Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9307260330
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
It's a topic discussed in hushed tones, the graphic details described in euphemisms that do not come close to describing the horror young victims experience.
The pain first experienced with the assault is then relived again and again as children repeat their stories to police, to lawyers, to juries.
Gino Williams, Floyd County's commonwealth's attorney, and Peggy Frank, assistant commonwealth's attorney for Montgomery County, have seen too many of these cases.
Both are unsure whether such cases are on the increase or if children are just reporting sexual abuse more frequently because of school programs that heighten awareness about "good touches" and "bad touches."
Publicity over several recent cases - including the suicide of a Roanoke man in May as Blacksburg police were seeking to arrest him on charges of fondling a young boy - have heightened public concern over the issue.
For prosecutors, it's not only the sheer number of cases that troubles them, it is also the frustrations of prosecuting cases complicated by family ties as well as legal complexities.
In rural Floyd County with a population of about 12,000, about 100 reports of child sexual abuse a year come to the Floyd County commonwealth's attorney office. Only a third of these cases make it to court.
"Most of the kids don't come forward, No.1, because they're either embarrassed or they don't understand what happened," Williams said.
Even in cases of repeated abuse, a child may not want to testify because the accused is a father or stepfather who can still manipulate the child's emotions and loyalty. Children may also be intimidated by the thought of testifying in front of a jury of strangers. Or the prosecutor may have no corroborating evidence to back up the child's claim, Williams said.
In other instances, the testimony is tainted. For example, the recollections of abuse may surface during hypnosis, which is inadmissible in court.
It's up to Williams to decide which cases appear strong enough to take to a jury and in which he should accept a plea rather than risk having the case fall apart in court.
"When it comes down to the kids' word versus the perpetrator . . . juries . . . don't understand," the prosecutor said.
More often than not, prosecutors are faced with offering plea agreements to suspects. Charges often have to be reduced in an effort to at least get a conviction of some kind on the suspect's records.
Frank has found that molested children don't want to testify in court because `"don't want to tell it in front of a defendant."
"They want space between them," she said.
Sometimes the case will break down after successfully going through the first stages of prosecution in a lower court because the victims and families do not want to relive the experience in Circuit Court.
That often leads to a plea agreement, too.
Operating that way is frustrating, Williams said. Recently, he had to decide that a young girl abused by a family friend several years ago would make a bad witness. He flinches at calling her that.
But in the years between the time she was assaulted and the man brought to trial, she was influenced by other family members and had even begun to sympathize with her attacker.
The case ended with the court dismissing the most serious charge of sodomy and accepting a plea to a less serious charge of sexual battery.
"Sure it happened," Williams said of the sodomy charge. "[But] she just could not be very graphic in her description" and would not have been an impressive witness.
"At least now I've got something that will be on his record," Williams said.
Frank and Williams hope that increased awareness, better training of officers and crisis response workers will help reduce the trauma for children of reporting and prosecuting such crimes. This, in turn, could produce more convictions in the courtroom.
Frank recently returned from a child abuse training session that stressed the importance of teamwork between police, social services and prosecutors.
Until now, there have been no set local policies for responding to sex crime complaints, Frank said.
She hopes to change that.
The session, sponsored by the Department of Criminal Justices Services and American Prosecutors Research Institute, recommended establishing a response team that would work on reports of child abuse "from day one to conviction," Frank said.
If Blacksburg, Christiansburg and Montgomery County established teams, then victims might gain some comfort in knowing they would deal with the same people throughout the ordeal and not feel like they were passed around from one officer to another as the case progressed.
Previously, there have been no written policies about how social services workers, police and prosecutors would respond to such reports, Frank said. In the future, Frank wants to see police and social workers responding together to complaints and calling her into the investigation as early as possible.
"They'll go together so that we're not interviewing a child more than necessary," she said.
Shannon Brabham, executive director for the Child Abuse Prevention Council in Roanoke, said departments there don't have a written policy outlining the team concept, but the mechanism is in place.
The Roanoke County Department of Social Services works with police officers and prosecutors from Salem, the county and Vinton who are usually specifically assigned to working child abuse and other domestic cases, Brabham said.
Brabham said most of the sexual-abuse cases those departments investigate come in as referrals and aren't emergency, after-hours calls that would require a team to be paged to respond.
In Roanoke, the larger police department does rotate assignments; but once an investigator is assigned to a complaint, he or she stays on the case throughout the investigation.
Frank said those who attended the work session are considering organizing a seminar to educate medical personnel on handling child sexual assault cases, especially gathering physical evidence such as semen and hairs.
"We rarely have a case that involves physical evidence but when we do, it's helpful to know we've got a . . . test that's done properly, we've got a doctor that's going to come" to court, Frank.
Physical evidence, coupled with the testimony of the victim, helps make a winning combination.
In March, a Blacksburg man was sentenced to 80 years in prison for sodomizing his 11-year-old nephew and breaking into a neighbor's home where the boy had run for help.
The boy testified he was playing the piano when his uncle came into the room, took him by the hand and led him to his bedroom.
"I was screaming," said the boy, who is now 12. I was saying, `Stop, stop.' "
In that case, Frank said, she was lucky to have photographs showing the injuries the boy had sustained and other physical evidence that the boy was telling the truth.
Historically, children who are the victims of sexual abuse are female, and their attackers are men.
Recently, more reports involve boys being sexually assaulted by men. There have even been cases where women are charged with sexually assaulting boys and girls.
"It may be that society hasn't accepted that males get molested," said Williams, challenging any conception that a girl being attacked is somehow worse than an attack on a young boy.
Once an abuser is confronted by authorities "there's always a denial . . . very few of them accept responsibility . . . admit they did [it]," Williams said.
It wasn't my fault is a frequent reaction.
Last year, a 69-year-old Elliston man pleaded guilty in Montgomery County Circuit Court to raping his 9-year-old granddaughter.
The grandfather was baby-sitting the child in 1990 when he took her to a bedroom, removed her clothes and forced her to have intercourse.
A year later when the child reported the rape, the grandfather blamed it on her - telling authorities the girl had touched him and led him on.
by CNB