Duke Official Arrested for Pimping 5-Year-Old Son

After working with issues of sexual violence for almost ten years, few stories make me physically nauseous anymore.  But this is one of them.  My excellent colleague Michael Jones has a companion post on this incredibly disturbing story as well.

Yesterday, Duke University official Frank Lombard was arrested for pimping his 5-year-old son to a man on the Internet for sex- a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer.  Lombard admitted in online chats with the undercover officer that he had molested his adopted son several times, drugging him with Benadryl first.  He also complained that the child was starting to resist the abuse as he got older.

At this point, unimaginably, the story takes a more perverse and ironic twist.  Lombard adopted two African-American children for the sole purpose of molesting and pimping them, a process he described as "not too hard... especially for a Black boy."  Ironically, Lombard works for Duke researching HIV/AIDS in the rural South and often spoke out about the exploitation of poor African-Americans, all the while exploiting his own adopted African-American children.

The other twist to this story is that Lombard is gay.  I mention this halfway into the post for a reason.  In much of the media coverage, the central themes of the story have been framed as "homosexual molestation" or "gay adoption horror," but I cannot stress enough that this is not a story about gay adoption! This is a story about an incredibly sick individual who was intent on having sex with children and used adoption as a way of accessing a child.  It is a story of a child being sold over the Internet for sex, and the sting operation which saved him from further abuse.  To lose sight of the issues of sale and exploitation undermines the importance of continuing to protect all children from anyone who would exploit them. Pedophilia is a psychological disorder separate from a sexual orientation; both gay people and straight people can be pedophiles.  Michael Jones discusses the eroneous use of this story to attack LGBT families in more detail.

This story should spread the message that a well-resourced, well-educated police force is an effective tool for catching those who would sell and abuse children.  It should help the adoption community in North Carolina improve their policies.  It should help prevent those two children from ever being harmed again.  To make this story a tool in a toolbox used to discriminate against healthy, loving LGBT families or deny them rights would lose sight of what this story is really about: keeping children safe.