The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action “incomprehensible,” and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list — that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists — were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

But NCDP leader Yiannis Vardakastanis, who is blind, warned the new list could create new difficulties for disabled Greeks who are already facing benefit cuts due to the country’s financial crisis.

“What’s happened is incomprehensible. I think there is some big mistake. The ministry should have a different policy on disability,” Vardakastanis told the Associated Press. “The list contains major changes to disability quotients, which could effectively remove many people from access to benefits.”

The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.

“It’s really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day,” said Vardakastanis.

Greece has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy since 2009. Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency.

Independently run welfare programs that survived on state grants have been the hardest hit, leaving some disabled groups, including the deaf, facing sudden drops in their standard of care.

The government is also battling widespread abuse in the welfare system, forcing tens of thousands of disabled people to be reassessed.

Source: AP

The defendants reportedly took sexually explicit photos of a child under age 12.

Two Valrico residents are facing multiple counts of child abuse, possession of pornography, sexual battery and other charges for photographing a child in sexual poses.

Charged are Elizabeth Wirick, 46, of 3320 Stonebridge Trail, in River Hills, Valrico, and Richard James Piccoli, 58, of the same address.According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, on Tuesday, Jan. 17, a witness delivered a USB drive to the sheriff’s office that contained images recovered from Wirick and Piccoli’s laptop.

The USB drive contained 22 images depicting a child under age 12 engaging in sexual conduct and sexually explicit poses. The sheriff’s office said, in four of the images, the defendants induced the victim to engage in a sexual performance.

The sheriff’s office said these incidents occurred on two separate dates.

In three images, the sheriff’s office said Wirick forced or enticed the victim to touch her breast in a lewd manner.

In six images, the victim is posed next to the defendants with an adult sex toy. The images also show the victim using the sex toy on herself. The sheriff’s office said Wirick performed sexual activities with the victim while Piccoli posed in the photos with Wirick and the victim.

The offenses reported took place at the defendants’ home.

Wirick is charged with 22 counts of using a child in sexual performances, two counts of child abuse, three counts of lewd molestation, six counts of attempted capital sexual battery and two counts of lewd exhibition.

Piccoli is charged with 22 counts of possession of child pornography, four counts of using a child in a sexual performance and two counts of child abuse.

This isn’t Wirick’s first run-in with the law. She was arrested in 2006 for possession of cocaine and driving under the influence with property damage. She was arrested again in 2007 for DUI with property damage or injuries.

Piccoli has arrests dating back to 1999 for grand theft and felony petit theft.

Source: Bloomingdale Riverview Patch

Two British soldiers have been arrested and questioned over allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” in Afghanistan, the UK’s Ministry of Defence announced after a newspaper described their alleged abuse of two 10-year-old boys.

Quoting defence sources, The Sun newspaper reported on Wednesday that a sergeant and a private from the Mercian Battle Group had recorded their abuse of the children on video and showed it to other soldiers on laptops.Military police launched an investigation into allegations against the two soldiers, a ministry spokesperson said, but declined to comment on the nature of the allegations.

“Two service personnel have been arrested, interviewed under caution and released,” the spokesperson said, adding that the ministry took any such allegations extremely seriously.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office responded in a written statement, saying that the government in Kabul was “deeply disturbed” by the reports and that the alleged behaviour was “immoral”.

“The government of Afghanistan is immensely disgusted by the rise in recent incidents of immoral nature among foreign soldiers that clearly undermine public confidence and the Afghan people’s co-operation with foreign troops,” Karzai’s office said.

The statement said the government was “deeply disturbed by reports that two British soldiers have encouraged two Afghan children to touch them through their clothes”.

‘Moral standards’

A spokesperson for the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan said they were aware of the allegations.

“We expect members of all ISAF troop-contributing nations to adhere to the highest standards of military service,”
Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, spokesperson for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said.

“An investigation has been launched, and if a service member is found to have committed an offence, or behaved in a manner not in keeping with the appropriate moral standards expected of them, they will be dealt with appropriately through the respective nation’s military judicial system.”

The arrests come just a week after a video emerged showing US Marines urinating on corpses, believed to be dead Taliban fighters, in Afghanistan.

The tape of the Marines also prompted reference to earlier scandals involving US soldiers’ treatment of prisoners in Iraq and the killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.

The US military has been prosecuting soldiers from the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade on charges of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed in Kandahar province in 2010.

Britain has about 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, mainly based in the country’s Helmand province. Britain says that it intends to pull out all its combat troops by 2015.

Source: Aljazeera

As reported by the Associated Press, disability groups in the country were especially outraged over the government’s decision to add pedophiles to its list of those the state recognizes as disabled individuals.

Among the other “disabled” categories added to the list were exhibitionists, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists, and sadomasochists.Greece’s Labor Ministry explained that the new “disabilities” were added for medical assessment and to determine who would receive financial assistance from the government.

But Greece’s National Confederation of Disabled People (NCDP) “called the action ‘incomprehensible,’” reported the AP, “and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.”

The additions to the government dole come as Greece is drowning in debt and attempting to stay afloat in an imploding economy. “Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency,” reported the AP.

The updated listing left the NCDP’s head, Yiannis Vardakastanis, wondering if the Greek government could be serious in its intention to grant “peeping toms a 20 to 30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day.” She noted that the new listing “gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.”

The fact that a socialist nation such as Greece would expand entitlements to whole new “victim” classes is not surprising. But that it would consider “disabled” those individuals whom society has heretofore considered merely criminal is noteworthy.

Becket Adams of TheBlaze.com suggested that instead of trying to do any more to salvage the sinking ship that is Greece, the other nations of the European Union should simply jump ship and try to save their own skins. “When it gets to the point where child molesters, pyromaniacs, and sadomasochists are all standing in the same line waiting to collect disability checks, it’s already over,” wrote Becket. “It’s going to take a lot more than austerity measures to save Greece; its problems are much deeper than that.”

Currently Greece’s national debt hovers at more than $445 billion, and in order to receive its next $165-billion bailout check from the EU and the International Monetary Fund, it has had to promise to cut spending to a bare minimum. That bare-bones budget will apparently now include a monthly disability check to pedophiles and other erstwhile Greek criminals.

Writing on FrontPageMag.com, Arnold Alhert noted that the United States is the largest contributor to the IMF, kicking in 17 percent of its budget. And, wrote Alhert, “while bills to defund our $100 billion contribution are working their way through both houses of Congress, it is more likely that only additional funding in 2012 will be prevented.”

With the United States so inextricably committed to bailing out insolvent EU nations like Greece, Alhert wonders if “American taxpayers might someday be underwriting Greek pedophiles.”

For those Americans prone to cluck their tongues over the reprobate depths to which Greece has apparently plunged, America is not far behind. As reported by The New American, at an August 17, 2011 conference in Baltimore sponsored by the pedophile-friendly organization B4U-ACT, a group of mental health professionals and sympathetic activists discussed what might be done to remove pedophilia from the mental illnesses listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

As reported by LifeSite News, on its own website “B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the ‘stigma’ attached to pedophilia, observing: ‘No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.’ The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents.”

Might pedophilia make it on to the list defining Americans With Disabilities? Don’t be too quick to dismiss such a possibility. Alhert charted the line of thinking that turns a mental illness — or criminal inclination — into a justification for entitlement, noting that “for progressives, the term ‘lifestyle choice’ becomes a viable substitute for moral depravity. And once ‘criminals’ become ‘victims,’ we are well along the path to where such victims eventually become ‘disabled.’”

Source: The New American

Experts say siblings of abusers cannot escape their relatives horrific actions

Lauren Book says that when she was sexually abused as a child by her family’s nanny — from the time she was 11 until 17 — she was too fearful to tell her parents and younger sister and brother.

“I knew what was happening was wrong. But I didn’t know how to stop it,” says Book, 27. “Who would believe me?”Now an advocate for sexual abuse victims and the founder of the Lauren’s Kids Foundation, which raises awareness of the issue and provides education tools for prevention, Book says that her siblings continue to suffer from the fallout of learning about her abuse.

Book says she sympathizes with the children of Baseball Hall of Fame writer Bill Conlin, who has been accused of molesting his children’s friends and other kids during the 1970s. Book says that in many of these cases, it is not at all uncommon for children on both sides — children of the alleged abuser and the victims themselves — to forever be scarred by the acts of a pedophile.

“I’ve come across several cases of men or women who will not assault their own children, but will have children bring friends over so they can molest them,” Book says. “That’s the pathology of a child molester. The entire family system suffers as a result.”

Conlin, 77, retired from his long-time Philadelphia Daily News columnist position on Tuesday, hours before a Philadelphia Inquirer story detailed the allegations of four alleged victims of Conlin, including his niece. Two of the alleged victims, brother and sister Kevin and Karen Healey, were friends of Conlin’s children. Two more alleged victims have come forward to accuse Conlin.

Two experts in sex abuse cases told the Daily News that children of abusers cannot escape the stigma of the horrific actions carried out by their relatives.

“It’s devastating. We talk about secondary or associate victims. You have the offender and the primary victim. The members of families on both sides are also victims,” said Gary Schoener, a clinical psychologist and the director of consultation and training at the Walk-In Counseling Center in Minneapolis. “Kids (of pedophiles) feel ashamed. Their friends trash them. Sex crimes are seen by many people as worse than murder, and the idea that your parent is the worst form of life can be devastating.”

John Giugliano is a clinical social worker specializing in early childhood trauma and has his own private practice in Philadelphia. Giugliano says that sexual abuse is “very divisive” for the families of abusers. In cases of incest — when the victim is a member of the abuser’s family — family members have torn loyalties between the abuser and the victim. Pedophiles can be very charming people.

“Some people blame the child for ruining their family if they come forward,” Giugliano said.

Lauren Book’s father, Ronald, says that while their nanny abused only Lauren, his middle and youngest children continue to deal with an “inherited bundle of baggage.” His daughter has battled eating disorders and self-mutilation, while his son has had numerous personal issues. The nanny, Waldina Flores, is serving a 25-year sentence in Florida state prison for sexual battery.

“The whole family unit suffers,” Ronald Book says.

Source: NY Daily News

Stepfather Mark Thomas and his brother Paul were each jailed for 18 years yesterday after being convicted of a catalogue of sex crimes against two youngsters.

They are being identified thanks to the bravery of the victims, Mark Thomas’ step-children, who wanted their abusers names publicised – at the risk of revealing their own identities – in case anyone else has suffered at their hands.

The brothers systematically raped and abused the youngsters from the ages of four and five years old.

The stepchildren – a boy, now 15, and his 16-year-old sister – yesterday said their abusers had robbed them of “any semblance of a normal childhood”.

The teenage girl said: “They imprisoned us in our bedrooms and now they’re having a taste of their own medicine.

“We’d like to thank our foster parents, who have been very special in our lives, for all their love and support through some very difficult years.”

At the hearing yesterday, the children’s birth mother, Alyson Mepham, was also jailed for two-and-a-half years after admitting cruelty by neglect.

Leicester Crown Court was told that as youngsters, the brother and sister were starved, beaten and sexually abused on a weekly basis, and trapped in a squalid bedroom with no lighting at their then-home in Ibstock, north west Leicestershire.

The “fear and cruelty” started in 1999 and continued until 2002, despite social services knowing of their plight, the court was told.

They were finally taken into care in 2002.

Sentencing, Judge Simon Hammond said: “These children were grossly neglected.

“They were shown no love and affection. The house was filthy, they were locked in their bedrooms and had to urinate on the floor.

“They were kept hungry, sworn at, slapped, suffered chronic head lice, were inappropriately dressed and had a difficult time at school.

“They had their innocence stripped from them.”

Judge Hammond praised the dignity and courage of the victims – who were in court for the sentencing – and their foster parents, whom he described as “saints”.

He said of the Thomas brothers: “They’re wicked men who shared these children over three or four years, abusing them for their sexual gratification.”

He said Mepham ran a “cruel and oppressive regime,” favouring three other younger children she had with then-partner Mark Thomas over the two victims from a former relationship.

Mepham (40), of Seagrave Close, Coalville, gripped on to a glass panel in the dock with one hand, clasped a handkerchief in the other and bowed her head as she was sentenced.

Mark Thomas (46), of North Marine Road, Scarborough, North Yorkshire, and Paul Thomas, of Jersey Road, Mowmacre Hill, Leicester, (42), showed no emotion.

Both men, who had denied rape and sexual assault, were banned from ever working with children, ordered to enlist on a sex offenders’ register for life and made the subject of an indeterminate sexual offences prevention order.

Mark Thomas admitted cruelty towards his two step-children at an earlier hearing.

Judge Hammond said: “I hope now these victims have been believed they can move on with their lives. I’m pleased they’re now in a home where they can be loved and appreciated.

“Their foster parents have given them the security, love and affection they needed.”

Adrienne Lucking, in mitigation for Mark Thomas, said there had been no further reoffending and he had suffered from mental health problems.

Felicity Gerry, for Paul Thomas, said he was not parentally responsible for the children and not involved in the cruel treatment.

Jonathan Bertram, for Mepham, said, unlike her co-accused, she pleaded guilty to neglect, sparing the victims from giving evidence against her involvement.

Speaking afterwards, Detective Constable Andy Spence said: “We have released the pictures in the hope of reaching out to any other victims of the pair that may be out there.

“They lived in various parts of the UK and, although we hope that there are no other victims, we’ve issued these photos in the hope of encouraging others to come forward.”

Source: Leicestershire

Schober, a pediatric urologist at UPMC Hamot, said she expected more oversight at a large university like Penn State, where retired assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year period.

“What you see happening at Penn State gives you a sense of institutional disrespect,” Schober said. “It comes down to money, power and valuing sports programs over the victims.”

It reminded Schober of the way the Catholic Church responded about a decade ago when some of its priests were accused of molesting children.

The Penn State scandal also confirmed what Schober has believed for years: There isn’t a good system for reporting suspected cases of child molestation.

“It’s just not well-defined. People don’t know where to go to report something,” Schober said. “Say a family doctor calls me to say a patient’s mother has told him about a suspicious circumstance, but the mother didn’t want the police to get involved at that moment. What does the doctor do?”

Schober knows how to treat pedophiles to reduce their risk to children.

Since 1999, she has been giving a small group of admitted pedophiles Lupron. It’s a prostate-cancer drug that lowers a man’s testosterone levels and decreases his sex drive to almost nothing.

“We know that there isn’t a cure for pedophilia,” Schober said. “There are things we can do to modify their sex drive, so they don’t have the desire to molest children.”

A study Schober and her research team did from 1999 to 2001 with five pedophiles drew worldwide attention.

She traveled to Rome in 2006 to speak with Vatican officials about the treatment, and she worked with officials in Germany to establish a protocol based on her study.

Schober continues to treat some of the pedophiles who participated in the study, which ran from 1999 to 2001. Funding problems prevent more pedophiles from receiving the treatment, she said.

“A six-month Lupron injection costs about $2,000, and many pedophiles don’t even have health coverage,” Schober said. “Funding for treatment is extremely difficult to come by.”

Schober talked with the Erie Times-News about how the pedophiles she treats have responded to the Penn State scandal, and why she believes pedophilia is not a mental illness.

Q) What has been the reaction among the men you treat to what has happened at Penn State?

“They all got incredibly fearful. They fear being identified, blamed and ostracized by the community. The ones who have been arrested fear being arrested again.”

Q) The men you treat with Lupron have volunteered for it. Why would someone agree to be chemically castrated?

“It’s such a relief for them to not have that constant compulsion. They feel more relaxed about the rest of their lives. For them, pedophilia is something that doesn’t ever stop. It makes it hard for them to focus on the other aspects of their lives.”

Q) Is pedophilia a mental illness?

“No. It’s a biological orientation, like heterosexuality, homosexuality, even bestiality. The majority of pedophiles simply aren’t oriented to other adults, either men or women. … They can try to suppress it and keep suppressing it, until they can’t any longer.”

Q) Why are the parents and family members of molested children sometimes reluctant to tell authorities about what is happening?

“The first fear is that if they call police, someone will come to the home to investigate, and possibly they themselves will be implicated. The second fear is that the child will be taken out of the home. The third fear is that they will be publicly recognized as an insufficient parent.”

Source: GoErie

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the horrors and damage caused by sex offenders. And it’s hard to talk about the facts of any criminal behavior since misinformation is common and ideas contrary to misinformation are quickly associated as soft on crime. The nuances of any criminal behavior are complicated.
A lot of sex offenses involve an over consumption of alcohol resulting in sexual assault and other inappropriate behaviors that have nothing to do with children. However, concerning children, we should not worry about sex offenders as a broad category; we need to worry specifically about pedophiles. Pedophiles are a certain type of sex offender.

Pedophilia is a specific mental disorder classified in the DSM, and to be clear, acting on impulses is also a crime. Pedophiles have a sexual interest in children; most, but not all, act on this interest but for those who do, it is serious crime. Not all sex offenders are pedophiles, however, by definition all pedophiles who act on their sexual interest in children are sex offenders and criminals.

Since experts estimate that only 1 in 20 cases of child sexual abuse is reported, the implication is that there are a sizable number of sex offenses and therefore sex offenders out there who are going unpunished. With this in mind it is very important: that a child knows 1) what constitutes inappropriate contact (something called “good touch, bad touch” training); 2) to say no when boundaries are crossed; 3) to report inappropriate contact to a parent and other trusted persons; and 4) that the child has done nothing wrong and should be praised for being brave enough to put aside the stigma wrongly associated with being a victim.

Also, sex offenders try to find children on the Internet; kids need to be made aware of risks and parents need to monitor activity.

Most internet sex offenders target teens, not children. With this in mind, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has several resources to reduce this risk, as does the Crimes Against Children Research Center. But most is not all, so we cannot stop there.

A total of 60 to 70 percent of sex offenses on children are done by acquaintances of the child. With this in mind, an effective strategy would begin by addressing this huge proportion of victims. It should also be made clear to the child that inappropriate contact can come from strangers or from someone known and trusted by the child. It is extremely important to let the child know that anything that happens to them is not their fault; that they have done nothing wrong; and they are not going to get in trouble for reporting any and all inappropriate contact.

Since 30 to 40 percent of victims are not an acquaintance of the offender, another extremely important thing that can be done is for parents to educate their children about the risks associated with strangers and how to be smart while alone. But more importantly, according to missingkids.com, or StopItNow.org, there are several things that parents can and should do to keep their children safe.

Kids don’t come with instruction manuals. Parents and caregivers need to be taught what symptoms to look for that indicate abuse.

It is important to know what works and what doesn’t in keeping children safe. For example, the program “Stranger Danger” has been found to be ineffective and, consequently, is a false sense of security. Since most sex offenses on children are done by people they know, “Child Safety Zones” and even sex offender community notification laws are also a false sense of security.

As awful as high profile examples sex abuse cases are, such as Jaycee Dugard or Elizabeth Smart, it is important to remember that high profile events are high profile precisely because they are unusual and unlikely. Making policy based on high profile events is a surefire way to overreact and make inefficient and, worse, ineffective policy.

A high profile event is good time find out where a shortcoming of a policy or a failure of a policy might reside, but a high profile event is not what policy should target. Doing so would result in the majority of cases being marginalized and a strategy designed around an unlikely event.

If prison is our way of dealing with sex offenders, or any criminal for that matter, it will have been too late; the crime and damage will already have been done.

Parents are their child’s best line of defense against sex offenders.

Source: The Milford Daily News

If you take away the anger and emotion surrounding Sandusky’s alleged crimes, experts say there are some persistent myths about pedophiles that can sometimes make detecting and diagnosing them difficult. Demystifying pedophilia could go a long way toward preventing similar abuse in the future, according to the experts. Here are a few misconceptions:

• Pedophilia is a moral failure.

Like drug addiction, alcohol abuse and other bad behaviors, medical experts say pedophilia is a diagnosable medical and psychological condition. Researchers are investigating the idea that there may differences in the brains of pedophiles that could be linked to brain injuries stemming from trauma or alcohol abuse.

“It makes sense,” said Thomas Plante, professor of psychiatry at Santa Clara University who treats pedophiles. “If someone has a head injury, they have impulse control troubles to begin with. With diminished executive functioning they will make all sorts of bad decisions.”

Plante cautioned that not all victims of head injuries are pedophiles.

• Pedophiles cruise local playgrounds or the Internet for victims.

The vast majority of the abuse against minors is from either a family member, or someone they know such as a coach, teacher or church leader, according to Dr. Fred Berlin, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic in Baltimore.

“This notion of the creepy stranger,” Berlin said. “That’s a rarity.”

Several experts interviewed by Discovery News said accurate data on the incidence of child molesters or pedophiles in the general population is hard to come by since it relies on self-reporting or hypothetical questions. However, a 2009 study by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center of 4,500 children and caregivers nationwide found that 21.7 percent of girls and 3.3 percent of boys reported some form of unwanted sexual contact.

• Gay men are more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexual men.

While that myth was proved wrong by the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other professional medical groups, it persists. The state of Florida cited this myth in banning gay adoptions, until the law was stricken down by a federal court in 2010.

• Victims of child sexual abuse are “damaged goods” forever.

Many victims can recover with proper treatment and live productive lives, according to Berlin and Plante. A controversial 1998 study that showed the ability of victims of child sexual abuse to recover was pilloried by Congress as a defense of pedophilia. The study was subject to great criticism over the next several years. At the same time, both Berlin and Plante said that many of their patients who are adult pedophiles were abused themselves as children.

“I’ve been treating patients long enough to see victims become aggressors,” Berlin said.

• Pedophiles can’t help themselves any time they see a child.

“Some do want relationships,” Plante said. “Some have a specific target. Often they will have a certain age group that is narrow, either just boys or just girls. Some are situational generalists and will abuse whoever is handy. But this notion they abuse hundreds of victims is not true.”

• There’s no cure except prison.

Researchers are using depo-provera, a drug used to treat prostate cancer in elderly men, to lower the testosterone levels of pedophiles. This chemical castration can help reduce the urge to abuse children, Berlin said. Other physicians are using cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as aversion therapy in which ammonia capsules are broken under the noses of pedophiles when they feel sexual urges toward children. The ammonia produces violent nausea, a scenario that was played out in the 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange.”

“It works pretty well,” Plante said. “But you have to have booster sessions.”

Both experts say they hope the Penn State developments lead to some changes in how society views child molesters, how they can be prevented from operating and perhaps cured.

“Penn State and every university will re-evaluate their policies and procedures about suspicion of child sexual abuse and that’s a good thing,” said Plante, who has treated Catholic priests convicted of child abuse. “It’s tragic for the victims and the community, but if we can be more mindful about who is an offender, how they operate, than a lot of good will come.”

Source: Discovery News

Stokes was a gym teacher in Miami, Florida from 1985 to 1998. Fired from his job for inappropriate contact with children, he moved to Thailand where he spent several years and opened a school in Bangkok to continue his depredations.

Stokes, now 49, was charged by US authorities in Chicago for moving to Thailand in 2002 to molest young boys until his capture four years later.

American immigration agents began investigating Stokes after learning he had a criminal record for child abuse, according to court documents.

An independent investigation by Royal Thai Police found young boys had visited his apartment, and teachers at his school said he had inappropriate contact with students.

The arrest followed a raid by officers on an apartment Stokes maintained in Pattaya. There they allegedly found around 100 photographs of boys aged nine to 11, both in school uniform and naked.

The US Attorney’s Office later found that Stokes had molested more than 70 boys. Most were under 16 and about half under 12, CBS news said in its trial report.

After his arrest in 2006, Stokes was returned to the United States to stand trial.

Two victims, both 11 year old at the time, flew from Thailand to Chicago to testify against him in a hearing last year.

Stokes’ defense in the trial was based on the claim that the search of his home violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The warrant carried by Thai police was not specific enough and the evidence seized should therefore be suppressed, his lawyers argued.

In her ruling, US District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer denied this motion, sentencing him to 15 years imprisonment, the maximum allowable at the time his crimes were perpetrated.

That maximum has since been doubled to 30 years.

Although Stokes was finally arrested in Cherng Talay, there is no evidence in the court record suggesting that he molested children in Phuket.

Source: PhuketGazette