CASPER, Wyo. (AP) - As she prepares to leave the office at the end of each day, Rosemary Bartle tucks in her clients. She organizes her papers into their respective files - stories of kids being beaten and sexually assaulted - and puts them away for the night.
“It’s just like kissing the kids goodnight,” she said.
Bartle works as a counselor and forensic interviewer at the Children’s Advocacy Project, a Casper nonprofit situated just down the street from the city’s police station. She interviews kids who have been the victims of abuse about what happened to them. Law enforcement, Department of Family Services investigators and prosecutors then use those interviews to pursue criminal cases or decide what other actions would be best for the child. Bartle and the other two interviewers are also mental health professionals and help those kids and teenagers process what happened to them through counseling, reported the Casper Star-Tribune (https://bit.ly/2lgnKyZ).
Between 2013 and 2015, the three counselors at the project have completed an average of 322 interviews a year for agencies across the state and country - more than one per work day. Between July and December, they conducted 145 forensic interviews. Almost three-quarters of those interviews were for children who reported that they had been sexually abused.
There are two other similar organizations in the state: Hirschfield Center for Children in Jackson and Safe Harbor in Cheyenne.
As Wyoming’s government continues to grapple with an economic decline and budget shortage, however, the three facilities have seen their funding change repeatedly over the past few years as state agencies were asked to slash expenses.
Last year, the Division of Victim Services, which funnels state funding to more than 60 groups that provide services to crime victims, ended state funding for the three facilities and replaced it with money from federal grants. Although the federal money not only fully replaced the state’s money but also increased the funding, the shift highlights the financial uncertainty that nonprofits and government agencies now face.
So far, cuts to statewide funding for providers of victim services - like the Children’s Advocacy Project - have not deeply impacted the programs’ operations. However, it remains to be seen how further reductions could affect the resources victims of crime are able to access.
“Would I like to have enough (state) general fund money to fully fund all of my programs? Of course,” the director of the division said. “But we all have our part in this.”
Necessary conversations
Tucked in a back room of the Children’s Advocacy Project building is a white board where the faces of criminals stare back at you from printed-out mug shots. Next to the mugs, staff pinned news articles detailing the alleged crimes of each man and tracing the progress of his court case. In the corner, a map marks the locations of many of the homes of registered sex offenders in the Casper area.
On the opposite wall, there’s a drawing from one of the nonprofit’s clients, the words “You are the best person ever” scrawled across the page.
“It’s rewarding to see the cases progress,” said Stacy Nelson, executive director of the project, as she looked at the printouts.
Near the observation room, one of the building’s back walls was covered with 1,767 paper cutouts of tiny hands - one for each interview conducted at the project between its opening in 2002 and its 10-year anniversary in 2012.
Each of those children sat in one of the two small interview rooms. Younger children are interviewed in a small room with two tiny chairs and a table of coloring supplies. Older children sit in a room with two comfortable brown leather chairs.
During interviews, law enforcement and DFS officials sit in the back room’s black office chairs and observe the interviewer and child’s interactions through a television. The interviewer’s job is to soak up all the child’s information by guiding them to tell stories and recount memories with as much detail as possible by using open-ended questions, Bartle, the interviewer, said.
Some kids are ready to tell every detail and need very little prompting, she said. Others are more reticent. Some don’t speak at all. About a third of the time, the information shared in the interview doesn’t substantiate the original report of abuse, Bartle said.
Victims sometimes hesitate to share if they feel they’ll get in trouble for talking or have reported similar abuse before but felt they weren’t believed. In some cases, she said, the reported offender is also the breadwinner for the family and the child fears that their loved ones would go hungry if the offender were jailed.
It’s especially difficult when a child is a victim of repeated, targeted abuse. The interviewer then has just minutes to dismantle months or years of grooming that taught the child that the abuse was OK and that the victim shouldn’t report it.
“People who exploit children are really good at it,” she said. “They’re good at picking their victims and grooming them. We have to work against that.”
After the interview, the child has access to CAP’s therapy program, though not with the same counselor who performed the interview. During those therapy sessions, Bartle and her peers help the child cope with the emotional turmoil of surviving their abuse and teach the kid that they are not alone. The final step is to help the child learn that what happened to them was not their fault. Kids almost inevitably blame themselves, Bartle said.
“Having the case go to court or having him found guilty doesn’t really change what happened,” she said. “Really, one of our main goals is to help kids process the trauma in a way that it doesn’t become the defining moment of their lives.”
Despite the horror of some of the situations Bartle’s clients share with her, she is adamant that her job is not dreary. The cases that stick with her, the ones that have affected her the most, are those where the child showed incredible resiliency and hope in spite of it all.
“It’s amazing to me that kids can have these really, really bad things going on in their life and still have straight A’s or still have meaningful, reciprocal relationships with, say, a best friend or still have a deep affection for macaroni and cheese,” she said. “I think it’s humbling sometimes. We (adults) could learn something about allowing things to be OK, allowing ourselves to change.”
’Without them, we’d be in a world of hurt’
When local law enforcement responds to a report of child abuse, officers are trained to ask limited questions of kids who may have been the victim of a crime. In general, law enforcement will ask basic questions to establish that a crime may have occurred and then refer the child to CAP so that a full forensic interview can be performed.
Not only have the three CAP interviewers gone through intensive training at the National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but their distance from the rest of the investigation allows them to interview the children without accidentally influencing the kid’s responses.
Many cases involving the physical or sexual abuse of a child are difficult because they often begin as “he said, she said” cases with little physical evidence, said Taylor Courtney, an investigator at the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office who works on many of the cases that involve a child victim. A defense attorney could easily attack a case based mostly on a child’s report of a crime by saying that the law enforcement officer who interviewed the victim influenced the child’s responses because the officer wanted to make an arrest.
But that argument is harder to make when the interview is conducted by a CAP interviewer who has no ulterior motive and who uses methods backed by research, said Detective Sara Nelson, who handles the bulk of the crimes involving children at the Casper Police Department. Although Nelson is a trained forensic interviewer herself, she prefers that CAP interview the victims in her cases.
“I lean on them heavily to get as much honest information as possible,” Nelson said. “Without them, we’d be in a world of hurt.”
CAP is also particularly effective because, unlike law enforcement agencies, it has the ability to help children process their trauma through one-on-one counseling.
“The justice system can never give those kids the ultimate justice, which is the victim being able to deal with the incident in healthy way and move on,” Courtney said. “CAP does that.”
Difficult choices during hard times
For years, the three advocacy centers split about $200,000 in state funding every two years - meaning each center received about $33,000 annually. During last year’s budget session, the centers’ funding doubled to $400,000, though the Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee chipped that number down to just above $368,000 for the centers to share over a two-year period.
Then, agencies were asked to make cuts.
“That’s when the sky fell and budgets were hit very hard,” said Cara Chambers, director of the Victim Services Division, which operates under the Attorney General’s office.
Chambers knew she could substitute the centers’ state funding with money from the federal Victims of Crime Act program, which had substantially increased in recent years.
So, after a meeting with the centers’ administrators, she made the move. It was a necessary shift, Chambers said, one that not only allowed the centers to remain fully operational but also increased their funds.
But Erin Johnson, director for the Child Advocacy Centers of Wyoming, said while the centers’ immediate needs are fulfilled, she feels that the federal funding is less stable than state funding, especially as a new federal administration settles into the nation’s capital.
“Now that there’s a new administration, I would expect that anybody relying on federal funding would feel a little uneasy,” she said. “Having some state funding would provide some assurance in case that did go away.”
Johnson said she is optimistic that state legislators and others in government appreciate the value of the children’s centers and would move to make money available should the federal funding fall through.
The funding shift allowed Chambers to make the needed cuts without decimating actual services for victims. Along with the centers’ funding change, Chambers reduced a program that supplemented salaries for people who work in victim services across the state, eliminated a position in her own office and made other staffing changes.
Chambers recognizes that program directors prefer to have money from the state’s general fund because it’s easier to obtain and is more flexible but said the change was the most strategic move available. Funding from the Victims of Crime Act is relatively stable, she said, because the money is generated through fees and fines paid by criminals, rather than from taxes.
Chambers laughed nervously when asked about how potential further budget cuts could affect victim services. So far, her division has managed to spread out the cuts so that no one service provider was deeply hurt.
And if there were more cuts?
“You can only cut so much before giving up programs,” she said. “That’s when it starts to get really scary.”
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Information from: Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, https://www.trib.com
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