No Easy Answers in Abuse Cycle series (Nov. 27, 2006)
This was actually the second series I wrote about sexual assault of children, a pervasive and devastating social problem we have seen over the years in this region — although much of it is hidden. The series included interviews with assault victims, perpetrators, therapists and the district attorney about its many ramifications.
(First in a Series )
It seemed crazy, unreal, when it happened to Debbie Florio.
The 12-year-old Hampshire County girl — whose name was changed for the purposes of this article — was at her best friend’s family lake house. Her friend’s father and stepmother sat at a picnic table at the water’s edge along with the stepmother’s aunt, watching the girls in the water.
While her friend was swimming and splashing around, Florio got a diving lesson from the stepmother’s uncle.
What they didn’t see was where the man’s hands were placed underwater.
“He molested me right there in the water with his wife sitting right there,” recalls Florio nearly 40 years later in her Greenfield dining room.
“He was a sweet, kind man. I remember thinking, He must not know where his hands are,’ because he was talking to me about the diving … I was like polarized by confusion. What’s he doing? His hands are under water, his wife right there, they’re all watching us in the water. I thought, He must not realize.’ Because I was taught always you must respect your elders, above all.”
In her confusion, the girl “didn’t have the words” to tell the stranger to stop touching her. “Finally I was uncomfortable enough that I said, I’m cold. I want to go in.'”
Later, when she told her friend what had happened, the girl told her, “Yeah, he always tries something with me, and I push him away.” Florio suddenly felt stupid: “Why didn’t I push him away? I guess he did know what he was doing.”
It wasn’t the first time the girl had felt confused in this way.
A year or two earlier, she was sitting watching a televised baseball game with her grandfather. When they were alone in the room, he began fondling her.
“It wasn’t like the thing you’d hear or think about,” someone who looks creepy or would say bad things to you, she recalls nervously.
“This was my grandfather. Again, I thought, he must not know where his hands are.’ Because he wasn’t saying anything. And it felt like a loving touch, almost. I was very uncomfortable with it. It was like, Am I crazy? Am I making something up? What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with me?'”
Florio shut down her senses, “because this is too confusing.” And too unsafe.
Not until she was a young adult, when a college psychology course reminded her of what had happened, did her anger surface.
Florio, now 51 and hyper-vigilant about her ability to keep her own two children safe, says she’s learned over the years that many of her friends have also had incidents of being molested — at least once, but most of them multiple times — and most of the offenders were uncles, neighbors, friends of the family.
Despite national media attention given to sexual predators kidnapping children, seemingly at random, about 90 percent of the perpetrators across the country are known to the victim. Most often, it’s a relative or a neighbor, experts say.
Statistics are stark
Assaults on children in Franklin and Hampshire counties are reported at the average rate of one every workday to Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel
“The vast majority of cases are sexual, though may include some component of physical abuse.” And because the cases are “vastly underreported,” she and other experts believe there are many, many more.
In fact, Franklin County has one of the highest — if not the highest — per capita rate of sexual assault on children anywhere in Massachusetts. It’s hard to know exactly, because the state Department of Social Services has stopped keeping detailed statistics by jurisdiction, said Scheibel.
Last year, of the 277 cases reported to the Hampshire-Franklin DA’s Child Abuse Unit, 157 were in Franklin County, and 111 of those involved sexual assault. That’s more than a 10 percent increase from the number 10 years ago.
Of the 111 cases of sexual assault referred to the child abuse unit for Franklin County last year, 17 resulted in charges that are still pending in court and 12 are still awaiting decisions on whether to charge the perpetrator or close the cases, according to district attorney records.
Another two cases led to charges but were not prosecuted, and three others were closed after charges were brought by the DA — one with a five-year probation sentence and two by juveniles committed to Department of Youth Services custody. And 77 cases were closed, without charges, in part because the perpetrator was never disclosed.
Difficult to prosecute
“These are the most difficult cases that I, as an almost 26-year prosecutor, have found to prosecute,” says Scheibel, who personally tried to prosecute them while working in Hampden County before being appointed district attorney in May of 1993.
The biggest reason is that the crime is so hidden from society, from criminal authorities, from any responsible adult, and in a sense, even from the consciousness of the victim.
“Shut down and immobilized,” in Florio’s words, the victim often finds it hard to comprehend what is happening or understands that no one will believe him or her if they dare tell.
It’s even more daunting to get a jury to believe “beyond a reasonable doubt” a child’s court testimony over the conflicting words of an adult, Sheibel said.
Prosecuting the cases is made more complex in families where there’s no “responsible” parent physically, mentally or emotionally, or where the adult who should be responsible is in denial that a sexual assault has taken place.
Where the abuse takes place within the family, Scheibel said, “If an adult is supporting the perpetrator, or subtly or not so subtly having difficulty believing the child, it makes it much more difficult to get a prosecution.”
Victim must be strong
It takes an emotionally strong child to disclose abuse, knowing or suspecting that doing so may tear the family apart, she said: “The child risks losing a lot, everything that’s familiar, if they disclose and come forward and go through a trial.”
The policy of removing the child from the home to avoid being victimized again — a policy that’s been modified somewhat since Scheibel was personally prosecuting these cases — can be a further stress on the family, especially when the abuser is the breadwinner.
“It really divides a family,” says Scheibel, explaining another force that promotes denial over disclosure and complicates prosecution.
“What does that do? (It suggests) I must have done something wrong,'” Scheibel says. “And it does perpetuate what an abuser typically says: No one’s going to believe you.’
In court, where, against all odds, the victim has to summon the courage to confront her abuser, face-to-face, the competency of the child in knowing right from wrong is always called into question by the legal system. And because disclosure of the crime often comes, if it does at all, weeks, months or years after it occurred, there is rarely any evidence, and rarely any witnesses.
TV’s CSI’ hurts
A prosecutors’ burden of proving their case has been complicated further still by what the district attorney calls “the CSI effect.”
“If there’s no physical evidence that ties the perpetrator to what the child is saying happened, then there’s reasonable doubt,” Scheibel says, especially when many jurors have seen week after week that CSI’s television “detectives” can prove any crime in less than an hour.
“It’s something — as district attorneys across the country — that we’re very concerned about,” she says.
“They see it on TV. They expect they can get fingerprints off of anything, which is not a reality. They expect there are fibers in everything. We don’t even have the capacity in our (crime) lab in Massachusetts. It’s not real, and yet jurors believe it’s real, the actual forensic evidence that everyone believes you can get in every case.”
By the time a sexual-abuse case runs its course of depositions, hearings and postponements, a victim may have been required to tell the awful truth again and again, and it may be more than a year after the abuse occurred before the child must appear in court to confront the adult abuser, face-to-face, and describe exactly what he did.
And then be cross-examined.
Often, a responsible parent won’t allow the child to testify, out of fear he or she will be further traumatized, or that the abuser will be acquitted.
Northampton psychotherapist Cynthia Monohan, a specialist in treating traumatized children and a member of the DA’s task force on child assaults, explains, “A year and a half later, to see the abuser right here, in your line of vision for the very first time, and have to say what happened, it’s an amazing thing. That’s why predators have a pretty easy time.”
Added to the frightening prospect for the child, says Scheibel, is the risk of not being believed “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Think about how difficult that is for an adult,” the prosecutor says, “and then put yourself in a child’s shoes, to say it’s not that they didn’t believe you, it’s just a reasonable doubt.'”
New prosecutor tools
The state’s Sexual Predator Law, which sets up a registry of known sex offenders and lets Scheibel order an evaluation of whether a perpetrator is likely to re-offend after finishing his or her sentence, is a step toward preventing future cases, she says, although there are critics who question how well the approach works.
“This is a real public safety issue for citizens,” she says. “You have that percent of sex offenders that’s going to re-offend. It’s incumbent on us to minimize that risk. We’re not Karnak, but it’s using a crystal ball to some extent to ask, Is this person going to re-offend?'”
This summer, the Northwestern DA’s Children’s Advocacy Center, an arm of the DA’s office that tries to minimize the trauma of young victims and prevent further abuse while improving investigation, prosecution and provision of victim services, moved to its own home in a Northampton house. It provides a more comfortable, child-friendly setting for videotaped forensic interviewing and medical exams.
The new center underscores what Scheibel says needs to be more of a collaborative approach combining gathering evidence for the prosecution, providing therapy for victims and support for their families, treatment for offenders and education for the community.
That requires more funding, and an acknowledgement that the solution to sexual abuse of children needs to be as comprehensive as the problem.
No simple answers
“Only by pooling our resources and collaborating our efforts are we going to be able to solve this,” Scheibel says.
“This is not a simple problem. There’s not a simple answer, because it’s not just focusing on — although my primary responsibility is focusing on — victims and the reporting, investigation and prosecution of these cases. There is that flip side of addressing perpetrators, and trying to have a more comprehensive approach to these crimes is only going to help us do that.
The DA’s child abuse task force has pointed to the need for more therapists specialized in working with traumatized children, particularly in Franklin County, and Scheibel and other advocates of a comprehensive approach to ending a cycle of abuse have pointed to the need for programs to treat offenders.
“Once a case is done, all the issues that existed before the crime don’t go away,” Scheibel says.
“They’re all still there, and perhaps in some ways at a more heightened level. Absent that intense kind of therapy early on and for as long as it’s required, they do become (long-term) victims, and some of them do become perpetrators
“And more become victims again and again. But there are many success stories, too. It’s amazing work.”
– RICHIE DAVIS