A boy, 14, sexually violated his younger sister, then 5 or 6. The mother had to decide whether to turn in her son to help her daughter or risk endangering her daughter to protect her son, says the St. Petersburg Times. She turned him in, but he spent just three weeks in juvenile detention, then was returned home to a family unequipped to deal with him. “I couldn’t sit across the table from him” at meals, the mother said. “I hated to hear him talk.”
In July, a mother made headlines when she balked at allowing her 13-year-old son to remain in the same home as the two half brothers he had sexually assaulted. She said authorities threatened to charge her with child abandonment. A therapist says it was the third case he knew of in a year where parents refused to take a child back into their home after he victimized a sibling. more often, because of a lack of funding and alternative housing options, the offender and victim remain under the same roof with limited or no assistance. Families deserve better, providers say. “There is no pamphlet you can throw at a family and say, ‘Good luck with this,'” said Lora Karas, a member of Hillsborough County’s Sexual Abuse Intervention Network.
Link: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/17/Hillsborough/When_the_molester_is_.shtml