> If they did what risks and repercussions do they face?
Based on my experience as a victim of a crime, complaint to police very quickly reduced my risk of repercussions -- as soon as perpetrators faced police.
Your anecdotal experience is of only minor consequence here.
I've known people that have been abused by the police and other authority figures.
Plus if you're a minor and you're being abused by your guardian and the police show up to ask questions you're going to face backlash and it isn't going to be good.
For some there's really nowhere to go for justice.
Child sexual exploitation is a well researched bit of criminology. Jessica Eaton has a lot of research focusing on female victims which covers all of this stuff.
I've been trying to figure out what dennisgorelik's angle is in his comments in this thread and can't quite figure it out. I've decided not to respond directly because they're obviously not coming from a rational person who's spent even a few moments thinking about what he's writing.
Everything I've written as a response comes off as patronizing at best and incredibly rude at worst so I've decided to just not respond at all. It's kept me up half the night to be honest because his perniciously ignorant responses are so rage inducing.
I strongly agree with you, and it took me considerable effort to write the post I did as calmly as I did. And I'm going to take the advice to dis-engage.
> How do you even know from that story that there was sex or child involved? You are eager to engage in a manhunt based on ... what exactly?
Trust. We can see often cases of americans executed by traffic police just because, and other abuses ("A Dallas police officer entered an apartment she thought was hers and killed the owner of the apartment" and so...) so the repeated message that encounters with US police should be navigated carefully if you don't want to be another victim looks justified. At least in some places and specially if you are black or latino.
I think that in Europe we have a different relationship with the police. It seems (from my non expert point of view, I could be wrong) that Police in USA can lie and "get away with murder" anytime they want. Europol lying about such serious theme as abused children would be a big no. Would nuke any trust and public collaboration and is just not expected. What happened to Ian Murdock, Aaron Swartz or Andrew Sadek [1] would be very difficult to justify from an european point of view
This also presumes they're strong enough to speak up in the first place. If you're a victim of this kind of abuse you usually aren't.