When a fifteen-year-old babysitter and the toddler entrusted to hercare vanish from their sleepy sub-urban town, Maddy Blake -- like the rest of Taylorsville -- is horrified. When the teenager turns up dead and the baby is nowhere to be found, Maddy's once tranquil life is shattered. Her husband becomes the prime suspect for this heinous crime, having only recently been acquitted of sexual misconduct charges brought by one of his teenage students. Plagued by doubts of her husband's innocence, tortured by a growing attraction to her priest, and disconcerted by the grim strangers to whom she has opened her home, Maddy realizes too late that she is inmortal danger.

Ida, a member of Sri Lanka's Female Tamil Tigers, fought with one of the longest-surviving and successful guerilla movements in the world. She is sixteen. Francois, a fourteen-year-old Rwandan child of mixed ethnicity, was forced by Hutu militiamen to hack to death his sister's Tutsi children. More than 250,000 children have fought in three dozen conflicts around the world, but growing exploitation of children in war is staggering and little known. From the "little bees" of Colombia to the "baby brigades" of Sri Lanka, the subject of child soldiers is changing the face of terrorism. For the last seven years, Jimmie Briggs has been talking to, writing about, and researching the plight of these young combatants. The horrific stories of these children, dramatically told in their own voices, reveal the devastating consequences of this global tragedy. Cogent, passionate, impeccably researched, and compellingly told, Innocents Lost is the fullest, most personal and powerful examination yet of the lives of child soldiers.

Lost Innocents is a follow-up to Beyond Blame: Child Abuse Tragedies Revisited (1993). In their new book, Peter Reder and Sylvia Duncan use the same process of case analysis and apply it to a more representative sample of cases. They describe the theoretical basis and method of the study and its findings, before going on to discuss their practical implications, and their opinions about the case review process itself. Finally, the authors discuss whether child abuse fatalities can be predicted or prevented.

Undercover officer George Raffield's job was to pose as a student in the small town of Midlothian, Texas and infiltrate the high school drug ring. When Raffield's cover became suspect, word spread through a small circle of friends that the young officer would pay with his life. No one stopped it. On a rainy fall evening in 1987, Raffield was lured to an isolated field. Three bullets were fired-one unloaded into his skull. The baby-faced killer, Greg Knighten, stole eighteen dollars from Raffield's wallet, divided it among his two young accomplices, and calmly said, "it's done." With chilling detail, Carlton Stowers illuminates a dark corner of America's heartland and the children who hide there. What he found was an alienated subculture of drug abuse, the occult, and an unfathomable teenage rage that exploded at point blank range on a shocking night of lost innocence...

Through an examination of thirty-five major inquiries into child sexual abuse, the authors identify common themes with important implications for professional practice.

Lost Innocents is a follow-up to Beyond Blame: Child Abuse Tragedies Revisited (1993). In their new book, Peter Reder and Sylvia Duncan use the same process of case analysis and apply it to a more representative sample of cases. They describe the theoretical basis and method of the study and its findings, before going on to discuss their practical implications, and their opinions about the case review process itself. Finally, the authors discuss whether child abuse fatalities can be predicted or prevented.

Eleven-year-old Erin Merryn's life was transformed on the night she was sexually abused by her cousin, someone she loved and trusted. As the abuse continued, and as she was forced to see her abuser over and over again in social situations, she struggled with self-doubt, panic attacks, nightmares and the weight of whether or not to tell her terrible secret. It wasn't until a traumatic series of events showed her the cost of silence that she chose to speak out-in the process destroying both her family and the last of her innocence. Through her personal diary, written during the years of her abuse, Erin Merryn shares her journey through pain and confusion to inner strength and, ultimately, forgiveness. Raw, powerful and unflinchingly honest, Stolen Innocence is the inspiring story of one girl's struggle to become a woman, and a bright light on the pain and devastation of abuse. Stolen Innocence is written with conviction and clarity. [Erin Merryn] doesn't hold back, and I respect her honesty and openness...By the end of the book, I thought I was reading passages from a much older adult than a high school senior. Erin has grown into a strong, wise, intelligent, perceptive, spiritual, caring adult." —Susan Reedquist, The Children's Advocacy Center

“Both creepy…and quite moving.” —New York Times Book Review “Wall’s story couldn’t be more timely.” —People Stolen Innocence is the gripping New York Times bestselling memoir of Elissa Wall, the courageous former member of Utah’s infamous FLDS polygamist sect whose powerful courtroom testimony helped convict controversial sect leader Warren Jeffs in September 2007. At once shocking, heartbreaking, and inspiring, Wall’s story of subjugation and survival exposes the darkness at the root of this rebel offshoot of the Mormon faith.

Recounts the events surrounding the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the trials of the three teens who were convicted of the crime.

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this loss, foregrounding the psychological conflicts experienced by her protagonists. It examines the subject not only across the range of her fiction, but also in relation to her unfolding narrative structures through a chronologically based discussion of her novels and selected short stories, interwoven with biographical information and drawing on unpublished letters. This book investigates the dominant kinds of innocence that Bowen represents throughout her fiction: the innocence attributed to childhood, sexual innocence and sexual morality, and political innocence, and argues that the transition from innocence to experience plays an important role in the epistemological journey faced both by Bowen’s characters and her readers.