Could more Kentucky child abusers be prosecuted? New manual intended to help
To put more child abusers in prison and protect communities, Kentucky prosecutors can now turn to a new manual to improve their skills in taking cases involving young victims to court.
“Prosecutors play a critical role in holding those that abuse and neglect children accountable to the law,” Attorney General Daniel Cameron said at a news conference on the manual in Frankfort on Tuesday. As chief prosecutor, “it’s part of my job to ensure they have the resources they need to do this.”
The 187-page Child Abuse Prosecution Toolkit, drafted largely by Amy Burke, a former Kenton County prosecutor and now head of the criminal branch of Cameron’s office, is meant to provide a “road map” for prosecutors to follow when faced with a case. Cameron announced in January that his office would be publishing the manual.
“Kentucky continues to rank first in the nation in instances of child maltreatment, and we’ve been in the top 10 states for more than a decade,” he said Tuesday. But fewer than 20 percent of these cases are prosecuted, in part because of weaknesses and inconsistent practices across Kentucky’s network of county and commonwealth’s attorneys.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the already severe problem. Reports of abuse across the state have dropped since March, but not because abuse is less prevalent. Rather, it’s “likely attributed to reduced contact between children and trusted adults” to whom children would otherwise report abuse, Cameron said.
The manual and its addendum of resources draw heavily on best practices, which are rooted in a collaborative approach between prosecutors, law enforcement, child abuse investigators and medical professionals.
For instance, the manual explains why prosecutors should transition away from making the first contact with a case at the end of law enforcement’s investigation — an otherwise common practice.
“To effectively handle child abuse cases, you need input and collaborating from all partners,” the manual reads. “To that end, best practices mandate that you, the prosecutor, are involved in the case in the investigative phase. This means a sort of paradigm shift away from what currently happens in many jurisdictions.”
It’s commonplace for prosecutors to “only become involved in the case in order to determine, based upon an investigation that has likely been going on for some time already, whether your office would accept charges. Get away from this practice! It is likely that you are declining prosecution that otherwise would be accepted if there had been more collaboration between your ... partners during the investigative phase,” the toolkit reads.
The multidisciplinary approach as a best practice, especially for child sexual abuse cases, isn’t new; for instance, Kentucky counties must have a functioning multidisciplinary team. Local teams, comprised of police, prosecutors, social workers and child abuse experts, are tasked with coordinating local investigations into child sexual abuse allegations to ensure no case falls through the cracks.
Yet 36 of Kentucky’s 120 counties didn’t have a multidisciplinary team operating under state-approved protocols last year, according to the 2019 annual report from the Kentucky Multidisciplinary Commission on Child Sexual Abuse.
Other areas covered in the attorney general’s manual include criminal charging strategies; how to take a trauma-informed, victim-centered approach; mandated reporting requirements; and victim notification to “provide a quick reference for prosecutors,” Cameron said.
Child sexual abuse cases, specifically, are “among the most difficult to prosecute,” Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn said, in no small part because less than than 5 percent of reported cases offer conclusive medical evidence that abuse occurred.
“That means prosecution has to rely on the testimony of children,” she said. But even so, “relying on children, we have a responsibility to prosecute to obtain justice and to hold offenders accountable, especially when they live in communities where they may continue to offend.”
Cameron said his office’s criminal division is poised to partner with local prosecutors on cases, should they want it. “Prosecution of child abuse and neglect cases is critical to our goal of ending child abuse in the commonwealth,” he said. And that’s done “by holding offenders accountable and ensuring they are met with the full force of the law.”
This story was originally published October 27, 2020 at 3:04 PM.
