amid claims they sold the girl, now 15, to a 76-year-old man in exchange for money over a five-year period. It is understood the mother took her daughter to meet the man on each occasion, with amounts changing hands varying between £12 and £16, according to The Sun.

Arizona police are desperately searching for an 11-year-old leukemia patient who was taken from a Phoenix hospital by her mother a day before she was scheduled to be discharged. According to AZ Central, authorities are concerned about the child’s welfare as they fear that a catheter in her heart could soon become infected and endanger her life. “We have been informed by medical personnel if the catheter is not medically removed the victim’s heart could potentially become infected resulting in the child’s death,” police spokesman Steve Martos told the news website.

A Detroit father who covered up beating his daughter to death by claiming she had been abducted in a carjacking has been sentenced to life behind bars – while repeatedly insisting that she’s still alive. D’Andre Lane, 33, denied abusing and killing two-year-old Bianca Jones for wetting herself, and said there was no evidence of the charges against him. Authorities launched a massive search for the youngster last December after her father said he was forced out of his car at gunpoint, while the little girl remained in the back seat. The vehicle was found less than an hour later with its doors open and engine running, but the girl had gone.

NEWPORT BEACH — A Costa Mesa man has been arrested on charges of having inappropriate sexual relationships with young boys that spanned more than a decade. Christopher Bryan McKenzie, 48, was booked into an Orange County jail on Friday on charges of lewd and lascivious acts with a child.

CIRCLEVILLE – The man accused of murder in the shaking death of 10-month-old Kyle Calton of Laurelville has reportedly been captured by the U.S. Marshal Service in Sacramento, Calif., according to Dwight E. Radcliff, Pickaway County Sheriff. Wayne “Wolf” Walker, 44, is now in the custody of the Marshal Service, and the Pickaway County Sheriff’s Office is awaiting word on when he will be returned to Circleville to face the murder charge.

A nineteen-year-old cold case has a surprising breakthrough. In Port Salerno, Florida, Chester Duane Price, 42, has been arrested and indicted for the missing person’s case of 10-year-old Andrea Parsons who went missing nineteen years ago during July of 1993.

A Chicago grandmother has been accused of beating, burning and biting her two grandchildren, aged five and six, and forcing them to eat cat food – four years after the kids were removed from the care of their abusive mother. Goldine Williams, 47, was arrested in Thursday and ordered held in lieu of $200,000 bond on charges of aggravated battery to a child. According to a police report, Williams hit the six-year-old boy with a plastic sword from his Halloween costume, lashed him with an extension cord and burned him with a hair iron all over his body.

Disturbing details of the bed polygamist Warren Jeffs ordered to be specially made for the purpose of sexually assaulting hundreds of young girls were outlined in pages of a diary he referred to as ‘priesthood records’. He told his followers the bed must be made of hardwood, sturdy so it wouldn’t rattle, long enough to hold his frame and covered with a plastic sheet to ‘protect the mattress from what will happen on it’. Prosecutors read out excerpts from the diaries on Wednesday as part of an attempt by the State of Texas to seize the multimillion dollar ranch owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

By the time she was 12, Rachael*, now 44, had been sexually abused repeatedly by two men. But when she tried to tell her parents, they didn’t believe her. Here she tells her shocking story. I’m the youngest of four children and I was always ‘Daddy’s special girl’. There’s a six-year gap between me and my brother Robert, who is number three, so I really was the baby. My late father was a sergeant in the RAF. He was a drinker who didn’t contribute to the housekeeping, a very angry man who beat me for misdemeanors such as wandering outside my designated play area, and he regularly hit my mum. But I loved him in spite of everything. When he wasn’t around, I used to pine for him. He was the only one who ever bought me sweets. Dad could be very caring and loving, but he was unpredictable.

Canton, Ohio – William Bailey, a 43-year-old Ohio man, was sentenced to a month in jail Tuesday after he was found guilty of harassing a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy by imitating the way she walks. According to police, an investigation was launched in September of this year after Bailey was caught on video taunting the girl at a bus stop.

A longtime elementary school teacher whose repeated sexual encounters with a 12-year-old student came to light following a high-speed chase in which she let the boy drive her SUV was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison. Lucinda Rodriguez Caldwell, 41, choked back sobs as she was placed in handcuffs after asking state District Judge Lori Valenzuela for probation.