As I said earlier Michelle, if I misunderstood you, I apologise. As someone who worked for many years as a youth-worker dealing with, amongst other (happier) things, the results of parental abuse, neglect and mis-guidance, I get very hot under the collar when I see parents behaving in a way that I personally feel lets their kids down. I find the whole business of promotion of children e.g. in these 'beauty-pageants' (or maybe 'cattle-markets' would be a more appropriate term), or as child-entertainers a la Michael Jackson, Judy Garland and (too many) others, totally distasteful and thoroughly irresponsible, and I firmly believe that parents who indulge in those kinds of things are putting their children in harm's way.

Your point about molestation being far more prevalent in the US than in other, much poorer, countries I reckon is an assumption that might not hold up to thorough investigation. I suspect that it goes on everywhere but, like here in the UK, sophisticated communications and legal systems in the US mean that we get to hear about it, whereas out in the third-world countries that may well not be the case. Don't know it for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me - there are certainly countries (e.g. Thailand, Viet Nam) where child-prostitution is common and apparently accepted and, following logic, every client of a child-prostitute MUST be a molester.

I guess we agree in general, although maybe not in every detail - I still don't see that the wealth of the parents would preclude them from trying to make money out of JonBenet - we have a saying in the UK, "Much wants more", basically it means that those who have the most are likely to behave in the greediest manner, and that's certainly something I've found to be true in my lifetime.

I guess we need to agree to disagree and move on.

S:0)