For more than 18 agonizing months, Becky Wekenborg said she suspected her young daughter was being repeatedly molested by a family member, but numerous hotline calls to the Missouri Department of Social Services Children’s Division had failed to bring protection for her child.
In call after call — including one made by her daughter’s pediatrician — the state agency said it would not substantiate the complaints. It took several rejections for Wekenborg, of Jefferson City, to understand the inaction.
The Children’s Division had no firm legal authority to directly intervene with her daughter, 4, because the alleged abuser was just 7 years old.
“I incorrectly assumed if you have a child being abused in any manner, you can call the Children’s Division and they will come out and help your child,” she said. “By doing so, I failed my child.”
It is becoming common knowledge that most child sexual abuse is committed by someone the child knows. But another reality of child abuse remains relatively taboo: some of it is perpetrated by teens or younger children.
Now, two bills moving through the Missouri Legislature aim to give state child abuse investigators more power to investigate and intervene regarding “problem sexual behaviors” committed by minors under 14.
The Missouri Children’s Division is the main state agency tasked with handling cases of alleged child abuse. It operates a well-known hotline to field complaints. When abuse is substantiated, action can range from family support to foster care placement.
But its powers are also misunderstood. Under current state law its investigators are limited to complaints alleging abuse by people deemed to have the “care, custody or control” of a child. That limits the agency to investigating mostly adults, such as parents or guardians, or older teens.
Without the Children’s Division involvement, it falls to police to investigate child abuse committed by children. Any punishment would most often be handled by the juvenile court.
But critics say there’s little continuity on how such cases are handled statewide. They say most police don’t know how to investigate complaints involving young children with problem sexual behavior, so sometimes nothing happens. The critics say excluding the Children’s Division and its caseworkers from the process can allow abuse to continue. And it can limit efforts to rehabilitate young offenders.
EARLY INTERVENTION
The House and Senate proposals would give the Children’s Division power to make formal assessments in cases of suspected abusers under 14 to protect the victim with safety plans and promote services for the child who demonstrates problem sexual behavior.
Proponents say it could prevent future abuse and deviant behavior. Interventions at an early age are generally successful, said Kelly Schultz, director of the Missouri office of Child Advocate and a lead advocate for the bills.
The Children’s Advocacy Center of Greater St. Louis conducts numerous counseling programs for children and their guardians that have had success in helping children eliminate problematic sexual behaviors. Jerry Dunn, executive director, said most such children are dealing with impulse control issues, which are far easier to address than the very different impulses of a sexual predator.
“They are not motivated by sexual gratification like an adult sexual predator,” she said. “Many of our children who are demonstrating sexual problems have a history of sexual abuse or overexposure to sexually explicit materials, so they just don’t know what to do with that information and they will act out different things.”
The issue was put in the spotlight in 2011 when Schultz and other child advocates began participating in a statewide task force to reduce child sexual abuse. Schultz said her office was getting numerous calls from families complaining that the Children’s Division would not intervene because of the age of the alleged perpetrator.
In written testimony to state legislators presented last month, Schultz said about 4 percent of monthly hotline calls to the Children’s Division contain allegations of juveniles committing sexual acts on other children. Last July, 272 of the 7,655 hotline calls to the Division involved allegations against juveniles, which could not by law be fully addressed by the Children’s Division.
Schultz said when the Children’s Division rejects the complaint, referrals can be made to local law enforcement or juvenile courts. But how those referrals are handled vary from county to county with some children getting help and others getting little or nothing.
“Law enforcement is pretty limited on what they can do with younger children,” Schultz said.
NO RESOLUTION
Wekenborg said the inaction in Cole County where she lives left her desperate.
She believed her daughter was being molested by a child during court mandated visits to her father’s home as part of a joint custody agreement.
Wekenborg said her daughter became withdrawn after visits and eventually told her that the boy had put his hands down her pants. Wekenborg said her daughter had similar problems on future visits. A family pediatrician suspected there was a problem when he tried to examine the child during a physical and she panicked when she was asked to remove her underwear, she said.
Though police were called and a family court judge was alerted about her suspicions, Wekenborg said her daughter’s claims were dismissed.
Without a complete Children’s Division’s investigation, she said she also had trouble getting a referral for a forensic interview to confirm the abuse. When she did, a child advocacy center concluded her daughter was indeed a victim of sexual abuse.
“The interviewer came out and said it was one of the worst child-on-child abuse interviews she had ever had,” Wekenborg said.
If state child abuse workers had been able to intervene, she said, two children could have received the help they needed sooner.
“Had this law been in place at the time, the Children’s Division would have had the authority to come in and possibly remove her from the situation so she was a safe,” she said. “They could have said to his parents, ‘We think he needs counseling.’”
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