An 11-year-old child bride returned to Thailand this week after widespread outrage over her marriage to a Malaysian man 30 years her senior, an official said on Saturday. Malaysian Muslims below the age of 16 are allowed to wed with the permission of religious courts but the union between the girl and the 41-year-old trader went viral on social media and reignited calls to end child marriage.

Police in the US state of New Mexico have rescued 11 malnourished children who were being kept in squalid conditions in a remote desert compound. The local sheriff's office said the children, aged 1 to 15, had no shoes, were wearing rags and "looked like Third World refugees". Five adults were found at the scene, including two heavily armed men. Police searched the site after receiving a message that read: "We are starving and need food and water."

A Tennessee mom is accused of leaving her baby inside a hot car in 92-degree weather while she went inside a restaurant for one “drink." Rachel Vanwagner, 26, is charged with child abuse and neglect. The charge stems from an incident on June 24, an indictment obtained by FOX 13, said. Two people walking in the parking lot heard a baby crying and called police. Officers responded to the restaurant in Arlington and saw the baby was in the backseat of a car that wasn't running.

An Afghan man has been accused of strangling to death a nine-year-old girl who was forcibly given to him by her family as a child bride to pay off a debt. News of the murder emerged a day after figures were published in a joint report between the UN children’s agency, Unicef, and the Afghan ministry of labour, social affairs, martyrs and the disabled, suggesting that more than one in three Afghan girls were still being married off before the age of 18.

A former Clackamas County probation officer was sentenced Friday to 35 years and one month in prison for repeatedly raping two girls beginning when they were 5 and 7. Clackamas County Circuit Judge Michael Wetzel sentenced Gordon Mead Jr., 69, for first-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse and first-degree sodomy of the two girls, which occurred separately between 2004 and 2012, court records show. A county jury found Mead guilty of the charges on March 2.

The spoons are intended to trigger metal detectors, alerting airport staff to any girls being flown abroad against their will; a Swedish national hotline received 139 calls last year about child marriage or forced marriage.

Migrant children are prostituting themselves in order to get a safe passage into France from the Italian border, according to a report from Save the Children Italy. The minors, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, are selling sex if they are unable to pay the €50-€150 asked by drivers in exchange for a lift across the border.

A woman working at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has been arrested for allegedly selling a 14-day-old baby. Two other women employees from the centre have been detained and are being questioned about other possible cases. Police took action after the state's Child Welfare Committee (CWC) registered a complaint.

Cigarettes sold in US, Europe and elsewhere contain leaf produced in tough conditions by children, impacting school and life chances. Child labour in tobacco is rampant and on the increase in poorer countries, a major Guardian investigation can reveal, in spite of claims by multibillion-dollar companies that they are tackling the issue. Evidence from three continents shows how children aged 14 and under are kept out of school and employed in hard and sometimes harmful physical labour to produce the tobacco leaf that fills cigarettes sold internationally, including in the UK, US and mainland Europe.

A high profile Republican governor has declined to sign into law, a measure that would have made his state the first to ban child marriage without exception. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey and someone who has been a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, said such a ban would conflict with religious customs. He did not specify what religions he was referring to.

In what might be the kindest act we’ve seen from a priest in quite some time, video footage has emerged of a French priest slapping a crying baby across the face after being outraged that the baby did not hold himself to the appropriate level of decorum. He is speaking in a rare dead language named ‘French’ however Reddit users have translated the holy man’s utterings as...

Immigrant children are being routinely and forcibly given a range of psychotropic drugs at U.S. government-funded youth shelters to manage their trauma after being detained and in some cases separated from parents, according to a lawsuit. Children held at facilities such as the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas are almost certain to be administered the drugs, irrespective of their condition, and without their parents’ consent, according to the lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law.

Amal is 11 years old and seeking a divorce. The young Sudanese girl was in elementary school when a 38-year-old man asked for her hand in marriage. Her father accepted the proposal, and Amal (not her real name) was immediately wed. In Sudan, child marriage has been woven into the fabric of the country's culture, driven by tradition and poverty. More than a third of girls there are married before their 18th birthday, according to a 2017 UNICEF report...

A sheriff’s deputy in South Texas has been accused of sexually assaulting the four-year-old daughter of an undocumented immigrant. Jose Nunez, a 47-year-old detention officer with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, is accused of threatening the young girl’s mother with deportation if she were to report him, authorities said. On Sunday, the Bexar County sheriff, Javier Salazar, said investigators arrested Mr Nunez on a charge of “super aggravated sexual assault” of a child.

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that more than 2,300 suspected online child sex offenders were arrested during a three-month, nationwide operation conducted by Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces. The task forces identified 195 offenders who either produced child pornography or committed child sexual abuse.

A former diplomat at the Vatican Embassy in Washington has been indicted by a Vatican court on allegations he possessed child pornography, the Vatican said Saturday. Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella allegedly "possessed and exchanged a large quantity of child pornography," according to a Vatican statement. Capella is set to face a trial at the Vatican starting June 22.

A five-year-old girl who died after being abused by her mother and stepfather left a notebook and memos written in hiragana, filled with pleas to the couple to stop abusing her, police said Wednesdsay. Police arrested the married couple in Tokyo on suspicion of leaving the woman's daughter unattended without sufficient food or medical care, resulting in her death at their home in Meguro Ward.

A new study at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that the annual economic impact of child sexual abuse in the U.S. is far-reaching and costly: In 2015, the total economic burden was approximately $9.3 billion and includes costs associated with health care, child welfare, special education, violence and crime, suicide and survivor productivity losses.

A man in Allen is facing federal charges after being caught with a massive amount of child pornography. The Collin County Sheriff’s Office said 39-year-old Richard Belden’s home on McDermott Drive in Allen was searched Tuesday. Detectives seized several electronic devices with 58 terabytes of data related to child pornography. A single terabyte is equivalent to 1024 gigabytes or more than 500 hours of video.

A father is under arrest after allegedly beating his daughter at school. The attack was caught on camera -- and shows school employees going about their business and doing nothing to stop him. The father, Raymond Emilio Rosario, is also a Miami-Dade police officer with a position at an airport.