Sex abuse cases hit record number

BOISE – Idaho counties logged a record number of child sexual abuse cases last year, including a disproportionate amount in the Panhandle, a new state study shows.

Kootenai County prosecutors alone filed 63 of 469 cases, second only to Ada County, the state’s most populous area, according to the report to the Idaho Legislature on sex crimes against children, released last week.

Experts attribute the increase to a crackdown on convicted sex offenders who fail to register and to enhanced law enforcement scrutiny in response to recent high-profile cases.

“This is the worst year ever that we’ve had in terms of child sex abuse prosecutions,” Deputy Attorney General Bill von Tagen told lawmakers.

Gov. Butch Otter called the report “deeply disturbing” in an accompanying letter, saying the number of cases “likely reflects a record number of sex crimes against children” for the fiscal year ending June 30.

“The victims were our youngest, most innocent and vulnerable citizens,” Otter said. “We all must do everything we can to prevent such crimes and bring perpetrators to justice.”

Prosecutors statewide filed 47 more cases than in 2005 and 98 more than in 2004. The cases involved 455 alleged offenders – both adults and children – and 437 victims.

Of the adult-perpetrated cases, 76 involved convicted sex offenders who failed to register – more than double the previous year’s number. Idaho law requires offenders to register within 10 days of moving into a county and within five days of changing their address.

In 2003, Idaho passed Carissa’s Law, which requires local sheriffs to advertise the picture, name, address and criminal history of violent sexual predators who move into a county. It was named in memory of 14-year-old Carissa Benway, of Post Falls, who was murdered by a sex offender from Washington who lived next door to Benway and her family.

As of late last week, Kootenai County was home to 265 registered sex offenders, compared with Ada County’s 609, according to the Idaho State Police.

While registration can make people feel safer, it’s not always the answer, said Robert Marsh, a criminal justice administration professor at Boise State University who has helped conduct the study for the past 16 years. The answer, he said, is more prevention – particularly educating parents.”I think registration is not a bad thing because what the criminal justice system and the politicians deal with is fear of crime, not real crime,” he said, adding that people can be afraid even if they see a report of a child sex crime in another state.

Bill Douglas, Kootenai County prosecutor, said the county’s numbers are historically large because it is located near the Washington border and is easily accessible from Interstate 90.

“I think we are part of an overall crime trend that includes Spokane,” Douglas said. “We’re just part of a bigger metropolitan area.”

County prosecutors also vigorously pursue child sex crimes, Douglas said.

“We are very aggressive in this office in prosecuting crimes against vulnerable persons, especially children,” Douglas said.The county gained national attention in 2005 when Joseph Duncan, a 42-year-old convicted sex offender who was passing through the state, murdered three Wolf Lodge Bay residents and kidnapped two children. Duncan now faces federal charges that he kidnapped and molested 8-year-old Shasta Groene and her 9-year-old brother, Dylan Groene, and that he killed Dylan.

The report shows that, unlike the Groene case, a majority of child sex abuse victims know and trust their assailants. Sixty-eight percent of the crimes by adults were committed by acquaintances or relatives. Strangers were involved in 5.7 percent of cases – the same amount as parents. For the remaining 20 percent, the victim’s relationship with the abuser was unknown.

Abuse by strangers makes for “the more sensational cases that we hear about, but if we were only to address that with the laws that we have for prosecution, we would be leaving 94 percent of the cases alone,” von Tagen said. Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said in a letter attached to the report, “This suggests that parents must know the people with whom their children spend time.”Most victims were white and female. More than half of victims of adult offenders were between 12 and 15 years old, whereas 61 percent of juvenile sex offenders’ victims were younger than 11.

About a third of adult-perpetrated abuse cases occurred at the victim’s residence and about 22 percent happened at the abuser’s house, consistent with recent years’ findings.

Abusers typically groom their victims, using favors, threats, or even brainwashing to teach them that inappropriate contact is acceptable, Douglas said. Abusers will tell children, “This is our little secret.”

“In every case, the offender is a manipulator,” he said. “These are crimes of manipulation and secrecy.”

Wasden noted that more than a quarter of offenders had previously been charged with child sex abuse.

The leap could be attributed to use of Idaho’s Sex Offender Registry to identify more repeat offenders, or more energetic law enforcement monitoring of sex offenders for compliance with registration requirements, Wasden wrote. It could also be a statistical anomaly.

Prosecutors charged nearly half of adult offenders with lewd and lascivious conduct, a felony charge that covers a range of acts from groping to intercourse with a child younger than 16.

The report found an “exceedingly wide variability in the types of sex abuse behavior and the actual charge filed,” with a bias toward filing “the most serious charge possible, not necessarily the most accurate charge.”

The state has a lower burden of proof using the lewd and lascivious conduct charge because it does not need to prove that penetration occurred, which is required in rape cases, Douglas said. Both charges can carry sentences of up to life in prison.

For cases that had been adjudicated and where the outcome was known, about 38 percent of adult offenders were sentenced to prison and about 26 percent were put on probation – an increase in prison sentences.

More attention to child sex abuse crimes may have alerted parents to take precautions and to make children aware of inappropriate touching, the report concludes. But it cautions that “a trend in this type of crime emerges slowly” and an increase in a one- or two-year period may be a normal, expected variation.

“Any conclusions about this information should be guarded because of the nature of child sexual abuse and the low incidence of reporting,” it states.

Marsh said more money should be spent addressing the problem. “It’s prevention, it’s treatment both in and out of prison, and it’s vigilance.”