The U.S. justice system is failing victims of incest, a Crime Report investigation shows.
John Mark Clubb was six when his father, a Baptist preacher and high school guidance counselor, came into his bedroom and violently raped him. The abuse continued until he was nine, but it wasn’t until he was 29 that he remembered what happened.
“I’ve struggled with sex, anger and alcohol to try and fill the empty feeling and mask my anger,” said Clubb who left home at 17 to join the Marine Corps, and is now a commercial airline pilot. When he finally gathered the courage to tell his family. they rejected his story and accused him of lying.
But worse yet, when Clubb went to the District Attorney’s office in Tampa, Florida, where his 89 year-old father still lives, he was told that his case could not be prosecuted. Years later, there was no evidence of the crime except for Clubb’s word against his father’s. And incest trials are notoriously hard to try, making prosecutors hesitant to accept these difficult cases.
But John’s story as an incest victim is not unusual. It is hard to find a more serious crime than the rape of a child; yet when a family member is the perpetrator, justice is sometimes hard to achieve. Child welfare advocates say that the safeguards in place to protect the child usually fail. Research suggests they are right.
Even if John’s case, for instance, had come to the attention of authorities when he was still a minor, the odds that his father would have been punished for his crime remain slim. That’s because, according to a 1990 study by University of South Florida criminologist Lorie Fridell, prosecutors tend to defer or divert complex incest cases to child protective services who can provide for an alternative, non-court resolution, such as therapy or community service, in an effort to keep the family together.
Other research has drawn a similar conclusion. A 1993 report of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, found that more than 90 percent of all child abuse cases do not go forward to prosecution. Moreover, the study showed many suspects are released without further intervention by law enforcement or the justice system.
No Help From Police
And survivors like John, who try to find justice later on in life, by going straight to the police, are often out of luck. Sometimes the evidence is judged insufficient or questionable. Or there are statutes of limitation that apply.
Or, in some cases, prosecutors shy away from taking on complex incest cases, one of society’s most emotional and secretive abuse.
“The criminal justice response to child abuse needs to be better,” says Suzanna Tiapula,
Director of the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, a program of the American Prosecutors Research Institute.
Yet the blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of the criminal justice system.
Even more troubling, Child Protective Services, the state agencies charged with protecting the welfare of children, are in many cases can be unprepared to properly investigate and collect evidence on these sensitive complex sexual abuse cases or have not been adequately be trained thoroughly to detect sexual abusive, thus possibly leaving thousands of children in dangerous situations, said experts interviews.
While the two agencies, Child Protective Services and law enforcement, working to protect incest victims and punish their abusers have made strides since the 1990s by forming multidisciplinary teams, closing some legislative loopholes and working with children advocacy centers, a Crime Report investigation suggests that the system inadequately still remains woefully inadequate to protects their fragile charges. Scant information, a hodgepodge of laws and statutes, poor communication, and prosecutorial discretion, along with underfunded, poorly trained and overburdened CPS investigators, all continue to leave children at the greatest risk.
Two-Tier System
The problem starts with how such cases are handled when they come to the attention of authorities. Sexual abuse within a family comes under the jurisdiction of Children Protective Services (CPS) units, which were established inside state departments of social services in accordance with the 1974 federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.
Under this law the federal government allocated resources to states to prevent child abuse and neglect, as well as programs related to the investigation and prosecution of child abuse.
The motives for doing this seemed beyond reproach. The basic idea was to have specially trained investigators work on these sensitive familial issues. And while having units dedicated to investigating child abuse is a good idea in theory, Child Protective Services agencies have been targeted with allegations of botched investigations and corruption. Many are criticized as ineffective gatekeepers of children’s welfare.
“If a kid is raped by a neighbor, people call police, but if the same person rapes their own child they call social services. What kind of justice is that?” said Grier Weeks, Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children (PROTECT), a national organization based in Tennessee that works on lobbying for child abuse legislation
If a child accuses a caretaker of abuse, CPS has to be involved, but law enforcement does not. So, if a child is raped by his or her parent and goes to the police, CPS has to be notified in all states. But if CPS is notified, they are not required to tell law enforcement. And herein lies one of the largest conundrums of bringing these cases to justice: too often, experts say, social workers don’t have the training to investigate a sexual abuse allegation.
Indeed, out of the three million referrals for child abuse received by CPS units around the country, according to the Administration for Children and Families annual Federal Child Maltreatment Report in 2008, which tracks all CPS statistics nationwide and were the last figures available, just 1.5 million were either investigated or received an assessment by CPS. Of these, only 24 percent of the investigations or assessments determined that at least one child was a victim of child abuse or neglect, among whom an estimated nine percent were sexually abused. This comparatively small percentage, leads advocates to believe that CPS has dismissed many cases without thorough investigation into the charges.
“If there is no check by a prosecutor, Child Protection Services has no one on looking over its shoulder,” says Victor Vieth, director of the National Child Protection Training Center, a not-for-profit organization that works to better train CPS workers. “CPS might not realize what they may not know.”
But when CPS does find a pattern of sexual abuse in a referred allegation it is almost impossible to track whether those cases made it to the criminal justice system.
This does not surprise professionals in the field: the relationship between CPS and law enforcement is historically fraught with distrust. While in certain communities, in particular urban areas, multidisciplinary teams have formed to fully investigate sexual abuse cases, a majority of agencies operate in separate silos.
“CPS is about protecting the kid, so you can protect a kid by taking them out of the house, but that doesn’t punish the adult at all,” says Ross Cheit, who studies child sexual abuse. “CPS isn’t about punishment or treatment of adult involved.”
Cheit, who heads the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy & American Institutions in Providence, found in a 1997 study of 500 substantiated CPS sexual abuse cases in Rhode Island that just 12 were prosecuted in criminal court. It is almost impossible to track what happened to the 488 cases that did not make it through the court system, but most likely these cases were handled using an alternative response.
CPS workers or multidisciplinary teams can decide whether it is in the best interest of the child to bring the case through the criminal justice system. They may try to remove the child from the home or try to terminate parental rights in civil court where the burden of proof is a lot lower.
And while this may be the right path for some incest survivors, others feel stymied by this often-adopted solution.
Punishment for the Crime?
Many incest survivors don’t remember what happened until they are adults. By that time, much of the evidence has disappeared, restrictions imposed by the statute of limitations (which vary from state to state) also contribute to the reasons why many cases never make it to court.
Moreover, child victims are often reluctant to press cases because they fear another family member might be hurt—or that their cases will be successful and their abuser will end up in jail. And ultimately, many worry simply that they won’t be believed.
These fears kept Tesa Rigel, 31, silent for over 20 years, the eldest of four girls, she managed to repress memories that were “too ugly to think about”―until her 12-year-old younger sister confided the same thing was happening to her.
When her father ignored Tesa’s pleas to stop the abuse, she decided the most effective way of putting him in jail, while protecting her sister’s privacy, was to reveal the story of her own rape. She filed a complaint with police in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, and her father was duly charged with Tesa’s rape—more specifically with the rape of a child under 14. But she wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
Two years later, her father was acquitted. The trial had turned on Tesa’s credibility—not her father’s actions. Neighbors had testified that she was a promiscuous teenager who “asked for it,” and a high school guidance counselor painted her as a troublemaker—apparently ignoring Tesa’s charge that the abuse had started when she was three.
“I don’t know how a three year-old asked to be raped,” says Tesa, whose voice still shakes with anger and pain as recalls the “trauma” of the trial—a trauma, she notes, “that is almost as big as the first.”
Theodore Cross, a Visiting Research Specialist in Quantitative Analysis at the University of Illinois Children and Family Research Center, found in a 2003 study that, while child abuse was less likely to lead to the filing of charges and incarceration, when prosecutors do choose to move forward, such cases usually ended up in court.
Cross also found that prosecutions tended to be successful when victims were older, and thus more able to provide a coherent account of what happened, when caregivers were present to support the victim throughout the court process, when the alleged offender is not a biological parent or, finally, when serious threats or violence were involved.
Yet experts in the field remain divided: some believe that prosecution is the most important means of dealing with child abuse and incest; others disagree.
Victims deserve an “aggressive prosecution,” “It is important for victims, they deserve an aggressive prosecution,” insists said Scott Berkowitz, Executive Director of RAINN, a Washington DC based, national organization of Rape and Incest survivors. He’s backed up by
Former Middlesex County, MA sex crimes prosecutor Wendy Murphy and author of the 2007 book “And Justice for Some” said that “Failure of prosecutors to treat these family rapes as a public crime just decriminalizes the act,” she says.
But opponents feel just as strongly. “While it is important to hold offenders accountable I don’t see that as the primary yardstick of success with any sexual abused child,” says Teresa Huiszar, executive director of The National Children’s Alliance (NCA), which provides intervention and prevention on child abuse through multidisciplinary approaches. “The most important thing is that the child victim is able to function and is protected from harm.”
Huizar says her teams have been extraordinarily successful. NCA has almost 700 centers nationwide and helped 259,000 child victims in 2009, NCA’s community-based centers provide children with one-stop access to everything from counseling to monitored interactions with CPS and law enforcement.
An additional note of caution is sounded by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crime against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “The perspective of the victim is very complicated in these cases,” he says. “Outside observers have to consider whether the prosecution agenda is their own agenda or in the best interest of child.”
But there is a strong case to be made that successful prosecutions can empower victims.
By the time Kayla Garriott’s mother found her diary, halfway through her senior year in high school, her father had been raping her for almost seven years. “It (began) right before I got my braces on at ten,” the Robbinston, Maine native recalls.
The next day, her mother took her to the local headquarters of the Maine State Police, where she told detectives her story.
“I thought I could stop it myself,” Garriott, now 21 and a college senior says in response to a question about why she didn’t say something sooner. Living in a town of 500 people, Garriott didn’t want everyone to look at her differently: “I didn’t want sympathy, I just wanted to be a senior in high school.”
After a six-month investigation, detectives were able to record one of their conversations, in which her father confessed to having sex with his daughter. After a trial, in which Kayla testified, Kevin Cobb was sentenced to ten years in jail.
Her dad’s imprisonment, says Garriott, was a “big relief.” But there was also little doubt in her mind that the process that got him there was also crucial to her recovery and self-confidence. “I am not a victim,” said Garriott, smiling like any 21-year-old co-ed without a care in the world. “I consider myself a survivor.”
Cara Tabachnick is News Editor of The Crime Report
Photo by Chris JL via Flickr.
Posted by Patti
Wednesday, February 23, 2011 03:03
I have been through all of this since infancy. One would tend to think that years of women in this Country fighting for their sons (and daughters whom we never seem to hear about and their cases) we finally get somewhere with laws against the clergy. But ‘why’ don’t the law address those that are non Catholic. It’s NOT an secular issue. Do not get me wrong, progress made to stomp out this disease and bring criminals to justice is the primary focus but to ignore ‘all’ other children via a state (WI) law that only recognizes Catholic boys who have been molested by a clergy member is simply ignoring the issue and turning a blind eye to what is truly going on in this State and the USA.
I have lived through the protocol for investigating child sexual abuse. I am a Shaken Baby Syndrome victim with life long injuries of TMJ (broken/permanently dislocated jaw), skull fractures and subdural hematoma injuries at eight weeks of age which required life saving surgery. Not one person has been held accountable. What’s worse is I’ve been re-victimized over the years and the very people/family members that injured me were allowed to continue to care for me and continually re victimize me way into my mid twenties because I simply had no cognitive recall of the SBS injuries but after having read over my medical records, obtained an education in this area to some extent and reflected back upon the family dynamics realized what went on.
It ‘is’ truly sad that SBS is not recognized or should alert the legal authorities and the medical professionals that there is something more going on than simply shaking a child out of a fit or rage. I do not think that I, a female, am a unique case and know that there was an infant child within the County that I reside who was deemed a Shaken Baby Syndrome child and whose injuries were remarkably similar to my injuries, specifically a broken jaw. She died. I survived. But telling the story for me has been as much as an uphill battle as I’m sure the County’s DA found himself in when he had to try to present the case.
I would only hope that the US would look at what is happening to it’s babies within their own environment after being birthed and going home. It’s so important for babies to have a good health environment to start their lives.
I realize that this is not a male or female issue. It was popularly believed when Shaken Baby Syndrome was discovered and is still being taught in some seminars that it is primarily the ‘male’ child that suffers such abuse but this simply is not true.
I’m tired, old and worn to the bone from yelling or screaming as an infant would do having been abused but no one listens. Enough is enough. I hope and pray that the USA realizes that there ‘are’ major differences in the M.E. and the US especially in moral values of infants. Please do not think that I mean to include ‘all’ M.E. states, countries, etc. But there are those that truly protect their babies and infants far more than the USA could ever imagine or have imagined over their years of existence. This can be witnessed by any Christian by reading the bible.
Bless us all in these troubled times.
God’s Wink.
Posted by Edna
Tuesday, October 05, 2010 01:05
When a kid is raped/sodomized/incest by their father, social services does NOT see it as a crime. They try to “reunify” the family. In a case where the child was a baby and was approx. 9 mos. old when the divorce occurred, the social services office is still trying to “reunify” something that was never unified from the beginning. The child didn’t miss the father as in a divorce case. He raped/sodomized and performed incestuous acts of all sorts on a 3 year old – yet social services did not investigate properly after being given information. When dealing with social services, you’ll find a large percentage of time there is no justice! The rapist is on the streets, also driving drunk and putting everyone’s life in danger. Nothing has been done to take him out of society and off the streets.
Posted by Edna
Tuesday, October 05, 2010 12:59
Social Services aka CPA workers need to be properly educated and intensively trained. Not performing an investigation immediately upon a rape/sodomy/incest case on a child is inexcusable and the rapist/molester goes on about his life while the child victim suffers. When evidence is given them, it is their job to thoroughly investigate!!! Either do away with Soc. Services/CPA or have a higher official that they have to report to. The molesters aka rapists, which we’re not supposed to use that word in court, need to be punished and taken out of society. The children are the victims – not the rapist! Yet, the rapist is treated with kid gloves and allowed to run loose on the streets, harming more victims. A worker or detective who does not perform their duties as required by law in a rape case is a waste of taxpayer’s money and harmful to the public. When they are hired with the Sheriff/Police they are supposed to know the law and their duties – if they don’t perform get rid of them and hire someone who knows the law and sees to it that it is carried out. There is no excuse for inept social service employees and detectives.
Posted by Barry Goldstein
Monday, September 27, 2010 09:40
Thank you for this really excellent article. Incest and sexual abuse of children make people very uncomfortable,but the lack of discussion permits offenders to get away with unspeakable abuse. The article points out how hard this offense is to prove and how often child protective agencies make inadequate investigations. The professionals in the custody court system should read this article. They need to have professionals with expertise in working with child victims of sexual abuse. The courts much be more open to the evidence that is available and if the evidence is insufficient, this does not mean the allegations are false, much less deliberately so. Courts must stop taking children out of the lives of protective mothers because she continues to believe the father is dangerous and tries to protect her children.
Posted by KT
Sunday, September 26, 2010 07:31
We need to get rid of CPS which both takes children from people whose only real crime is being poor, and leaves children in situations where they are being beaten and/or rape. Real law enforcement should be expanded top make sure that assault and rape are treated as crimes, not mental illness. Physical assault and rape need to be treated by same way whether the perpetrater is a relative or not. Get rid of all this therpay crap and start punidhing these perps if anyone actually wnats this abuse to stop. Therapy is a joke. It empowers abusers while revictimizing the victims.
Posted by Anne Grant
Sunday, September 26, 2010 07:28
Thank you for this important article. After watching Rhode Island Family Court remove children from good mothers who had escaped domestic violence and child sexual abuse, we started the Parenting Project in 1996 to try to understand the system better and to protect these children.
The state’s Department of Children, Youth and Families acknowledged that they did not even track allegations of child sexual abuse to see if there might be a pattern of certain investigators or administrative hearing officers overturning findings without adequately examining the evidence of crimes against children.
We have reported the history of one of those cases at http://littlehostages.blogspot.com/
Adversarial litigation allows private contractors (lawyers, psychologists) with evident conflicts of interest to profit from delaying these cases until children turn 18, at huge cost to the children, to the parent who is trying to protect them, and to taxpayers who underwrite this intractable system.
We agree that a multi-disciplinary team paid and supervised by an independent, accredited agency—whose members hold each other accountable to high professional and ethical standards—offers a more promising route for these custody cases.
Please provide more details on those multi-disciplinary teams and any pilot projects that are developing and testing them. Thank you.
Posted by SayWhatWho
Saturday, September 25, 2010 08:37
Who the heck is this Radford with his psycho-rants such as, “As a child I fell from a tree and out of my shoulder came a device,that looked much like today’s rfid glass chip.”
@ Child Abuse Wiki: “If a kid is raped by a neighbor, people call police, but if the same person rapes their own child they call social services. What kind of justice is that?” —> It is not justice and when anyone knows of something like this going on, just skip calling social services and swear out an affidavit with the police.
Posted by Keith Richard Radford Jr
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 07:24
Neighbors with guns & uniforms murdering people is what the sex offender registry is & people won’t support laws that allow people to do this! Moms killing kids, beheading them like some ancient sacrificial worship where a bunch of #2s need to let blood for #1? Well the next time you see god thank him for the kiddy porn some cyber cop sent to feed his family on the carcasses of their neighbors online and sell the house on TV. State sponsored terrorism & murder just like the other genocides.
End sex laws to curb people that feel the need to capitalize on people like cattle/sheep/duck/chickens. Politics is simple, when Oprah almost shut the law down with her campaign to make prostitution legal in the 70"s bunch of fascist rot, bought her and started a run with media companies tha designed the chip placed in me as a child over 50 years ago (my humble opinion) , well your run is done along with law and makers of law using hundreds of years old idologys that support the stoning, murder of women commiting adultry so in America we create a catch22 through war policies and now we are in the dirt to our eye lids. Exposure of Nazi stylings of law has been tested and failed. It’s not a mental disorder to like sex as a child, kids play with them selves and others but the mental disorder is making laws and manipulating a nation by media into thinking every household should line up in some goose step when kids die at the rate of 90K per day and kids set up adults and other children, often at the direction of other members of the family for fun/status/home ownership/money/deception/God/Daddy/or? more time on stage at the local house of worship trying to impress #1 In the words of Stephen Hicks: Nazis thought socialism should control not only economics but breeding, religion and other intimate details of life. Can we see the networks adopting the netwit ideas where we have come to the point that we murder people because some compleate idiot say there is no way to stop the what, when they are so far off base that even Dr. Phill says the mental problem is blown clear of reality?End sex laws now and look after your own like you care if you can but fact is the perponets of the law are not concerned with anything but lining pockets.
Posted by Keith Richard Radford Jr
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 07:23
As a child I fell from a tree and out of my shoulder came a device,
that looked much like today’s rfid glass chip.
Through my life I have been put through every sort of manipulation and
people used me to put forth their agenda, those that had access to this info to defraud a nation through Excutive Action to sell a product that has rasised suicide rates under the pretext of healthcare like some voodoo of putting pins in a map of the location of where people deemed aid sex law prosicuted individuals will prepair a world to be more healthy when the facts do not support the reality.
The making of villains and hero’s are as fabricated by this process as
much as Hollywood would have us all believe that when looking for
information on Noriega IE:Manuel Antonio we would find a rapper.
IE:wrapper used to cover up the involvement of this complex deception.
They also have twisted the idea that religion is the good guys and non
religious people are the bad guys when fact is the use of leaders in
any nation is based on their ability to control by what ever means not
how much they love the unseen but how effective they are in
controlling the seen, people by what ever means be it the gun or the
nun.
over 95% of all new sex crimes are committed by someone not on the registry and these spinners of fake news and policy want to murder with the laws they can write that serve no one but people that already have more by taking from the poor more than the do already?
Posted by Child abuse wiki
Monday, September 13, 2010 06:53
This is a really good article, highlighting the problems with investigating child abuse crimes in our country. This quote from the article says it all:
“If a kid is raped by a neighbor, people call police, but if the same person rapes their own child they call social services. What kind of justice is that?"
Posted by Keith Richard Radford Jr
Monday, September 13, 2010 11:49
You already lost, see with the laws as they are, if your sister wants a tongue lashing and you don’t get down and services her needs and thank her for the experience you will go to jail on her request whether you did or not, catch 22, and if her mom is in on the scam your double sunk, especialy if your brother is the 1st choice anyway and your not being around doesn’t matter. So don’t think for a moment sex laws do any good. This is what an extra mouth to feed in a poor hosehold has to expect.
38K die drug related deaths DEA cost us $600mil over the cost of ops when they get just under 4billion per year to keep the door open.90K kids die each day & we have a sex regestry that kills people for having sex both DEA & the regestry needs too be shut down for terror activity. CPS send child porn to get more action and the system is not what you think when you say pedophile thats a made up word 4 control of not only economics but breeding, religion & other intimate details of life, eugenics.
1941 ~ 1945 sterilization experiments were conducted in concentration camps. The goal of the experiments was to become capable of effectively sterilizing millions of people with a minimum of time and effort. This was accomplished by using X-ray, surgery, and drugs, so all you doctors in your big homes given by your big war bucks and your lives of privilege, how easy it is to not bring economics into the equation when fact is that what this is allot about.
Equality can not be had with sex laws in any country ever. • Female prisoners (4.7 percent) were much more likely than male prisoners (1.9 percent) to be assaulted by other inmates and we don’t have prison with men and women in them together! Get it?
Posted by Eileen King
Monday, September 13, 2010 08:12
Justice for Children would like to see the states collecting the statistics re what actually happens to incest/child sexual assault cases that are substantiated by CPS. How many are sent on for prosecution, how many rejected/accepted, how many are plead out, how many are probation before judgments, how many perpetrators actually see any jail time? How many serve the full sentence? There are many unanswered questions that would help us see what is really happening to incest perpetrators and whether we take this crime seriously — or not.
We also see a problem with CPS being the first to investigate the allegations: CPS investigators are not trained in evidence collection, in questioning alleged perpetrators, or in putting a case together.
Moreover, CPS is notoriously skeptical of incest allegations that are brought by mothers who are in the process of separation or divorce from the child’s father. In our cases, across the country, CPS tends to call these cases “custody battles” and passes them along to the family courts with only a cursory investigation. Family court judges are asked to decide whether a child has been sexually abused or not based on a sloppy or indifferent CPS investigation…no wonder they often unable to make decisions that truly protect children.
We know so much about incest/child sexual assault but we have a ways to go to be truly effective in not only protecting incest victims but achieving justice for these children.
(I am currently attending the 15th Annual International Conference of the Institute on Violence, Abuse & Trauma in San Diego, CA. www.ivatcenters.org Also, check out the National Partnership to End Violence at www.npeiv.org)