Karen Winston receives same YWCA award as mother did 36 years ago

Karen Winston, at first a reluctant social worker, embraced her love of children and turned it into a lifelong career helping vulnerable children in Washington State.

She estimates she did more than 5,000 forensic interviews of children when she worked for Partners with Families and Children and has testified in court more than 100 times. She is still testifying in trials even though she officially retired two years ago.

Her work with children has earned her the YWCA Women of Achievement award for community enhancement. She will be honored at a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Oct. 4 at the Davenport Grand Hotel, 333 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. Tickets are $125 and can be purchased by calling (509) 789-9312.

Winston’s grandmother was a social worker and her mother, Vivian Winston, was a community activist who was a YWCA Women of Achievement award recipient in 1982.

“I didn’t really want to be a social worker when I grew up,” she said. “I wanted to be an anthropologist.”

She graduated from Holy Names Academy and attended the University of New Mexico for two years. She moved back home, married and had three children. When her youngest started preschool she went back to school at the University of Washington and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work.

But her dream of anthropology went unfulfilled. “I realized that I wanted to work with people who were alive,” she said.

Her first job was with the Girl Scouts, where she helped develop a career education program. After she was laid off she took a job as a Child Protective Services social worker. “My first caseload was all street kids,” she said. “Every swear word I know I learned from them.”

Eventually she moved from general investigations to child sex abuse investigations. She remarried and went to graduate school for a master’s degree in social work at the same time her husband attended law school. After they both graduated they moved to Spokane in 1991.

She remained with CPS until 1994, when she took a job with the Deaconess Regional Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, which would later become Partners with Families and Children. She got her training in forensic investigation in 1994 and became the director of Partners with Families and Children’s Child Advocacy Center in 1995.

Doing forensic interviews is all about asking questions that are not leading and not coercive in an environment that is child friendly, Winston said. There are strict protocols to follow in such interviews, which Winston helped write.

“I have to justify in court why I asked a question a certain way and whether or not I followed protocol,” she said.

Doing interviews with abused children can be difficult, but Winston said the children were always safe with a guardian when she spoke to them. She also made it a point to leave her work at the office.

“There are always certain cases that stick with you and are hard to manage,” she said. “I made sure I left it at work and didn’t take it with me. I had the ability, I guess, to just put it aside.”

Even though she is retired, Winston is still helping children. She is on the board of the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Washington and on the executive board of the Children’s Justice Task Force.

“I love working with kids,” she said. “They’re our most important natural resource. They are our future, and we need to invest in our future.”

Winston said she is honored to be receiving the same award given to her mother.

“I was totally overwhelmed,” she said. “I’m extremely flattered. It’s wonderful to accept an award that was given to my mother years ago. She was my role model in so many things.”