Child killer's helper to be freed

10 May 2011 Last updated at 11:56 ET  Martin was sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in the Dutroux case The ex-wife of Belgium's child killer Marc Dutroux - the man responsible for several rapes and deaths in the 1990s - is set to be released from prison.

A court ruled in favour of freeing Michelle Martin, who is halfway through a 30-year jail sentence she received for complicity in the Dutroux case.

Prosecutors said there were no grounds to appeal against the decision.

Dutroux was detained along with Martin in 1996. He was given a life sentence in 2004.

In a case that shocked Belgium, Dutroux was convicted of the kidnap and rape of six girls, teenage or younger. He also killed two of the girls and caused the deaths of two others.

This was the fourth attempt by Martin's lawyers to win her release, after previous requests were turned down.

'Monster'  Dutroux was first detained for the child abductions in 1996 but not convicted until 2004

The Belgian justice authorities have approved a request to allow Martin to be transferred to a convent in France upon her release.

Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck told Reuters he expected her to remain in the convent for the entire 10 years of her probation period.

Mons prosecutor Claude Michaux, who had until Tuesday afternoon to launch an appeal on a procedural basis, said there were "no grounds" to appeal the ruling.

"Though I do not agree with the decision, I have therefore decided not to introduce an appeal," Mr Michaux told reporters.

Martin was found guilty in 2004 of helping Dutroux in the abductions, and of complicity in the deaths of two of the girls, who were found starved to death in a cellar in the southern city of Charleroi.

The bodies of the other two girls - An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19 - were found in 1996 in the garden of the same house. Post-mortem reports showed they had been raped and beaten before being drugged and buried alive.

Victims' families condemned the decision, saying Martin should complete her full sentence.

"She's the murderer of my daughter; 15 years seems light," said Jean-Denis Lejeune, whose eight-year-old daughter Julie Lejeune was found in the cellar, along with Melissa Russo, also aged eight.

"Michelle Martin was as bad as Dutroux. She could've opened the door, given them water," he said. "We're allowing a monster out into society."

Child protection shake-up urged

May 2011 Last updated at 02:39 ET By Hannah Richardson BBC News education and family reporter Eileen Munro said the focus on targets "are becoming obstacles on people keeping a clear eye on children"

Front-line social workers should regain the freedom to decide what is best for children in a shake up of England's child protection system, an official review says.

The review, by social policy expert Professor Eileen Munro, calls for targets and red tape to be scrapped.

Developing social workers' expertise will enable more children to stay with their families, she adds.

The government is investing ￡80m implementing the reforms this year.

Education Secretary Michael Gove asked Prof Munro to review the child protection system in England, focussing on whether bureaucracy and targets have been getting in the way of good practice.

In her report, the expert from the London School of Economics, says: "Helping children is a human process. When the bureaucratic aspects of work become too dominant, the heart of the work is lost."

'Significant savings'

She argues that the system has become preoccupied by individuals "doing things right" rather than "doing the right thing".

Continue reading the main story  Mark Easton Home Editor, BBC News

When the government asked Eileen Munro to review child protection procedures, her terms of reference contained a paradox.

On the one hand ministers said they wanted social workers to be free from unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation - to make decisions based on their professional judgment, not simply following procedures.

On the other, they said they wanted social workers to be clear about their responsibilities and to be accountable - lessons must be learned. Errors exposed. Names named. While the former is about the system being hands-off, the second requires it to be hands on.

Of course, it is not a simple either/or. There is a balance to be found between a tick-box approach that blinds professionals to the subtleties of individual cases and a laissez-faire model that sees vulnerable children slipping tragically through the net.

Professor Munro reflects this tension when she points out that timescales for assessing children at risk were introduced because of legitimate concerns about "drift". But now, she claims there's "an over-preoccupation" with such targets.

And she concludes this attitude has meant that learning from professional experience has been limited.

She recommends a chief social worker - similar to a chief medical officer - should be appointed to report directly to government and liaise with the profession.

Prof Munro's report sets out how the system can move from one that has become too bureaucratic and focussed on compliance to one that values and develops professional expertise.

She says centrally-prescribed time scales for formal procedures, such as social work assessments, should be scrapped.

Her report also calls on the government to revise social worker statutory guidance - said to be 55 times longer than that issued nearly 40 years ago.

The amount of regulation has led to child protection staff feeling obliged to do everything by the book rather than use their professional judgement, says the report.

Prof Munro also wants the government to ensure local areas have the freedom to innovate, with local authorities taking more responsibility for helping their staff to operate with a high level of skill and knowledge.

'Radical change'

And she calls for the social workers' expertise to be developed - pointing out that skilled help can enable more children and young people to stay safely with their families and bring "significant savings".

Prof Munro told the BBC people had "underestimated how much skill is needed to do good social work".

She said social workers did not stay on the front line long enough to become really good at the job.

"What I'm recommending is a radical change to how we see a social work career and we have a complete progression into senior management where you're still knocking on the front door and doing real work as well as managing the service."

Her report warns that more money will be needed at first to develop the additional training necessary to set the profession off on a "new path".

Prof Munro has stressed the importance of nurturing social work expertise

And it cautions that "cherry-picking" reforms will not lead to the desired improvements overall.

One of the major challenges, the report adds, is how to enable a wide range of professionals work together well for the good of vulnerable children.

Clear lines of accountability and named contacts are "vitally important" for this, she adds.

The report also places an emphasis on early intervention, calling on the government to place a duty on local councils to ensure there are enough early-help services for children, young people and families.

In particular it singles out the effectiveness of Sure Start Children's Centres in providing early help and intervention.

'Long term' implementation

Children's Minister Tim Loughton said the review presented some wide-ranging and radically different proposals for reform.

"It is now up to the government and the children's sector to work together to look at the recommendations in detail and assess the implications of their implementation in practice for the long term, not as a short term fix.

"To do this the government will be working closely with a group of professionals from across the children's sector and we will respond to Professor Munro's recommendations later this year."

Chief executive of children's charity 4Children said the review backed many of the calls families are making for a move away from bureaucratic assessment to personalised and hands on support for those who are struggling to cope.

"I hope that government follows Munro's recommendation of local support for families who are struggling but have not yet reached crisis point. Our new campaign, Give me Strength, argues for the urgent need to stop patching up problems after they spiral out of control and make prevention and early intervention a reality."

The College of Social Work agreed that social workers have been hampered by an excessive emphasis on form-filling and a compliance culture.

"Surveys have shown that child protection workers can spend more than 60% of their time at computer screens, time which would often be better spent in face-to-face work with children at risk of harm."

Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson said she welcomed the recognition that children and young people of all ages needed early intervention and help.

"Harmful behaviour affecting a child can occur at any age and professionals must be trained to recognise early on when family intervention and support is required for older children."

Experts Say DNA Match Is Likely a Parent or Child

While federal officials said that analysis of DNA from several relatives helped confirm that it was Osama bin Laden who was killed in the military raid on Sunday, they have not yet disclosed the relationships of the family members whose DNA was used.

Officials said they collected multiple DNA samples from Bin Laden’s relatives in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. And they said the analysis, which was performed the day Bin Laden was killed but after his body was buried at sea, confirmed his identity with 99.9 percent accuracy.

Some scientific experts said on Monday that if results really were so accurate, at least one of the sources was likely to have been a close relative, like a child or parent with whom he shared half his genes.

“That would be most likely,” said Frederic Zenhausern, director of the Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine at University of Arizona.

DNA matching usually involves obtaining genetic material from a blood sample or cheek swab.

The vast majority of a person’s DNA sequence will be the same as every other person’s. So a test, which can be done in a few hours if needed, typically focuses on a small number of locations on the genome, usually 13 to 16 spots. These spots are located on what is sometimes referred to as junk DNA, areas of genetic material that do not contain instructions for building brain, bone and muscle.

A DNA analysis looks for patterns of two or more nucleotides, the chemicals that form DNA. These strings of nucleotides are called short tandem repeats. The closer the relative, the more the pattern of repeats matches. In an identical twin, they should be the same. A parent and child should share half the number of repeats. In siblings, the combinations can vary; in half-siblings, they can vary even more.

“With a sibling, there is only a likelihood that you’ll share some DNA with them,” said Mitchell Holland, a forensic scientist at Penn State University and former head of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. “With a half-sibling, that complicates things even farther.”

Bin Laden did not have any full siblings. He did have more than 50 half-siblings, some of whom have close ties to the United States and had long ago distanced themselves from him. Dr. Zenhausern said using a half-sibling’s DNA could still yield a reasonably high chance of identification, more than 90 percent. And collecting DNA from several half-siblings would increase the likelihood of making a match.

“If you have that, you can attempt to reconstruct the parents,” Dr. Holland said. “You know the numbers the proof is coming from. But the math is relatively complex.”

If two people share a rare DNA pattern, it makes it more likely that they are related. And testing can also be taken to a more detailed level — for example, by looking at the Y-chromosome, which only males have.

Recently, some law enforcement agencies have begun using relatives’ DNA to help identify suspects in criminal cases. In 2008, California changed state law to allow use of familial DNA, relying on it last year to arrest Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., accused of being the “Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer of 11 women. A match between DNA found at the crime scene and DNA from Mr. Franklin’s son, who was arrested for unrelated weapons charges, led police to Mr. Franklin.

ABC News reported on Sunday that to identify Bin Laden, officials used DNA from the brain of a half-sister who had died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A spokeswoman for Massachusetts General said the hospital had not been able to verify that report.

“We have not been able to confirm any of this with anybody here,” said the spokeswoman, Kristen Stanton. She added, “I don’t know the name of this sister — whether it was Bin Laden or something else — but nobody we can find knows if someone who was Bin Laden’s sister was ever here.”

 

Experts Say DNA Match Is Likely a Parent or Child

While federal officials said that analysis of DNA from several relatives helped confirm that it was Osama bin Laden who was killed in the military raid on Sunday, they have not yet disclosed the relationships of the family members whose DNA was used.

Officials said they collected multiple DNA samples from Bin Laden’s relatives in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. And they said the analysis, which was performed the day Bin Laden was killed but after his body was buried at sea, confirmed his identity with 99.9 percent accuracy.

Some scientific experts said on Monday that if results really were so accurate, at least one of the sources was likely to have been a close relative, like a child or parent with whom he shared half his genes.

“That would be most likely,” said Frederic Zenhausern, director of the Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine at University of Arizona.

DNA matching usually involves obtaining genetic material from a blood sample or cheek swab.

The vast majority of a person’s DNA sequence will be the same as every other person’s. So a test, which can be done in a few hours if needed, typically focuses on a small number of locations on the genome, usually 13 to 16 spots. These spots are located on what is sometimes referred to as junk DNA, areas of genetic material that do not contain instructions for building brain, bone and muscle.

A DNA analysis looks for patterns of two or more nucleotides, the chemicals that form DNA. These strings of nucleotides are called short tandem repeats. The closer the relative, the more the pattern of repeats matches. In an identical twin, they should be the same. A parent and child should share half the number of repeats. In siblings, the combinations can vary; in half-siblings, they can vary even more.

“With a sibling, there is only a likelihood that you’ll share some DNA with them,” said Mitchell Holland, a forensic scientist at Penn State University and former head of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. “With a half-sibling, that complicates things even farther.”

Bin Laden did not have any full siblings. He did have more than 50 half-siblings, some of whom have close ties to the United States and had long ago distanced themselves from him. Dr. Zenhausern said using a half-sibling’s DNA could still yield a reasonably high chance of identification, more than 90 percent. And collecting DNA from several half-siblings would increase the likelihood of making a match.

“If you have that, you can attempt to reconstruct the parents,” Dr. Holland said. “You know the numbers the proof is coming from. But the math is relatively complex.”

If two people share a rare DNA pattern, it makes it more likely that they are related. And testing can also be taken to a more detailed level — for example, by looking at the Y-chromosome, which only males have.

Recently, some law enforcement agencies have begun using relatives’ DNA to help identify suspects in criminal cases. In 2008, California changed state law to allow use of familial DNA, relying on it last year to arrest Lonnie D. Franklin Jr., accused of being the “Grim Sleeper,” a serial killer of 11 women. A match between DNA found at the crime scene and DNA from Mr. Franklin’s son, who was arrested for unrelated weapons charges, led police to Mr. Franklin.

ABC News reported on Sunday that to identify Bin Laden, officials used DNA from the brain of a half-sister who had died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. A spokeswoman for Massachusetts General said the hospital had not been able to verify that report.

“We have not been able to confirm any of this with anybody here,” said the spokeswoman, Kristen Stanton. She added, “I don’t know the name of this sister — whether it was Bin Laden or something else — but nobody we can find knows if someone who was Bin Laden’s sister was ever here.”

 

In Child Sex Case, More Facets Than Meet the Eye

PARIS — The site was called BoyLover.net, and on it the authorities say they found thousands of lurid comments, including conversations about performing sexual acts on boys sometimes barely out of infancy.

Europol, the European Union police agency, cracked the site’s server and developed intelligence reports on 4,200 participants in 35 countries, 670 of whom are suspected of downloading illegal images of child abuse or engaging in illegal acts with minors. The police have made more than 180 arrests and say they have taken 230 children out of harm’s way.

It was, Europol said with some hyperbole, “probably the biggest online pedophile network in the world.” But with arrests quietly continuing in a dozen countries (at least one as recently as last week), it may turn out to be something more: the clearest test yet of whether, after 25 years of intense focus on this particularly disturbing set of crimes, the prosecution of child molestation has come of age.

As countries around the world have ramped up their investigations of pedophile rings and the sexual abuse of children in recent years, they have achieved some notable successes: in February, for example, a Canadian who was convicted of running a brothel in Thailand of boys as young as 3 years old was sentenced to 25 years in prison after Interpol and the U.S. police tracked him down. In September, a six-year trial of a high-society pedophile ring in Portugal that included a former ambassador and a prominent television celebrity concluded with prison sentences of 5 to 18 years for six of the seven defendants.

But with the alarming nature of the crime provoking sometimes rushed action, there is also a record of highly publicized prosecutions gone awry, with innocent people imprisoned for years, other cases eventually dismissed for lack of evidence and physical attacks not only on suspects but on people mistaken for them.

With the latest case, the authorities say, they have learned hard lessons about how to home in on predators while ensuring that the nature of the crime does not lead to prosecutorial excess. If anything, said John Carr, a member of the British Home Secretary’s Internet task force on child protection, “It is more likely that fewer people were prosecuted than should have been rather than more were prosecuted than should have been.”

That notwithstanding, experts who have long tracked the record of pedophile prosecutions say there is a need to monitor every aspect of the emerging cases closely. “This is really excellent police work and I would have no doubt that they have caught some very dangerous and predatory pedophiles in this net who meet the stereotype the public are afraid of,” said Mary de Young, a professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who has written about the issue extensively. “The danger is that the net is very wide and that there are a lot of different fish in this net.”

The issue is so fraught, she said, that even basic the terms used are very much in dispute — starting with the term pedophile itself.

In the narrow sense, a pedophile is defined as a person who has a sexual interest in children. But colloquially the term is often understood to mean someone who goes beyond mere interest to sexual abuse. That blurs the line between molesters and those who view images of molestation, a disturbing but different crime.

Investigators point out that the demand for images drives their supply and therefore the molestation. Interviews with investigators involved in the Europol operation suggest that most of those arrested so far have been people suspected of downloading and exchanging illegal images of child abuse rather than abusing children themselves.

In Britain, for example, where most arrests have been made — 121 as of mid-March — one in five are suspected of child molestation, said Kelvin Lay, a senior investigating officer on the case. The others are what police call “image offenders” of different degrees, he said.