Commonwealth of Pennsylvania House of Representatives

COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

JUDICIARY COMMITTEE HEARING

STATE CAPITOL HARRISBURG, PA

IRVIS OFFICE BUILDING ROOM G-50

TUESDAY, JULY 17, 2012 10:30 A.M.

PRESENTATION ON HB 1739 CHILD ABUSE MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESPONSE ACCOUNT

BEFORE: HONORABLE RON MARSICO, MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HONORABLE TOM C. CREIGHTON HONORABLE BRYAN CUTLER HONORABLE SHERYL M. DELOZIER HONORABLE BRIAN L. ELLIS HONORABLE KEITH GILLESPIE HONORABLE GLEN R. GRELL HONORABLE MARK K. KELLER HONORABLE TODD ROCK HONORABLE TODD STEPHENS HONORABLE TARAH TOOHIL HONORABLE THOMAS R. CALTAGIRONE, DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN HONORABLE JOHN P. SABATINA, JR. HONORABLE RONALD G. WATERS

ALSO IN ATTENDANCE: HONORABLE JULIE HARHART

* * * * *

Pennsylvania House of Representatives Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 2

1 COMMITTEE STAFF PRESENT: THOMAS W. DYMEK 2 MAJORITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR KAREN DALTON 3 MAJORITY SENIOR LEGAL COUNSEL MICHELLE R. MOORE 4 MAJORITY LEGISLATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT MICHAEL A. FINK 5 MAJORITY RESEARCH ANALYST LINDA E. HOUSEHOLDER 6 MAJORITY LEGISLATIVE SECRETARY FOR RESEARCH

7 VINCENT KURT BELLMAN 8 DEMOCRATIC RESEARCH ANALYST KATRINA COWART 9 DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE INTERN

25 3

1 I N D E X

2 TESTIFIERS

3 * * *

4 NAME PAGE

5 REPRESENTATIVE JULIE HARHART PRIME SPONSOR OF HB 1739...... 8 6 ABBIE NEWMAN, R.N., J.D. 7 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MISSION KIDS CHILD ADVOCACY CENTER OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY; 8 PRESIDENT, PA CHAPTER OF CHILD ADVOCACY CENTERS AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS...... 13 9 CHARLES LAPUTKA, ESQ. 10 BOARD PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHILD ADVOCACY CENTER OF LEHIGH COUNTY...... 19 11 THERESA RENTKO 12 CHILD/FORENSIC INTERVIEW SPECIALIST, CHILD ADVOCACY CENTER OF LEHIGH COUNTY...... 30 13 JOHN D. VAN BRAKLE, M.D. 14 CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF PEDIATRICS, LEHIGH VALLEY HEALTH NETWORK...... 34 15 SEÁN M. McCORMACK 16 CHIEF DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY, DAUPHIN COUNTY...... 42 17 CHRIS KIRCHNER, M.S.W. 18 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PHILADELPHIA CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE AND THE NORTHEAST REGIONAL 19 CHILDREN'S ADVOCACY CENTER...... 63

20 FRANK P. CERVONE, ESQ. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 21 SUPPORT CENTER FOR CHILD ADVOCATES...... 71

25 4

1 SUBMITTED WRITTEN TESTIMONY

2 (see "HANDOUT")

3 * * *

4 CHARLES R. SONGER, JR. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 5 PA CHILDREN AND YOUTH ADMINISTRATORS, INC.

25 5

1 P R O C E E D I N G S

2 * * *

3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Well, good morning,

4 everyone. Welcome to the Judiciary Committee hearing, and I

5 appreciate all of you being here and the Members.

6 I'm going to make several welcoming remarks. Before

7 I do that, though, I want to ask the Members to introduce

8 themselves and tell us what area of the State you represent,

9 starting on my left.

10 REPRESENTATIVE ROCK: Good morning, everyone.

11 Todd Rock, Franklin County.

12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Let's go down over

13 there.

14 REPRESENTATIVE CUTLER: Good morning.

15 Bryan Cutler, southern Lancaster County, 100th

16 District.

17 REPRESENTATIVE KELLER: Good morning.

18 Mark Keller, 86th District, which is all of Perry

19 and part of Franklin County.

20 REPRESENTATIVE ELLIS: Brian Ellis, 11th District,

21 Butler County.

22 REPRESENTATIVE GRELL: Good morning.

23 Glen Grell, 87th District, Cumberland County.

24 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Julie Harhart, 183d, Lehigh

25 and Northampton Counties. 6

1 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Todd Stephens, 151st,

2 Montgomery County.

3 REPRESENTATIVE DELOZIER: Sheryl Delozier,

4 Cumberland County, 88th District.

5 REPRESENTATIVE TOOHIL: Good morning.

6 Tarah Toohil, 116th, Luzerne County -- southern

7 Luzerne County.

8 MINORITY CHAIRMAN CALTAGIRONE: Tom Caltagirone,

9 Berks County, 127th.

10 REPRESENTATIVE MARSICO: Ron Marsico, Dauphin

11 County, 105th Legislative District.

12 Karen.

13 MS. DALTON: Karen Dalton, counsel to the Judiciary

14 Committee, Representative Ronald Marsico, Chairman.

15 REPRESENTATIVE MARSICO: Once again, thank you for

16 being here, and welcome. We're going to be discussing HB 1739

17 and the Marsico amendment to the bill.

18 HB 1739 is Representative Julie Harhart's bill, and

19 by the way, as many of you know, she's been working very long

20 and hard with this bill for a number of legislative sessions,

21 and I just want to commend her for her leadership and her

22 persistence with this legislation. And I have got to say that,

23 because she has been very persistent, not just with this Chair

24 but this Chair and other Chairs and leaders. So we commend

25 you, Julie, and we're certainly pleased to have a hearing on 7

1 this bill.

2 Her bill creates a funding stream at the

3 Commonwealth level for children's advocacy centers. The House

4 Judiciary Committee took a tour of the Children's Advocacy

5 Center of Lehigh County in May, and I am pleased to continue

6 the dialogue with Members of the committee and the staff of

7 Lehigh County's Children's Center, who will present testimony

8 here today, and we welcome new voices to the conversation.

9 As introduced, the bill creates the Child Abuse

10 Multidisciplinary Response Account in the State Treasury.

11 Money in the account would be generated by an additional fee on

12 certain court filings. My amendment proposes an alternative

13 way to create a fund dedicated to helping children's centers,

14 and the amendment would add a $10 fee to child abuse background

15 checks for those who seek to work in a school or a daycare

16 setting and those that work with children.

17 Consistent with current law, the fee would not apply

18 to persons who seek child abuse background clearances from the

19 Department of Public Welfare in order to become foster parents

20 or adoptive parents or to volunteer with rape crisis centers or

21 domestic violence shelters or with Big Sisters or Big Brothers

22 of America.

23 My intention is to create a link between the money

24 being raised and the children we seek to help. This seemed the

25 best way, but I'm open to hearing other points of view. Of 8

1 course, Representative Harhart is the same with that.

2 According to our internal estimates, this amendment

3 would raise about $4 million a year, which is an amount far

4 greater than our internal estimate of the money generated by

5 HB 1739 as currently written.

6 Just before I turn this over, I just want to make

7 some housekeeping remarks as well. The committee asked

8 Secretary Alexander to or another person to testify on behalf

9 of the Department of Public Welfare. The Secretary has

10 respectfully declined, as he wants the Task Force on Child

11 Protection to issue its report and recommendations regarding

12 amendments to the Child Protective Services Law before taking a

13 position on legislation dealing with abused children. The

14 committee understands and respects the Secretary's position.

15 Additionally, the committee will keep the record

16 open only to receive written comments at a later point.

17 With that, now I recognize Representative Harhart

18 for opening remarks. Representative Harhart.

19 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Before I begin, I, too,

20 want to thank Chairman Marsico for holding this public hearing

21 on HB 1739, which, you know, it's a bill to establish a funding

22 mechanism for children's advocacy centers in Pennsylvania.

23 In May, the House Judiciary Committee toured the

24 child advocacy center in my home county of Lehigh. Some of the

25 professionals from the Lehigh County Children's Advocacy Center 9

1 are here today, and I want to welcome you and am interested in

2 listening to your testimonies.

3 I also thank Mr. Chairman and the Members of the

4 House Judiciary Committee for your hard work on this issue, and

5 I want to thank the witnesses that will testify today for their

6 commitment to and work on behalf of the Commonwealth's

7 children. We all owe them a debt that cannot be repaid.

8 What is a child advocacy center? Essentially, a

9 child advocacy center is a vocal point for the delivery of

10 medical care and mental health treatment to child victims of

11 physical and sexual abuse. It's a one-stop shop for the

12 tiniest victims of crime. A child advocacy center brings

13 together doctors, nurses, prosecutors, social workers, and

14 police in order to provide a unique and essential program of

15 treatment and healing.

16 The multidisciplinary approach gives these wounded

17 children the best chance to recover and also provides the most

18 effective way to bring predators to justice.

19 The children's advocacy center utilizes techniques

20 which not only minimize the trauma of a child who must tell a

21 heartbreaking story of abuse but also employs strategies to

22 increase the odds of gaining convictions.

23 Approximately five children a day die in the United

24 States as a result of abuse. More than three out of four of

25 those children are under the age of four. 10

1 Ninety percent of the victims of child sexual abuse

2 know their predators. Sixty percent are molested by a family

3 member. Sadly, Pennsylvania is not immune.

4 According to the reports published by the Department

5 of Public Welfare, 33 children died at the hands of a predator

6 as the result of abuse in 2010, and 34 children died as a

7 result of abuse in 2011. And as you know, it is impossible to

8 quantify the human cost of a child's victimization. However,

9 it is possible to quantify the consequences of child abuse on a

10 child victim who grows into adulthood.

11 According to Childhelp, 36 percent of women in

12 prison in the United States were abused as children; 14 percent

13 of men in prison in the United States were abused as children.

14 Children who are victims of abuse are 59 percent more likely to

15 be arrested as juveniles, 28 percent more likely to be arrested

16 as adults, 30 percent more likely to commit violent crimes, and

17 over 60 percent of adults in drug rehabilitation centers report

18 being abused as children. Approximately 30 percent of child

19 victims of abuse will later abuse their own children, and child

20 victims of abuse are 25 percent more likely to experience teen

21 pregnancy.

22 Children who have been sexually abused are two to

23 three times more likely to abuse alcohol and four times more

24 likely to develop an addiction to illegal drugs. This is why I

25 am encouraged by the committee's interest in HB 1739, which 11

1 provides the funding mechanism for the child advocacy centers

2 in Pennsylvania.

3 And Chairman Marsico did go over what his amendment

4 will do. I had a little bit of an overview on that, so I will

5 just forego that. But again, I do want to thank Chairman

6 Marsico for his efforts, and I am sure there will be further

7 discussions about how to generate money for the fund as well as

8 the other provisions on the bill, and I welcome that discussion

9 and stand ready to assist the committee in any way.

10 And for the sake of our children and for the sake of

11 our taxpayers, we need to encourage the work of children's

12 advocacy centers as well as nurture the founding and growth of

13 additional children's advocacy centers throughout Pennsylvania.

14 We need to help ensure that children's advocacy centers

15 continue to be their multidisciplinary arms in which the

16 youngest victims of abuse can find solace, comfort, and

17 healing.

18 Again, I thank you, Chairman, and I thank you all

19 for being here.

20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: The Chair recognizes

21 Chairman Caltagirone for a brief statement.

22 MINORITY CHAIRMAN CALTAGIRONE: Thank you,

23 Mr. Chairman.

24 And currently, I think it's pretty well understood

25 that there's no statutory funding for the children's advocacy 12

1 centers in the Commonwealth, and typically these centers

2 receive their funding through the Federal Government,

3 charitable organizations, private gifts, and sponsoring

4 institutions.

5 So I think this piece of legislation sponsored by

6 Representative Harhart will receive my personal support,

7 because I think it's absolutely needed and I think the time has

8 come, with everything that has been going on in this State,

9 that we absolutely have to get this legislation moving and get

10 the funding stream online to help these centers throughout the

11 Commonwealth and get some order out of this chaos. So I'm

12 completely supportive, Julie, of your legislation.

13 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

14 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

15 The Chair recognizes the presence of Representative

16 Sabatina from Philadelphia. What district is that?

17 REPRESENTATIVE SABATINA: 174.

18 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: 174. Okay.

20 PANEL I

22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: With that, we're going

23 to proceed with Panel I. Panel I is welcomed: Abbie Newman,

24 who is the Executive Director of the Mission Kids Child

25 Advocacy Center of Montgomery County and also President of the 13

1 Pennsylvania Chapter of the Child Advocacy Centers and

2 Multidisciplinary Teams; and also Charles Laputka, President of

3 the Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh County, Board of Directors.

4 Welcome. It's good to see you again. Whoever wants

5 to go first, you go right ahead.

6 MS. NEWMAN: Thank you.

7 Good morning, Chairman Marsico and Chairman

8 Caltagirone and Members of the Judiciary Committee. Thank you

9 for the opportunity to testify here today.

10 As you were just told, my name is Abbie Newman. I'm

11 the Executive Director of Mission Kids Child Advocacy Center in

12 Montgomery County and the Pennsylvania Chapter of Child

13 Advocacy Centers and Multidisciplinary Teams.

14 If it's all right with you, since you have my

15 written statement, if I could give you highlights and, you

16 know, please, it may not be your custom, but if you'd like to

17 interrupt me and ask me questions, that's fine, too.

18 As Representative Harhart was talking about, the

19 statistics are absolutely staggering. One in four girls and

20 one in six boys throughout the United States will be victims of

21 child sexual abuse before the age of 18, and we have no reason

22 to believe that the statistics in Pennsylvania are any

23 different from anyplace else.

24 Child abuse occurs, child sexual abuse in

25 particular, in every ZIP Code, every race, every ethnicity, in 14

1 every community. More than 90 percent of the time, it is not

2 stranger-danger but somebody that the child knows who is close

3 to them and to their family, and more than 50 percent of the

4 time, possibly 60 percent of the time, somebody who is actually

5 a family member.

6 Child abusers keep the silence of their victims by a

7 process known as grooming. As you've heard in the news,

8 increasing levels of touch become more acceptable over a long

9 period of time -- months or even years. It's unusual, although

10 not unheard of, but unusual that it's really just the immediate

11 attack on a child. It takes time, and that's the grooming

12 process.

13 And when you consider that this is now being done by

14 somebody who is close, not only to the child but to the family,

15 the abuser is grooming the family and the community as much as

16 they are abusing the child and grooming the child. So by the

17 time the abuse occurs, the child now may believe that they are

18 somehow at fault, that they have invited this touching. They

19 may be being threatened.

20 And then in their mind, what happens if they tell?

21 What happens if it is Mom's brother or Grandpa who's doing this

22 abuse? What is this going to do to the family dynamic if this

23 child tells? What happens at Thanksgiving dinner?

24 What if it's a clergy member? What if they're not

25 believed? And you know that the abuser is telling them that 15

1 nobody's going to believe them because of the abuser's position

2 to both the child and the family.

3 In communities that don't have a child advocacy

4 center and prior to child advocacy centers being developed,

5 what would happen is that when child abuse was reported, the

6 child would need to go to the police station, which is meant

7 for criminals and to intimidate them, or to a busy emergency

8 room, or they might be interviewed in the principal's office.

9 Who went to the principal's office in school unless you were in

10 trouble for something that you did?

11 The child had to then relive this horror and what

12 happened to them over and over and over again with each story,

13 and by the time they would get to trial, what would happen is

14 that often the child would not be able to get up on the stand

15 one more time, tell their story, this time to a judge in a

16 black robe, a jury with 12 people, as their testimony is being

17 judged and the abuser and the abuser's supporters sitting right

18 in front of them. And what would happen is that often, the

19 child would fold; they couldn't go forward; the case would fall

20 apart; the abuser would walk away; and the child and the family

21 would be left in a worse condition than when they started.

22 What now happens with a child advocacy center is

23 that the child is like the hub of a wheel, and all of the

24 agencies whose job it is to protect the child are like the

25 spokes. So you have the District Attorney's Office, Children 16

1 and Youth Services, law enforcement, medical, mental health,

2 victim advocacy services, who all come to the child advocacy

3 center where the child is the hub. And what happens is that

4 the child is interviewed by a specially trained forensic

5 interviewer whose only job it is is to ask these children

6 questions in an open-ended, development-appropriate fashion,

7 so that it is a nonleading interview; it's not tainted.

8 Often the testimony is recorded so that there's no

9 question later on, "How was this question asked?" "What was

10 the child's response?" And all of these parties make up the

11 multidisciplinary team.

12 Law enforcement, Children and Youth Services,

13 district attorneys, can watch by closed-circuit television so

14 they get the benefits of the live testimony without having to

15 make the child repeat the story. And there's nothing like live

16 testimony when you watch a forensic interviewer who is talking

17 to a child about "What's your favorite subject in school?" and

18 the child is happy and animated, and then will say something

19 like, "Do you know why you're here today?" and suddenly the

20 child's head goes down and they start playing with their hair

21 and no longer making eye contact. You can't get that in a

22 written statement anyplace.

23 Every child advocacy center is a child-friendly

24 environment. We had one interview that was conducted at

25 Mission Kids of a 17-year-old girl. The alleged abuser was her 17

1 stepfather. He was an upstanding -- or so we thought -- member

2 of the community. He was wealthy. He was very involved. And

3 this girl was noted to be withdrawn, not doing very well in

4 school, and the father just said, you know, she's a typical

5 teenager; we have problems with her; you know everybody, you

6 all have teenage daughters, you know what they're like. And he

7 was a single father, and everybody thought he was just doing

8 the best that he could. Well, she finally told a friend that

9 her father had been raping her repeatedly for years and years

10 and years with drugs and alcohol. The friend told a teacher,

11 the teacher reported it to Children and Youth Services, and the

12 child was interviewed at Mission Kids.

13 When the initial interview by very seasoned

14 detectives interviewed that stepfather, they thought that he

15 was absolutely innocent, that he did nothing wrong. He was

16 very believable and convincing. And then the interview was

17 done at the child advocacy center, with all the team members

18 watching, including the detectives, and suddenly their view of

19 that case changed. More evidence was looked into, was found.

20 The case went to a full-blown trial. And where previously this

21 abuser may have walked or they may not have even continued with

22 the investigation, he was convicted and sentenced to the full

23 amount that he could get under law.

24 The National Children's Alliance, which is the

25 national accreditation body for child advocacy centers, 18

1 supports different organizational structures, and what's

2 important about that is that there's no one set way to do it so

3 that it works for every community.

4 Mission Kids is a nonprofit entity. As

5 Representative Harhart said, it can be a governmental agency,

6 part of a prosecution or Children and Youth Services, it can be

7 part of an umbrella organization, whatever works best for the

8 community, and that's the point of a child advocacy center. It

9 can be made so that it fits the needs of each community.

10 But regardless of what type of entity is housed, the

11 ultimate success of any child advocacy center lies in the fact

12 that it is the only entity to bring together all partner

13 agencies in a collaborative effort, and all partners feel equal

14 ownership of the process.

15 A challenge that many centers face is sustainability

16 and limited funding. There is never a fee to the child and

17 families for services. Some agencies are able to obtain some

18 compensation from partner agencies, but the remaining balance

19 must be raised through private donors, foundations, and special

20 events.

21 Members of the committee, you have before you an

22 attachment that is the product of work done by the Pennsylvania

23 Chapter of Children's Advocacy Centers. It has had input from

24 directors across the State. These directors have the full

25 cooperation of their local police officers, County and Youth 19

1 Services, and district attorneys in their counties.

2 Child advocacy centers are the only organizations

3 which provide for the best interests of the child -- the

4 non-offending caregivers, the professional investigators, and

5 communities at large. Please, let's work together to advance

6 these critical public safety and pro-victim organizations for

7 the health of our communities, and thank you very much and for

8 your interest in this bill.

9 MR. LAPUTKA: Thank you, Chairman and Members of the

10 House Judiciary Committee today for inviting us down here to

11 speak about this topic. It is something that's very important

12 to a lot of people in this room.

13 I am Charles Laputka. I am the present President of

14 the Board of Directors of the Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh

15 County. Some of your Members came to visit us in May, and it

16 was a great experience to have them come to our office. The

17 only thing that overshadowed that experience is we are

18 presently in some financial turmoil at our center, and I'd

19 like to give you a brief history of how the center has come

20 about.

21 Prior to 1999, we had the six disciplines, that have

22 been mentioned by Representative Harhart and also by Abbie

23 Newman, that worked independently in their own offices

24 throughout the county. That was a process that had been in

25 place for years. 20

1 What came about next was the multidisciplinary team.

2 Some members of our community thought, hey, wouldn't this be

3 great, you know, if we could get everybody to work together?

4 Some of the people you'll hear from later, such as Terry Rentko

5 and Dr. John Van Brakle, who have come with me today from the

6 center, they started putting all of this together to get

7 everyone to work together, and that was great, but everyone

8 still had their separate offices. And what the child advocacy

9 center does for the multidisciplinary team, or at least in

10 Lehigh County as we had it set up, was to actually bring all of

11 those people together not just in spirit in monthly meetings

12 but in daily operations in the same location.

13 We provided a child-friendly place, not only for the

14 interview, as there are in some counties. In some counties, a

15 child advocacy center is a small place where you can interview

16 a child, have monthly meetings with the separate disciplines,

17 but in our county, we established in 1999 a location called a

18 co-location model where all of the different disciplines

19 actually operated in the same facility. We had local law

20 enforcement, we had the detectives, we had a medical exam room

21 in our building -- a one-stop shop that Abbie was talking

22 about. It was fantastic. I say "was," because at the moment,

23 we no longer have it. It was in place from late '99, early

24 2000, until about a year ago when we started having some

25 funding troubles. 21

1 It was a beautiful facility. If you could picture

2 it sort of like a pediatrician's office. You come in; there

3 are toys; there are welcoming people. Even though we had law

4 enforcement and detectives there, there are no guns, nothing

5 scary about it, not like going to the police station.

6 We had the interviews done there, the medical exam

7 rooms done there. When we lost funding about a year ago, we

8 had to downsize. With that, we lost our specific facility, and

9 what we have now is, we still have our MDT in place and we are

10 still trying to get our center back or another center like it

11 in the future.

12 Where we are is housed in a county government

13 building, similar to the building today. You have to go

14 through metal detectors to get in there. The hallways are not

15 primary colors with building blocks on them, things that

16 children can relate to. It works, because we still have our

17 co-location model, and it works for now, but we would like to

18 have our child-friendly place.

19 When you are a child victim of abuse, you need to be

20 in a situation where you feel comfortable if you're going to

21 tell your story. You don't feel comfortable when you walk up

22 to a cold government building and go in through metal detectors

23 and you're searched and -- that's not part of the process that

24 we like. We didn't have that in Lehigh County when we had our

25 center. Unfortunately, we're dealing with that now. Through 22

1 some funding, hopefully through the passage of this bill and

2 creation of a fund, we can have that back.

3 A lot of my statistical thunder was stolen by

4 Representative Harhart and Abbie speaking before me, so I'm not

5 going to be able to throw those out again and again because

6 you've already heard them. What's important and what I want to

7 talk to you about is the day-to-day operation of when a victim

8 walks into our facility.

9 When you have a victim come into our facility, I

10 just explained the differences between past and present, but

11 beyond those front doors what we have is, they're greeted by

12 some friendly workers; we have an interview specialist,

13 Terry Rentko, who will speak to you shortly and give you some

14 more information about that process. But in the past, children

15 were interviewed five, six, seven times by all the different

16 disciplines in preparation for court and things of that nature.

17 What our center has now presently, which we moved from the old

18 facility to our current facility, we have a fantastic interview

19 room where our child interview specialist, specially trained

20 Terry Rentko, comes in, sits down, meets with the child. We

21 have closed-circuit television; the children are made aware of

22 it. All of the other disciplines watch the interview through

23 the closed-circuit television, and rather than forming their

24 own opinion, as Ms. Newman stated in multiple interviews with

25 the child she discussed, everybody is there in the room. They 23

1 can talk together as the process is going on: "Hey, do you

2 notice that?" "Hey, what do you think about that?" Everybody

3 can join together. There can be six, seven, eight sets of eyes

4 and ears on the interviewed child instead of just one, the

5 person doing the interview. It allows for a collaborative

6 effort, which is fantastic. It reduces the trauma on the

7 child, which is fantastic. The less times you have to tell

8 that story, the better.

9 One of the benefits of this and having everyone work

10 together and get the child's story right the first time is that

11 it often leads to guilty pleas rather than prosecutions,

12 because the prosecutorial part of a child abuse investigation

13 is very traumatizing on the child, and if we have early

14 identification of the perpetrators, we can remove them from the

15 family, we can individualize them and hopefully get them to

16 plea to what they have done as opposed to allow additional time

17 for the child to be abused in the home before the person is

18 identified, such as in Ms. Newman's story, and get them out of

19 the community as fast as possible or get them the treatment

20 that they need so that they don't keep doing this in the

21 future.

22 Another important thing that the child advocacy

23 center does that the six disciplines don't do independently in

24 a multidisciplinary team is community awareness. Our CAC in

25 Lehigh County has a two-part mission, the first part, of 24

1 course, being the treatment of the child, but the second part

2 being community awareness.

3 What we do is we have annual fundraisers, and in

4 those fundraisers, it's community awareness first and

5 fundraising second. Of course, money's very important, which

6 is why we're here today, but also so is community awareness.

7 We want children that are in the community to know if they are

8 not safe or if they feel that they are being abused or they

9 feel that they just need to talk to somebody, that those people

10 are there.

11 Now, the child advocacy center is not a direct

12 referral facility, meaning you don't call the child advocacy

13 center if you feel you're an abused child. You go through the

14 normal channels of government. The difference is how it's

15 dealt with once you arrive there. It comes to the child

16 advocacy center and all of the teams are in it from the

17 beginning, as opposed to a referral directly to CYS where a

18 child can be interviewed, maybe the case is picked up, maybe

19 it's not, maybe they have to tell their story again. We've got

20 everybody together right from the beginning.

21 We go into the schools with our fundraisers. We

22 have a Read On Program that both encourages children to read,

23 which is always fantastic, plus we give them a presentation

24 about feeling safe in your home. We don't directly discuss

25 child abuse because that turns a lot of people off, but we talk 25

1 about being safe and how all the children have the right to be

2 safe.

3 Along with that, we also offer a Blue Scarf Drive in

4 Lehigh County, which is where we have several women and groups

5 that knit for us scarves that we hand out to children at the

6 schools as a symbol of being safe and warm, and on every one of

7 those scarves there is a little label with the ChildLine

8 hotline number that they can call if they don't feel safe or if

9 they want to talk to somebody. It's a fantastic community

10 awareness campaign that we are very proud to continue. Even

11 though we don't presently have the structure that we used to,

12 we are still fulfilling those very important missions of

13 community awareness and treatment of the child.

14 What we need from this bill is to create a fund to

15 get some money back to the child advocacy centers, to all of

16 the counties. One of the things that I didn't hear anyone

17 specifically mention yet today is that there are currently

18 21 existing child advocacy centers and there are 33 counties

19 that don't have them. We need to get money to those counties

20 that don't have them so that they can start something. And it

21 doesn't have to be as grand as Lehigh County was a year ago,

22 but something is better than nothing.

23 Funding is absolutely imperative, and we need to

24 develop a State source of funding. The funding that we lost

25 that helped us have our center was a county, and money's tight 26

1 everywhere. So anything that any of you can do to assist with

2 that would be wonderful.

3 Thank you.

4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Questions from the

5 Members?

6 Before we go to questions, I just want to recognize

7 Representative Gillespie from York County.

8 Representative Stephens, a question?

9 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

10 Thank you both for being here. Just a quick

11 question for you both.

12 I've worked with Abbie at Mission Kids and some of

13 the fundraising that I know they have to undertake. Could you

14 each just maybe give an assessment of how much time you devote

15 to raising money just to sustain your organization? Just a

16 ballpark? Or if there's somebody else on your staff that

17 helps, too. I mean---

18 MS. NEWMAN: I was going to say, we have reached the

19 point where we have hired somebody 20 hours a week who does

20 grant writing for us, and she just told me last week when I

21 asked her to do another one that she's well over her time; she

22 doesn't have time to do it.

23 We are very lucky that we have had a full-time

24 volunteer on staff who handles our annual event and who also

25 does fundraising for us. So that's, let's say, one-and-a-half 27

1 positions right there. And then it is part of everybody's

2 obligation as being a staff member that they must do some kind

3 of fundraising as part of what they build into their job every

4 day.

5 Quite a bit.

6 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Okay.

7 MR. LAPUTKA: In our facility, when we had the large

8 facility, we had a budget of about, a little shy of $500,000 a

9 year. That was an operating budget. A large part of that

10 budget was donated by the county.

11 As far as the time that goes into it, we had two

12 full-time employees, a full-time director, and also a full-time

13 fundraising and community relations person. So it took two

14 people to have the child advocacy center at that level.

15 Where we are right now is an entirely volunteer

16 basis at the moment, in addition to the county government

17 employees of the six disciplines who have their jobs that work

18 with this. At the moment, we are entirely on a volunteer basis

19 of all the Board of Directors, myself as the interim Acting

20 Executive Director.

21 And to have it on the -- it depends; the amount of

22 time you want to put in is the scale that you will have. To

23 have the small scale that we have now, which works but is not

24 the best, it doesn't take that much. To have the large scale

25 that we had before, it took two full-time employees. 28

1 You know, I am doing this as a volunteer position.

2 I also have an active private law practice. So it doesn't take

3 that much. It doesn't take away from my practice. It can be a

4 few hours a week if you want to have a small facility.

5 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Okay.

6 MS. NEWMAN: And what I wanted to add that I

7 forgot, and how could I, sitting next to the President of the

8 Board of Lehigh County, is that my entire Board of Directors,

9 we have over 30 people on our board, and that's what they do;

10 they are a fundraising board. And we are successful because

11 they are very, very successful as far as fundraisers. That's a

12 lot of people putting in. Our directors put in quite a bit of

13 time.

14 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: And what's your total

15 annual budget at Mission Kids?

16 MS. NEWMAN: It's just over $600,000, and I would

17 say that on top of that we have in-kind donations such as the

18 full-time volunteer and other people who donate a good amount

19 of their time. If we paid them, we have figured out that that

20 would add up to be another $150,000 a year.

21 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: And do you get any other,

22 I mean, what type of--- And this is my last question, Mr.

23 Chairman, I promise -- for this panel.

24 Just as a percentage, private funding versus public

25 funding? Ballpark? 29

1 MS. NEWMAN: Gosh, we're probably 65 percent public

2 funded? I mean, private funded in donations.

3 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Okay. Thank you very

4 much.

5 MR. LAPUTKA: Thank you.

6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Any other questions?

7 Okay; great job today.

8 MS. NEWMAN: Can I?

9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Sure.

10 MS. NEWMAN: I forgot one other story. I'm sorry.

11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Go ahead.

12 MS. NEWMAN: Can I have 1 more minute with that?

13 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Go right ahead.

14 MS. NEWMAN: I had a meeting last week with an adult

15 survivor of child sexual abuse. He's a man in his fifties, a

16 very successful individual, and we were talking about Mission

17 Kids and what we do. And Mission Kids had done an ad last year

18 that said imagine reliving the worst day of your life over and

19 over and over again, and this was somebody on the board, a

20 volunteer, a fundraising thing to do. He said that he saw that

21 ad and he said, "Abbie, what kept going through my mind is that

22 it wasn't the 1 day, it was 2 days." And I said, "What do you

23 mean?" He said, "Well, the first worst day of my life was the

24 day of the abuse." It was a coach at his school in middle

25 school. He said, "The second worst day of my life which was 30

1 equally as bad, and 40 years later I still think about each of

2 those days every day, was the day of the investigation," and

3 that's what I would like to leave this panel with.

4 Thank you.

5 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Thank you very much.

6 Excellent presentation.

7 MR. LAPUTKA: Thank you.

8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Thanks for coming down.

9 MS. NEWMAN: Thank you.

11 PANEL II

13 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Panel II is

14 Dr. John Van Brakle, Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics,

15 Lehigh Valley Health Network; and also Theresa Rentko, the

16 Child/Forensic Interview Specialist of Lehigh County.

17 Welcome to the Capitol. Good to see you again.

18 MS. RENTKO: Good morning.

19 I'm going to give you just a little bit of my

20 background so you know what I mean by the "good old days" when

21 I use that term.

22 I've been the Child/Forensic Interview Specialist

23 for the Child Advocacy Center of Lehigh County for the past

24 4 1/2 years. Prior to that, I was the Special Victims Unit

25 Child Abuse Investigator for the Lehigh County District 31

1 Attorney's Office for 15 years, investigating, arresting, and

2 going to court with those cases.

3 Prior to that, I was a Children and Youth caseworker

4 for 15 years working with ongoing abuse cases and doing

5 investigations. I continue to do training for several agencies

6 as well as attend any available training that pertains to my

7 specialty.

8 In the old days, prior to CACs, it was very

9 difficult to communicate with other agencies working the same

10 case that you had. Agencies didn't return phone calls to one

11 another. They didn't trust one another. There were turf

12 issues. They didn't understand each other's mandates. No one

13 wanted to give up the information they had. It resulted in

14 many cases being handled separately or not at all. There was

15 no central concept that this was all about the child.

16 In Jaycee Dugard's book "A Stolen Life," she states

17 that we live in a world where we rarely speak out loud or speak

18 out, and when someone does, often nobody is there to listen.

19 This is so true. We need to create a safe place for children

20 to speak out about what has happened to them, a child-friendly

21 place where they can feel comfortable telling someone in detail

22 about whatever terrible thing that has happened to them.

23 The CAC creates a place where children can not only

24 speak to someone who will listen but can do it safely, without

25 family or perpetrators being able to hear what they say. The 32

1 police, OCYS, and other members of the multidisciplinary team

2 can observe this forensic interview, which will save the child

3 from multiple interviews. Medical exams and services can be

4 done at the center or arranged quickly. A family advocate can

5 help the family with other services as needed.

6 The benefits of a CAC model are consistent and fast

7 followup to abuse reports, improved flow of information between

8 agencies, effective medical services and mental health

9 referrals, reduced trauma to children, and a

10 child-appropriate/friendly facility, resulting in increased

11 successful prosecutions.

12 A forensic interview is a structured conversation

13 with a child that is designed to elicit accurate accounts of

14 events. The goal is either to corroborate or refute

15 allegations. The objective is to discover the truth, not to

16 prove or disprove abuse.

17 Part of our protocol addresses how this is to be

18 done. The forensic interviewer is always alone in a room with

19 the child. In that room are only two chairs and a glass table.

20 There is a small camera on the wall. We use the I-record

21 system to record everything from the time the child enters the

22 room until they leave. The system also allows the team to

23 observe the entire interview from another room on a TV screen.

24 At some point during the interview, the interviewer

25 goes to the team to discuss any concerns or other information 33

1 they need. All questioning must be done so as not to taint

2 what the child says. Taint is when the interviewing techniques

3 of interested adults are so unduly suggestive and/or coercive

4 that the memory of the child is affected, rendering that child

5 incompetent to testify.

6 These recorded interviews are often shown to defense

7 attorneys and/or in court proceedings. If it appears that the

8 child's testimony has been tainted, the whole case will be

9 dismissed. Interviews done correctly have saved many children

10 from having to testify in the courtroom. Following the

11 interview, a copy is given to the police detective and one copy

12 is always kept in the DA's Office.

13 Questions must be asked in a sensitive and legally

14 defensive manner. We cannot ask questions that suggest what

15 happened. Emotions must be controlled. We must listen

16 carefully to what is and is not being said.

17 There is no interrogation. Can you imagine being a

18 child sitting with a stranger and having to tell them in detail

19 about sexual abuse? A child needs to be able to trust the

20 person talking with them and to be comfortable in that

21 environment. We offer that with the CAC model. Interviews are

22 not conducted in police stations, homes, or hospitals except in

23 the most unusual circumstances.

24 To have a child-friendly building and a team of

25 professionals is a long way from where we were in the old days. 34

1 We are co-located and quickly get involved as a team. We have

2 multidisciplinary team meetings. We brainstorm; we strategize.

3 Each person has a role in the case. We are so much more

4 effective in protecting our children.

5 We must continue to improve and move forward. We

6 need a safe place for the children to be heard and continue

7 training for all those who choose to do this work. And we have

8 to remember, when we help one child, we save many others.

9 Thank you.

10 DR. VAN BRAKLE: John Van Brakle. I'm the Chairman

11 of Pediatrics at Lehigh Valley Health Network and have been so

12 for over 20 years.

13 I have participated with my colleagues in Lehigh

14 County responding to questions of child abuse. During that

15 entire time and about 12 years ago, we opened the child

16 advocacy center, and I'm a member of the Board of Directors of

17 the CAC in Lehigh County.

18 We also, in my practice at the hospital, we see

19 children who come from many counties in Pennsylvania. Because

20 of the trauma service, because of the burn service, we have

21 children who are sent down because of questions of sexual

22 abuse, and so I get to interact with a variety of counties,

23 some of whom have CACs, some of whom are in the process of

24 developing them, and some who do not. And I will tell you that

25 I am a very strong advocate, because of this experience, for 35

1 child advocacy centers.

2 Charles talked about the physical location. One of

3 the things we have at the child advocacy center is a series of

4 protocols. We had great advantage from the National Children's

5 Alliance and from consultative advice when we developed this

6 team. It took us 2 years, I suppose, as we talked about this

7 in Lehigh County before we actually opened the CAC, and we

8 understood the model and how it worked and the protocols.

9 For example, Terry now is our forensic interviewer.

10 We did not have that prior to the CAC. I now do what we call a

11 minimal-facts exam. In other words, when I do the history, I

12 focus it on the medical aspects. The people in the DA's

13 Office, the people in the police, they all coordinate these

14 efforts, so we're not asking things in a very discoordinated

15 sort of way and that we can put things together in a much more

16 logical aspect.

17 We're also in a position where we can talk

18 professionally. So there are many times when I'm trying to

19 think through what the conclusions are in terms of a physical

20 injury that the other folks who have also had a wealth of

21 information and experience contribute to that, and as a team,

22 we come to much more timely results.

23 I always emphasize, when I'm talking to people, that

24 we tend to focus, understandably, on issues where children were

25 abused. We see a number of cases where at the end of the day, 36

1 we feel there's an alternate explanation. And in the past,

2 before we had the CAC, we would have experiences where the

3 turmoil in the family and the risk of separation of the child

4 from the family was much higher. And so when I now have a

5 question of child abuse in the emergency room at Lehigh Valley

6 Health Network, the people in Lehigh County come over and they

7 talk, both the police and the people from Children and Youth

8 come over, and they work together, and so it's a much more

9 timely response.

10 The other piece that I always mention is, because

11 I'm a pediatrician, is that I think we really need to

12 understand the impact that the way we approach these questions

13 has on children over the long course of time. You heard about

14 the statistics in terms of our prisons, in terms of our mental

15 health, in terms of children who don't graduate from school.

16 This all starts -- it doesn't end with the legal process. The

17 legal process is very important, and the fact that it works

18 better, I believe, in itself, is worthy of supporting this.

19 The fact that taxpayers spend a lot less money, I think it's

20 worthy of it. But to me, the major issue is that the impact on

21 children and the way we approach this in a family-centered

22 manner is tremendous, and from that alone, it's worth the

23 investment in our future.

24 It's also, in terms of the education process, we do

25 a lot of education between disciplines. One of my favorite 37

1 things to do is, periodically, I get asked to give a

2 presentation to the new people who are coming in to the DA's

3 Office, and it is really very interesting when you interact

4 with the various disciplines. There are things that they

5 assume I know that I don't; there are things that they assume

6 they know that they don't, and as we put this together, we come

7 to much more substantial results.

8 I think that at its simplicity, it's simply a matter

9 of coordination in terms of the various disciplines where they

10 are required to respond here. I'm asked very frequently, are

11 we going to close the child advocacy center or are we not going

12 to have it in the future, and my response has always been, when

13 ChildLine stops getting reports of people who are concerned

14 about the possibility of child abuse in the community, then I

15 am going to say no, that I'm not going to participate in the

16 CAC. But until then, I really continue to volunteer my time

17 and efforts.

18 I did want to leave some time for questions, if

19 there are.

20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: We can do that,

21 questions.

22 Before we go to questions, I recognize

23 Representative Waters from Philadelphia County; and also who

24 snuck in the back door, I see him back there, Representative

25 Creighton from Lancaster County. 38

1 Questions from Members?

2 Representative Keller.

3 REPRESENTATIVE KELLER: Just a question, Doctor.

4 As a pediatrician, when a child comes in to your

5 office, is there any indication, can you tell, is there

6 anything that points out if that child has been sexually

7 abused?

8 DR. VAN BRAKLE: Is it a question of abuse? Yes;

9 one of the---

10 REPRESENTATIVE KELLER: I mean, is there something

11 that, you know, maybe it's not obvious, but to you as a

12 pediatrician?

13 DR. VAN BRAKLE: There are a number of things that

14 raise a red flag, as I would put it.

15 Sometimes in our trauma center we will see an injury

16 that is just not at all consistent. If you have a 3-month-old

17 child with a fracture of the leg and the story was that the

18 child was rolling off the couch, little people who are 3 weeks

19 of age do not roll off the couch.

20 We have children who come in and the parents feel

21 that the child has some type of a bleeding problem, because

22 they have multiple bruises that come and are inexplicable, and

23 in fact we have, of course, a very medical way of going about

24 eliminating this.

25 But there are other explanations, and sometimes the 39

1 nature of the injuries: if it's a symmetrical injury; if these

2 are repeated injuries; things that are consistent with what we

3 call a pattern injury, if that child has been hit with an

4 object.

5 There are times with sexual abuse, children who are

6 being sexually abused very frequently do not bring this

7 information out immediately. If they're young, they may not

8 know that this doesn't happen in other people's homes.

9 Most of these children just want it to stop. They

10 do not want to talk about it. Sometimes they feel guilty about

11 it. So you see some behaviors in children.

12 And then sometimes, just out of the blue, the

13 children will say something, and their parents will bring them

14 in or their caregiver will bring them in. Or I had an instance

15 where a girl who was 12, who had been sexually abused for

16 years, came in one day and she said, this is very hard for me

17 to say, but my father is starting to abuse my younger sister

18 and I have to tell you what's been happening. So there are a

19 variety of things that bring this to our attention.

20 I had, just last week I met with one of the counties

21 very close to us, and their issue was they could not get a

22 timely response when they had a question of -- they just needed

23 a medical evaluation for child abuse. This is totally

24 unacceptable, for a number of reasons.

25 Some of the findings, most of these cases do not 40

1 have positive findings. If you're going to find something

2 acutely in terms of forensic information -- everybody watches

3 these shows on TV -- you're going to get it when it's 24 hours

4 afterwards. But that's still the minority of cases.

5 So this process in how the information is obtained

6 is so important, and I am very much supportive of this idea of

7 forensic interviewers who understand what you can say, what you

8 can't say, how you get information from children. They are

9 very neutral in the way that they approach this, and it is the

10 way, really, that we need more of these resources in

11 Pennsylvania.

12 REPRESENTATIVE KELLER: Okay. Thank you both very

13 much for your testimony.

14 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Representative Harhart,

16 a question?

17 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

18 I think in my remarks I said that, you know, you go

19 from 4 below as far as when a child is being abused. What was

20 the youngest that you ever had to examine and determine that

21 that child had child abuse? Was it 2 years old? 4 months old?

22 2 months old? How old -- or young?

23 DR. VAN BRAKLE: We have had children in their first

24 month of life who had been physically abused to the point of --

25 particularly with head injuries, this idea of "don't shake the 41

1 baby." We had this phenomena where -- I try to say this in a

2 politically correct way here, because it is both men and women

3 who abuse these children. But there's usually a baby crying in

4 the background, and people are ignoring it and something

5 happens. Sometimes there are drugs involved, sometimes there's

6 alcohol involved, but they just become infuriated.

7 I've had people tell me that they almost see

8 themselves out of control, squeezing the baby's chest and

9 violently shaking the baby back and forth, which results in

10 intracranial bleeding; it results in fractures, and we have

11 seen this in the first weeks of life.

12 The youngest child I have ever seen with sexual

13 abuse and attempt at penetration was under 4 months of age.

14 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Four months of age.

15 DR. VAN BRAKLE: It is a world that fortunately most

16 of us have never experienced. But it is very important to

17 address these issues when they arise.

18 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Thank you, Doctor.

19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Questions?

20 Okay. Thanks for your time.

22 PANEL III

24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Next on the panel,

25 the next panel, is actually Seán McCormack. Seán is the 42

1 Chief Deputy District Attorney in Dauphin County, and he's

2 representing the Pennsylvania District Attorneys

3 Association.

4 Welcome. It's good to see you again.

5 MR. McCORMACK: Thank you. I guess I'm a panel of

6 one.

7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: One; a distinct panel of

8 one.

9 MR. McCORMACK: Well, I actually, just to give you a

10 little background, I've been with the Dauphin County District

11 Attorney's Office since 1989, and since 1995 I've been

12 prosecuting child sexual abuse cases, and currently I'm the

13 head of our Child Abuse Prosecutions unit.

14 And I'm also with the Pennsylvania District

15 Attorneys Association, the Chair of our Child Abuse Coalition,

16 which is a network of child abuse prosecutors across the State.

17 We meet quarterly. A lot of times I halfheartedly joke that

18 it's a support group, as we kind of exchange different stories

19 and cases that we're prosecuting across the State.

20 The issue of child abuse is one that really, when

21 you start pulling back the curtains and exposing what's going

22 on with child abuse, as Dr. Van Brakle was just saying, it is

23 such a horrible picture, and it is occurring each day in every

24 one of our communities, whether people are looking for it or

25 not. 43

1 Talking about young children, I will be prosecuting

2 in a few weeks a case, a homicide case, of a young man who is

3 accused of killing his 5-week-old. I have prosecuted cases

4 over the years that I have been very thankful from the response

5 of the legislature, where I had a little girl who was so

6 injured during the course of a rape, she was 5 years old, and

7 Mom's boyfriend, through the act of penetration and those sorts

8 of things, injured her so badly that she nearly bled to death.

9 And she needed a colostomy bag and those sorts of things for a

10 period of time as a result of the rape, and the legislature

11 responded to that issue and came up with a new charge, which

12 was called rape of a child and then rape of a child with

13 serious bodily injury, which increased the penalties. And if

14 today someone were to commit that same crime, the penalty

15 wouldn't be 10 to 20 years as it was back in the day that that

16 case was prosecuted; it would be a lifetime sentence as we

17 currently now have.

18 So that brings me today to address another issue

19 that I think we need to deal with, and that is the support of

20 children's advocacy centers. And I've had the unique position

21 from 1995 to today to see the evolution of child abuse

22 prosecutions in the State of Pennsylvania and in Dauphin County

23 in particular.

24 When I started doing these prosecutions, we had

25 three people. We had a county detective; we had a person, a 44

1 paralegal, known as a child abuse coordinator; and myself.

2 That was our team, and we had received a grant through PCCD to

3 kind of seed our county and start a child abuse unit.

4 We were lucky at that time that PinnacleHealth --

5 Polyclinic Hospital at the time -- was founding a child

6 advocacy center. When I first started doing child abuse

7 prosecutions, I had absolutely no idea what a child advocacy

8 center was.

9 Our Children's Resource Center, as it's called in

10 Harrisburg, which is located right up here on North Third

11 Street in the city of Harrisburg, when we founded that center,

12 it has evolved over the years from what it was -- one doctor

13 and one assistant -- to being a center that now has forensic

14 interviewers, that now has the facilities to record interviews,

15 the facilities to meet, to discuss cases, and those sorts of

16 things.

17 I went from a situation where I would go to police

18 departments and really try to beg police officers to trust

19 allowing someone else to interview a victim, because police

20 officers over the years have been brought up with the idea that

21 they need to be the one to interview the victim; they need to

22 get a feel for the case and those sorts of things. It took

23 them having the experience of a children's advocacy center to

24 really see the worth of a center like this.

25 I recall early on in my career doing child abuse 45

1 cases where a detective told me, or actually I observed the

2 detective do an interview, and during the course of that

3 interview when he was asking the child where the child was

4 touched, he actually reached out and touched the inner leg of

5 the child and asked the child directly, "Did your daddy touch

6 you here?" A highly inappropriate question and the type of

7 question that, if the case goes to court, there is a good

8 chance, as it was talked before about taint, there's a good

9 chance that the judge is going to rule that that idea was

10 planted into the child's head, and as a result, that child will

11 not be allowed to testify in court. And since most cases are

12 based upon the testimony of the child, that case would be

13 thrown out.

14 When you have a children's resource center or a

15 children's advocacy center, what we have now is the child goes

16 to the center, we gather our police officers, someone from the

17 District Attorney's Office, someone from Children and Youth,

18 and we also have victim advocates present, and the child is

19 interviewed by a child interview specialist, someone who knows

20 how to ask the right questions and the child-appropriate

21 questions; someone who knows how, when there's a roadblock

22 thrown up by the child, how to get around that roadblock; how

23 to find a different way to ask that question in a nonleading

24 fashion, in a way that's not going to plant any ideas in the

25 child's head, but ask that question nonetheless. And you need 46

1 someone like that, and that's what child advocacy centers bring

2 to the table. They bring those child interview specialists to

3 the table where you have someone who knows how to ask the right

4 question.

5 If someone were to ask, and I'm sorry for getting

6 too explicit here, but if someone were to ask a 5-year-old

7 child, "Did you put your mouth on Daddy's penis?" and the child

8 says no, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. It might mean

9 that the question wasn't asked properly. Maybe the proper

10 question was, "Did any part of Daddy ever touch you?" "Well,

11 yes. Daddy's penis touched my mouth," or whatever the

12 child-appropriate terminology that they would use. And that's

13 the other thing; you want to make sure you're not introducing

14 terms to the child that they're not already using themselves.

15 And the reason why I bring that up is, on the one

16 hand, if I ask directly if Daddy's penis, if you put your mouth

17 on Daddy's penis, the child may not view it that way when they

18 were abused. They didn't do something; Daddy did something to

19 me. And that's the difference between just having a police

20 officer who doesn't have any training in this area just going

21 out and asking questions and having trained specialists.

22 The other thing that our Children's Resource Center

23 has -- and there are a lot of different models. You'll hear

24 about prosecution based, community based, and different models,

25 and it just means essentially the way in which it is formed. 47

1 We're lucky that ours is medical based. The child not only

2 gets an interview that is recorded by videotape but the child

3 also receives a medical examination. Ours is based in a

4 hospital. When the child is finished their interview, they

5 will go and they will get a medical exam.

6 What they will be seen by is a specialist. We're

7 lucky to have currently Dr. Paula George in the Children's

8 Resource Center, recognized across the State as an expert in

9 child abuse examinations.

10 If you take your child, and I mean no offense to

11 other professionals, but if you take your child perhaps to your

12 pediatrician, they do not necessarily have the same training,

13 skill, and equipment that a child advocacy center will.

14 There's a good chance they will not have a culpascope. A

15 culpascope is a specialized piece of equipment that has evolved

16 over the years which is really a light with a magnifying --

17 like able to magnify what they're looking at. It's

18 noninvasive. They're able to do an examination of that child,

19 magnifying it on the camera, and I've seen the doctors do this

20 and they do it in a way in which the children don't see it as

21 totally being invasive. A lot of times they'll show them their

22 belly button on the screen and "Look how big your belly button

23 can get" and those sorts of things. But they're able to, using

24 that piece of equipment, try to see if we can find any piece of

25 medical evidence that we can find so that when it gets to me in 48

1 court, we're able to introduce that in court and prove that

2 there is some corroborating evidence.

3 There was the question before about, you know, the

4 number of times that there is evidence and those sorts of

5 things, medical evidence. Well, I can tell you that one of the

6 benefits we have from having Dr. George at our Children's

7 Advocacy Center is the majority of the time in sexual assault

8 cases -- and yes, I say the "majority" of the time in sexual

9 assault cases -- there is no physical evidence -- no physical

10 evidence -- and that's something that most people and it's one

11 of the things that children's advocacy centers also do, which

12 is getting into the communities and educating the community.

13 We educate the community; I educate the community

14 through the jury system. And at a jury trial, I call

15 Dr. George to testify to explain why there is no medical

16 evidence, because a lot of times when people see there's no

17 medical evidence, they say there's no crime. The child says,

18 "I was penetrated." The child was 7 years old. The child is a

19 little girl who says she was penetrated; there must be some

20 type of physical evidence. The reality of the situation is,

21 the majority of the time there will not be physical evidence,

22 and Dr. George will explain that to you, will explain the

23 studies.

24 I believe there's a study out of Texas that examined

25 35 pregnant women, examining them and examining their hymens to 49

1 see if there was any medical evidence that they had had sex,

2 and the majority of those women did not have any evidence and

3 yet we knew that they had sex. There was no evidence of sexual

4 intercourse.

5 So the children's advocacy centers provide many,

6 many, many, many resources to a community and many resources,

7 from my perspective as a prosecutor, to the law enforcement

8 side and to Children and Youth in their investigations.

9 It's also a hub, as was described before, a key

10 feature when an investigation is being done, because it brings

11 the team together. We meet as prosecutors; we meet as

12 investigators; we meet as Children and Youth workers, and we

13 discuss how we're going to do the investigation next.

14 Investigations involve more than just going out and

15 interviewing people. We have a lot of tools that we didn't

16 utilize before. We utilize tools under the Wiretap Act where

17 we may have a parent or a victim, if the victim is old enough,

18 call the perpetrator, call the perpetrator and record that

19 conversation. And a lot of times you'll catch them by surprise

20 and they'll admit to the fact that they were abusing a child.

21 They will admit to that. That makes that case so much

22 stronger.

23 Before we did these coordinated investigations, if

24 the police were even considering doing that and Children and

25 Youth had already gone and notified the perpetrator that "Hey, 50

1 we've opened up an investigation," you've lost the element of

2 surprise; you've lost the ability to use that type of tool. By

3 having a children's advocacy center as a place to coordinate

4 your investigations, you're able to utilize that type of

5 activity and that type of investigative tool.

6 We also get together every other Thursday. I get

7 together with not just the investigators in a particular case

8 but all of the investigators in all of the cases that we are

9 doing in Dauphin County currently. And we staff those cases;

10 we discuss the cases. We discuss the status; we discuss what's

11 coming next.

12 The best part of having it in that type of

13 atmosphere with multiple jurisdictions present, just about at

14 every meeting we have, there's going to be a police officer

15 sitting across the table whose case it is not and he's going to

16 say, "Hey, I know that family. That family used to live in our

17 jurisdiction." If you're not coordinating these

18 investigations, if you're not pulling people together in

19 case-review-type scenarios, you lose the ability to coordinate

20 things and gain additional information.

21 You will have a more seasoned investigator and

22 sometimes even a Children and Youth caseworker who will say,

23 "Hal, have you thought about doing a consensual phone call?"

24 and throwing out those types of ideas.

25 The need for child advocacy centers across this 51

1 State is great. We have been lucky to have one that is housed

2 in the PinnacleHealth System. Even though it's in a hospital

3 system, we are fighting every year dealing with budgets and

4 those sorts of things. I know our center will be cutting two

5 positions very shortly because of funding issues in this

6 economy -- any way that we can find to support these advocacy

7 centers.

8 I had the opportunity to go up and view the Lehigh

9 Center a number of years ago, a beautiful facility, and they

10 had some things that we don't have. They had their Children

11 and Youth caseworkers actually onsite. I'd love to have that.

12 They had some detectives onsite. You know, that resource, when

13 people work together in that atmosphere, it gets rid of what I

14 used to face, which was Children and Youth workers who didn't

15 trust police and police officers who didn't trust Children and

16 Youth workers.

17 With our case-review meetings, by having those

18 meetings at our Children's Resource Center, we find that those

19 parties start talking to one another. They call each other.

20 They actually, amazingly, get together outside of work hours

21 and get together and socialize. They know each other's jobs,

22 and they learn each other's way they do things. This is what a

23 child advocacy center brings to the table.

24 Just one final thing. When you were talking earlier

25 about funding, and I saw that, you know, there was either the 52

1 court fees or a $10 fee on the background checks. If I can

2 throw out a third, perhaps an option that might help to

3 supplement. I don't think it would do it in and by itself, but

4 perhaps an idea that might help supplement, because every

5 dollar counts. I know it when we're looking at different

6 budgets every year.

7 License plates. Pennsylvania is one of the States

8 that does not have a child advocate license plate. If you go

9 to other States, some of our surrounding States, you will see

10 many times on the road, and it doesn't take long, you will see

11 a license plate a lot of times that has a little handprint.

12 You know, we have it, the specialized plates here in the State

13 of Pennsylvania. I know in a lot of other States, the people

14 that work in this field are the ones that go out and buy these

15 license plates and pay that extra additional funding. I think

16 it might be $15 additional or whatever it is, that additional

17 funding.

18 Again, every dollar counts. So perhaps that's an

19 idea that you might be able to use to perhaps supplement any

20 shortfalls you might find as you're trying to find money for

21 this type of a children's advocacy center, because they are so

22 important to investigating and prosecuting child abuse cases.

23 Thank you.

24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Seán, I do have a

25 question for you. 53

1 As far as the Dauphin County funding for the

2 Children's Resource Center, is the county providing moneys or

3 is it just PinnacleHealth for the resource center?

4 MR. McCORMACK: The county provides funding through

5 a contract with Children and Youth in a couple of different

6 ways.

7 One, when Children and Youth refer a child to the

8 Children's Resource Center, out of our Children and Youth

9 budget, there are certain moneys that are paid for that. And

10 then additionally, our Children and Youth office rents a space

11 at the children's advocacy center.

12 But despite the fact that we have a hospital, and

13 I've always thought that, well, we have a hospital and that's

14 great and we're in great shape, but the hospital is always

15 looking at the bottom line. And I know on occasion myself and

16 my boss, District Attorney Marsico, have met with the CEO of

17 PinnacleHealth when we felt that there was a good chance that

18 the center was either going to be cut back seriously or cut

19 completely.

20 And in today's day and age, you know, funding is

21 huge, and we spend a considerable amount of time fundraising,

22 putting on galas, going out in the community. We go up to the

23 Farm Show and coat-check. Whatever donation we can get from a

24 coat-check, we get.

25 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Okay. Thanks. 54

1 Representative Delozier.

2 REPRESENTATIVE DELOZIER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

3 First and foremost, thank you for everything you do

4 to fight for those victims in court, because that day is

5 extremely important to them when they hear that, hopefully,

6 guilty verdict, and all of those that are here today.

7 And I thought of this question, and it may have been

8 more appropriate to the first panel, but in your job in

9 prosecuting, obviously the centers work to make the case and

10 work with the victim, getting all the information, gathering

11 all the information and the evidence that you need to get that

12 guilty verdict. Where does the advocacy center's role end?

13 You know, certainly our goal is to move that victim,

14 to get that justice in the system certainly, but to move that

15 victim from being that victim to being a survivor and to taking

16 that "closure," to use the word that is typically used, and

17 moving past it and then certainly going on and hopefully having

18 a healthy and happy life. Certainly no one can change what has

19 happened. But that ability, where does the center end? Does

20 the center just work through the prosecutorial stages of the

21 victim's experience, or do they possibly facilitate onward

22 counseling or do they provide that afterward counseling?

23 MR. McCORMACK: It's decided by the community that

24 has a child advocacy center. I can tell you, in Dauphin County

25 we routinely do referrals for mental health issues, if 55

1 someone's dealing with that, or we routinely do referrals for

2 counseling and those sorts of things.

3 When we have our case reviewed, those meetings we

4 have every other Thursday, one of the things that we're

5 discussing in addition to, hey, these are the charges we should

6 be filing, or this, we ask the question quite frequently, what

7 do we need to do to help this child? You know, does this child

8 need counseling?

9 You know, a lot of times the question comes up, what

10 counseling does the perpetrator need, too? One of the sad

11 things is a significant number of the perpetrators we're seeing

12 right now are juveniles themselves, and many of them, not all

13 of them, but many of them have been victimized themselves over

14 the years.

15 So I guess where in the role that each center has is

16 defined by their community. We have tried to take an approach

17 that brings in as many disciplines as possible. And, you know,

18 even when the case is finished, we've had our center still

19 involved in cases even though I finished the prosecution, or

20 we've made a decision not to file criminal charges.

21 REPRESENTATIVE DELOZIER: Thank you.

22 I just, my biggest -- you watch them come through,

23 and like I said, that day in court is certainly very, very

24 important, but a lot of times, a lot of the work has just begun

25 in getting that victim to become that person in the community 56

1 that can continue their life as a survivor. So thank you very

2 much.

3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Representative Grell.

4 REPRESENTATIVE GRELL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

5 Seán, are you aware of any statistics out there that

6 have compared those counties that have these centers versus the

7 counties that don't in terms of prosecutions, convictions,

8 reversals, those kinds of things that would -- I mean, I'm not

9 questioning the value of these organizations, but if there is

10 some sort of empirical data on that, that would be really very

11 helpful to us.

12 MR. McCORMACK: Yeah. I don't know if the

13 Pennsylvania Chapter has any specific statistics. I can tell

14 you, I don't have statistics. I can tell you from the strength

15 of the cases that we are putting forth in court today compared

16 to the strength of the cases or the lack of strength of cases

17 before, the chances of getting a guilty plea, which I think is

18 one of the better statistics, the chances of getting a guilty

19 plea in one of these cases and the chances of a child never

20 having to testify I would imagine is definitely increased where

21 you're going to have a center.

22 One of the things that you get from the majority of

23 the centers -- and again, they're all based in each community,

24 so not all of them videotape. Your ability to videotape an

25 interview and utilize that interview either in court or if the 57

1 defense attorney, for example, sees the interview, there's a

2 good chance that they'll know that this child is going to do a

3 good job in court and will waive the charges and convince their

4 defendant that it's in their best interests to plead guilty.

5 The only---

6 REPRESENTATIVE GRELL: Well, I would just say that

7 if anybody who is part of the hearing today has any information

8 like that, it would be helpful to us.

9 The only other question I had for you, I think, is,

10 is there any statutory impediment to any county in the State

11 establishing one of these centers right now? Is there anything

12 -- you know, this bill primarily deals with funding, but is

13 there anything statutorily that we should be looking at to

14 authorize counties or to allow them to have the best possible

15 kind of center, or is this all just about funding?

16 MR. McCORMACK: No, it's not just about funding,

17 because one of the impediments that I have found, and I just

18 received a question from one of the other counties recently

19 that is having some difficulties, because we were lucky here;

20 we had all the right people in the right places at the time we

21 formed our center and our team. Some counties aren't that

22 lucky and there's a lot of mistrust and those sorts of things.

23 And when you get into the statutes, and I testified

24 before the legislative task force on child abuse that's

25 currently going on, and one of the things I suggested there is 58

1 we look at the definitions under the Child Protective Services

2 Law and then we look at the definitions under the Criminal

3 History Records Act. I've seen some, especially under the

4 Criminal History Records Act, I've seen some arguments put

5 forth that law enforcement can't share information with

6 Children and Youth and with other agencies because the CHRIA

7 prevents that. My reading of it doesn't -- I don't read it

8 that way, but there are other D.A.'s that do read it that way.

9 So there are different areas, and I'd be, you know,

10 glad to meet with anybody and provide some of those specifics

11 on that, because I think there are other sections and areas

12 that can be used to help foster this. But I don't think

13 there's anything specifically in the legislation that says, no,

14 your community can't build one of these centers.

15 REPRESENTATIVE GRELL: Thanks very much.

16 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Representative Stephens.

18 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

19 Just as sort of a followup with Representative

20 Grell's question.

21 I know when I was prosecuting child abuse cases in

22 Montgomery County and we did not have a CAC, we actually used

23 the Philadelphia CAC on occasion. Do you experience that here

24 in Dauphin? Do you have surrounding counties that may, on

25 specific cases, avail themselves of your, I guess you called it 59

1 a child resource center?

2 MR. McCORMACK: Yeah. The Children's Resource

3 Center, it's less now because of the number of child advocacy

4 centers that are being formed. At one time, it was serving

5 19 counties.

6 At this point in time, on almost a full-time basis,

7 they serve Dauphin County, which is where the majority of their

8 cases come from. They also serve Cumberland County and Perry

9 County. They have also, on occasion, served Lebanon County.

10 Before York County and Adams County formed their centers, they

11 were also interviewing and examining children from there.

12 But I know they go upwards of Schuylkill County, and

13 some of the counties in the center of the State refer children

14 down to their center.

15 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: So obviously those

16 surrounding counties view that model as a preferable model

17 in those cases as well to bring those children all that

18 distance.

19 MR. McCORMACK: And I can tell you, I'm also a

20 co-chair of the Children's Justice Act, which is Federal

21 funding that comes through the State through the Department of

22 Welfare, and we just finished the process of going through a

23 grant request, and a significant number of those grant requests

24 were from communities attempting to get funding to form child

25 advocacy centers. 60

1 So centers are out there trying to find funding in

2 any way that they can, down to the, as I said, coat-checks; you

3 know, every little dollar that you can get. And certainly a

4 bill, like the bill you have before you, is one that would

5 certainly help to foster -- it's not going to, I don't believe

6 you're going to be able to get a center completely funded by

7 this. You're always going to have to find additional funding

8 and those sorts of things. But if you're able to help in the

9 process and keep these centers above water, it certainly is a

10 good thing.

11 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Thank you.

12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Okay. Thanks, Seán. I

13 appreciate your time.

14 MR. McCORMACK: Thank you.

15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Do you have a question?

16 Representative Waters; I'm sorry.

17 MR. McCORMACK: Okay.

18 REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I

19 just thought of something.

20 Before you leave, I just wanted to ask you about,

21 has there been any data that would show an increase in the

22 need for this service over the last decade, more and more

23 cases, or is it maybe more and more people are beginning to

24 come forth?

25 MR. McCORMACK: You know, I can't speak as to 61

1 whether there's more cases, because I think historically the

2 number of cases reported was always a low number as to the

3 actual number of cases that occurred.

4 I think we are doing a much better job as a society

5 in making it easier for victims to come forward and making it

6 easier for people to report child abuse crimes. And certainly

7 the issues that we have in the State right now with Sandusky

8 and some of those things have certainly brought to the

9 forefront of many people's minds issues with mandated reporter

10 and those sorts of things.

11 I can tell you, we investigate open investigations

12 probably on about 500 child abuse allegations a year, and

13 that's Dauphin County, which is, I believe, a third-class

14 county. So, you know, we have a significant number of cases.

15 We have two full-time prosecutors and a third part-time

16 prosecutor that work on these cases, and many of our police

17 departments have at least one detective assigned to these

18 cases.

19 So it is definitely a problem that is not going away

20 at the moment. You know, I hope to get to that point at some

21 point, but at this point in time there is a significant need

22 for these types of services.

23 REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: And in your years of service

24 in this area, is it only sexual abuse cases that you identify

25 as child abuse or are there other types of abuses? 62

1 MR. McCORMACK: No; we prosecute sexual abuse cases,

2 which happens for us to be our largest portion of our caseload,

3 but physical abuse cases and neglect-type cases also. I mean,

4 we've had cases with infants that have been starved. We've had

5 children that are neglected, you know, children that are not

6 being properly supervised. It runs the gamut, our definition,

7 our personal definition of "child abuse."

8 REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: And I know in some cases

9 where some people who were victimized later on had mental

10 issues that went as far as the person even committing suicide.

11 So I just want to thank Representative Harhai for trying to

12 find a way to get this---

13 REPRESENTATIVE HARHART: Harhart.

14 REPRESENTATIVE WATERS: Excuse me, ma'am -- my

15 colleague. I want to thank my colleague for trying to identify

16 some kind of dedicated source of funding so that this could be

17 addressed and with some security, too, as we move forward, and

18 a competent level of funding so that we could address this

19 issue.

20 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

21 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Well, thank you, Seán,

22 again for your time and coming over. Good to see you.

23 MR. McCORMACK: Thank you for having me. I

24 appreciate the opportunity.

25 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Sure. 63

1 PANEL IV

3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Panel IV is

4 Frank Cervone. Frank is the Executive Director of the Support

5 Center for Child Advocates; and Chris Kirchner, the Executive

6 Director of the Philadelphia Children's Alliance and the

7 Director of the Northeast Regional Children's Advocacy Center.

8 Welcome, and you may begin your testimony.

9 MS. KIRCHNER: Good morning. Thank you, and thank

10 you for your attention to this matter and for inviting me to

11 speak today in support of State funding for CACs.

12 My name is Chris Kirchner, and I am the Executive

13 Director of the Philadelphia Children's Alliance, the

14 accredited children's advocacy center in Philadelphia. I have

15 been in this position since 1992 and have witnessed the

16 evolution and growth of the CAC model locally in Philadelphia,

17 across the State, the country, and internationally.

18 And some of you have been to our center. We started

19 in '92 out of a small facility above a restaurant at 40th and

20 Chestnut, and 2 years ago we moved downtown to 15th and

21 Chestnut where we're in 8,000 square feet with three interview

22 rooms. And we're looking forward to moving next year, and I'll

23 talk a little bit more about that later.

24 Since 1995, we've also received a grant from the

25 Justice Department, OJJDP, to serve as the Northeast Regional 64

1 Children's Advocacy Center. Through NRCAC, we've provided

2 training and technical assistance to more than 600 communities

3 in the child abuse intervention field in Pennsylvania,

4 New Jersey, and north through Maine.

5 Covering the northeastern United States, our charge

6 is to promote a team response to allegations of child abuse and

7 develop facility-based programs known as children's advocacy

8 centers. So in '95 the Justice Department secured some funding

9 to create four regional training centers to replicate this

10 model across the country, and we were awarded the grant which

11 we've competed for and maintained since then.

12 So my time is spent working to build the capacity of

13 the Philadelphia Children's Alliance to serve all 1,800

14 children who present to DHS, our Department of Human Services,

15 and the police annually with allegations of sexual abuse while

16 also developing children's advocacy centers across the

17 northeastern United States through the Northeast Regional CAC.

18 I agree with everything that has been said by my

19 colleagues so far today and I won't reiterate some of that, but

20 I want to point out that there are 10 national standards that

21 comprise a children's advocacy center, including forensic

22 interviewing, victim services, access to medical and mental

23 health services, case tracking and case review, a

24 child-friendly facility, organizational capacity, and cultural

25 competency. 65

1 But the one standard that continues to be the most

2 challenging, and I think the most important, is the

3 multidisciplinary team standard. The foundation of children's

4 advocacy centers rests on the interagency partnerships among

5 the required agencies necessary to fully address a case of

6 child abuse from start to finish. Training of individual

7 disciplines is important, but beyond individual competencies,

8 it's essential that well-trained professionals value the

9 strengths that their partner agencies bring to a holistic

10 response to child abuse. Professionals need to be able to form

11 interdisciplinary partnerships to share information,

12 collaborate on responses to cases, problem-solve, and make

13 best-case decisions in the interests of the child victim.

14 The structure, first conceived by Bud Cramer, a

15 prosecutor in Huntsville, Alabama, and then a Member of

16 Congress for 12 years, has proved to be the most successful

17 strategy to comprehensively address child abuse cases and

18 approach healing and justice for children and families

19 involved. Sharing information is the key. One participant at

20 the table has one piece of information, another has another

21 piece.

22 Our biggest challenge is to bring together

23 disciplines and individuals that don't always like, trust, or

24 value each other's perspective, mandates, or limitations. We

25 have to institutionalize a coordinated response. It can't be 66

1 based on personalities. It can't be based on how you feel on

2 Tuesday morning about the colleague who's also assigned to the

3 case and maybe you don't see eye to eye and so you're just

4 going to do this child interview by yourself. There have to be

5 mandates in our communities that require collaboration and

6 don't leave it up to individual investigators to make the

7 decision if they feel like collaborating on that particular

8 case.

9 Every community must decide for itself that the

10 needs of the children we serve take priority before those of

11 the agencies and individuals involved, and from that

12 perspective, teams will always find a way to do the right

13 thing, despite tremendous obstacles in these cases.

14 Access to services, as you've already heard, is a

15 key theme and obstacle in our advocacy to advance CACs. There

16 are currently 750 accredited and associate CACs across the

17 United States, and 21 of them are in Pennsylvania. Thirteen of

18 our centers are -- actually, 22 of them are in PA. We just got

19 a new one in June. Thirteen of them are accredited and 8 are

20 associate, which means they're working toward accreditation.

21 We also have a State Chapter of CACs, which brings

22 all of us together regularly to offer a forum for sharing

23 information about what's working in our communities. Our

24 chapter's ultimate goal is to ensure that every child in

25 Pennsylvania has access to the services of an accredited CAC. 67

1 Sadly, many child victims of sexual and physical assault cannot

2 be treated with our model of service due to lack of resources.

3 Some programs in Pennsylvania have to restrict by age, others

4 by case type.

5 From urban centers like Philadelphia, serving

6 thousands of children per year, to rural counties where the

7 children's advocacy center services might be shared across

8 several counties, it is imperative that every child receive a

9 coordinated response with adequate services available to meet

10 their needs.

11 Clearly, one of our biggest challenges is funding.

12 Even communities where there is an accredited CAC, such as

13 Philadelphia, there may not be sufficient resources to ensure

14 that every child can be served at the children's advocacy

15 center. There has been minimal public-sector funding support

16 for CACs, and we do raise the bulk of our revenue from the

17 private sector.

18 I mentioned earlier that there are about 800 reports

19 of alleged sexual abuse in Philadelphia. We're currently able

20 to see about 1,200 of those a year. We don't have enough

21 space, forensic interviewers, and victim advocates to serve

22 100 percent of those cases, and we're working to build our

23 capacity to be able to do that. One of the biggest challenges

24 is, of course, funding.

25 We do currently serve an average of 100 children 68

1 each month. That's four to five families every day that come

2 into our center, almost all because of child sexual abuse. We

3 do occasionally interview child physical abuse victims and

4 child witnesses to violence. We don't sort of sell that as our

5 focus because we don't have the resources to serve all sexually

6 abused kids, but we do respond when police and DHS request help

7 with cases.

8 We have a $1.5 million budget, and that includes

9 support from the Department of Human Services, and we do get

10 funding from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and

11 Delinquency, which is Victims of Crime Act money. We also get

12 some Justice Department money that is passed through our

13 national office in Washington, DC. Basically, it's about

14 50/50 -- 50 percent of our revenue from the public sector and

15 50 percent from the private sector through individuals,

16 corporate support, foundations.

17 Although we plan to maintain diverse funding sources

18 and will continue to approach the private sector, we would like

19 to have a reliable State funding stream for a portion of our

20 budget that maybe would be the foundation of our budget.

21 We are working toward co-location. Commissioner

22 Anne Marie Ambrose of the Department of Human Services is

23 committed to moving us all in together. We've identified a

24 site at 300 E. Hunting Park Avenue, and in April of '13 we

25 will move the entire Special Victims Unit, which is about 69

1 100 investigators; the specialists from the Department of Human

2 Services, which is about 30 child sexual abuse specialists; my

3 staff of 20 individuals; and Children's Hospital will have a

4 medical clinic and several of our mental health agencies in the

5 city will move in. So we're planning for a co-located project

6 to take effect in April of 2013. We're signing a 15-year

7 lease.

8 And co-location isn't required to be an effective

9 children's advocacy center, but you can imagine in a city the

10 size of Philadelphia, having all of the players under one roof

11 will bring efficiencies that we couldn't achieve if we were all

12 located in different facilities, which we are right now. DHS

13 can walk to our center. The prosecutor's office can walk to

14 our center. But we don't have medical onsite and we don't have

15 mental health onsite, and the police have to drive down into

16 center city. So we're really looking forward to co-location.

17 We're sending a group of agency leaders to Chicago to visit

18 their children's advocacy center, which has been co-located for

19 about 5 years, and we really think that that will make a big

20 difference for us.

21 In closing, the National Children's Advocacy Center

22 standards are the state of the art in collaborative

23 investigations. They offer Pennsylvania communities a set of

24 criteria by which to create an approach to joint investigations

25 that work for that community in the best interests of the 70

1 children they are called upon to serve. We look forward to

2 partnering with all of you to ensure access to children's

3 advocacy centers for all of Pennsylvania's children who need

4 us.

5 I also wanted to just comment to some of the prior

6 questions. I can certainly have some of the national research

7 that's looking at the effectiveness of the children's advocacy

8 center approach shared with all of you. The Justice Department

9 funded a 5-year, five-site study of five CACs and control

10 groups across the country looking at the effectiveness. It

11 didn't specifically look at CAC prosecution rates and CACs in

12 Pennsylvania, but it certainly looked at it across these five

13 different sites.

14 In terms of the question about the number of cases,

15 we've actually seen a slight decrease. In the nineties, when

16 CACs were really coming to the forefront, part of the reason

17 for the development of CACs was the huge increase in numbers of

18 reports of alleged allegations of child sexual abuse. And in

19 Philadelphia, we hit a max of about 160 reports a month, and

20 that was in the late nineties and early 2000s. There's still a

21 professional debate about whether that's because cases, the

22 incidents of abuse, are actually decreasing or something else.

23 But we now see about 130 reports a month in Philadelphia. So

24 that number has gone down slightly. It's still a huge and

25 overwhelming number, though, as you can imagine. 71

1 And so now, I'll defer to Frank.

2 MR. CERVONE: Thanks, Chris.

3 Chairman Marsico; Chairman Caltagirone.

4 Representative Harhart, thank you for your leadership on this.

5 It's always good to see you again and continue to champion this

6 cause, among others.

7 Thank you for the opportunity, all of you, to come

8 to this special session to hear about child abuse

9 investigations, about CACs, and about this bill.

10 I like to talk about investigations rather than

11 CACs, because it's just a tool, and I want to try to help you

12 understand where these devices fit into the overall process.

13 CACs, I always like to say, are both a place and a

14 process, and I hope you think of it that way. You know, we've

15 talked a lot about facilities. These are buildings or floors

16 or rooms. They're also how people interact. And both

17 metaphors, I think, are important to understand why you have to

18 step up.

19 A bit about us, first. The Support Center for Child

20 Advocates is Philadelphia's lawyer pro bono program for abused

21 and neglected children. At Child Advocates, we work to change

22 the story for children. For 35 years -- we think we're the

23 largest and oldest volunteer lawyer program for kids in the

24 country -- we've offered the skills and dedication of

25 lawyer-social worker teams, and we represent more than 850 kids 72

1 a year, including in criminal prosecutions of their abusers.

2 While our direct service work is Philadelphia

3 focused, we work with partners across the Commonwealth and the

4 nation on the development of effective policy and practice for

5 vulnerable children. We attempt to offer a balanced and

6 constructive assessment of how we're all doing and for our kids

7 and what our kids need.

8 To assist and inform your work, we've brought some

9 materials, which I hope you have in folders from my office,

10 including five child protection policy papers from the Protect

11 Our Children Committee, Pennsylvania's statewide coalition of

12 advocates and physicians and service providers who are joined

13 together in coordinated strategies to prevent child abuse and

14 achieve targeted reform. And one of those papers addresses

15 this set of issues in particular, the "Investigating Child

16 Abuse and Crimes against Children in Pennsylvania."

17 I've also included several recent op eds of my own,

18 including one in the Patriot-News this Sunday on the Penn State

19 crisis.

20 I want to be clear that the positions that I'm going

21 to talk about today are not those of the POCC, the Protect Our

22 Children Committee, or its members, except as folks might agree

23 with me, but these are mine and our agency's thoughts.

24 We focus today on investigations and, in particular,

25 services provided by CACs. What you've heard and what I can 73

1 confirm from national exposure is, this is the state of the

2 art. This is the way it is done or should be done.

3 I'd like to share some of that national perspective

4 and a few of the statistics that our national colleagues offer

5 and then pick some fights, if I might, because we've all been

6 really nice this morning and it's just not that nice.

7 According to the statistics provided by the National

8 Children's Alliance, almost 280,000 children were served at or

9 by CACs in 2011, investigating crimes or activities of more

10 than 220,000 alleged perpetrators. And 179,000-plus kids

11 participated in onsite forensic interviews; 78,000 received

12 some form of medical care or examination, and their Website

13 offers all of this great data.

14 In many jurisdictions, law enforcement, Children and

15 Youth, CAC staff, medical professionals, counselors,

16 therapists, are co-housed or co-located, as you heard that

17 phrase, in the same building, making the entire process more

18 efficient and more collaborative.

19 You'll see that -- oh, and about two-thirds of the

20 cases are sexual cases, about one-third are physical. We'll

21 come back to that. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

22 There's an underside.

23 You'll see that virtually every State has CACs

24 operating in them. It is indeed the way it should be. We

25 provided a gap-analysis map from the national colleagues, and I 74

1 think staff reproduced this for you. It's a map that looks

2 like this. So you look at it and see New Jersey where, very

3 impressively, there's no white. Every county has a CAC

4 capacity or an actual program.

5 Sadly, Pennsylvania is covered in white. Sadly,

6 33 counties in Pennsylvania, including many of yours, are not

7 served by CACs, and many of the counties with accredited or

8 developing programs cannot afford to serve all of the children

9 with this state-of-the-art approach.

10 What's the alternative? Well, presumably the most

11 experienced police officer in your township gets assigned to

12 the case -- or not. You know how cops get assigned, in all

13 sorts of different ways. Perhaps the Children and Youth worker

14 who is interviewing the child has a solid relationship with the

15 local police department. Perhaps they've been doing the case

16 for a lot of years and they're outstanding, like Theresa Rentko

17 -- or not.

18 Almost undoubtedly, without a CAC, the child will be

19 separately interviewed by the Children and Youth intake worker,

20 the investigating police officer, then the detective, then the

21 assigned district attorney, maybe another Children and Youth

22 worker to which the case was transferred after intake, probably

23 the guardian ad litem if it's Dependency Court involvement, and

24 perhaps multiple times by several of those people on the way to

25 the arrest and the preliminary hearing. And then if it gets 75

1 held for trial, it's all going to happen again. Many of those

2 folks are going to interview this kid again.

3 That's in fact the way it's done. It's

4 unbelievable. And in places where we've heard the word "trust"

5 several times today, many of our professionals in this business

6 don't trust each other: they got burned on some other case; as

7 a witness, they went south; oh, that Children and Youth agency

8 is such and such; oh, those cops work like this, and they don't

9 give up information to their colleagues. You can imagine who

10 suffers. We have to close the gap and make collaborative

11 investigations and quality interviews available to all child

12 victims.

13 The physical/sexual distinction. Chris's office

14 specializes in sexual abuse cases. Most of the programs focus

15 on or specialize in and occasionally are exclusively about

16 sexual abuse cases. This is part of the history of the

17 organizations dating back to the eighties. But today, it's

18 mostly about resources. There's nothing about the nature of

19 these cases that says that physical abuse cases should not be

20 interviewed and examined and processed and planned in this way.

21 We just can't get to them by lack of resource.

22 Across the nation and across the Commonwealth, many

23 of the CACs do videotaped interviews. They facilitate this

24 joint communication. They track cases and case-review

25 meetings. As Seán suggested, by portraying a reliable picture 76

1 of the child and his or her story, the videotaped interview

2 promotes both guilty pleas and nol-pros dismissals.

3 I'll skip my prepared remarks about forensic

4 interview and crisis counseling in the record, because you've

5 heard a lot of that. I want to focus on teamwork and then on

6 some of the problems.

7 As Chris suggested, teams work best when they commit

8 to work as a team. If Seán McCormack was in every team, we

9 wouldn't be here today, all right? But they're not all saints

10 like him. He said when we have our week--- "When we have our

11 weekly meeting...," right? This is amazing that they get

12 together every week and talk about cases across departments.

13 Lots of agencies across the State are not doing that.

14 Mostly they have to be organic, as you've heard

15 several people say: voluntarily entered, the terms of

16 engagement sorted and negotiated and documented in a memorandum

17 of understanding. That's what's happening in the places where

18 it's working.

19 I've been around the country through my American Bar

20 Association work, and I have kind of made it kind of a habit to

21 stop in at the CAC, just to see what it's like. So I visited

22 and conferred with practitioners in Dallas, Houston,

23 Albuquerque, Brooklyn, Doylestown, Allentown, Philadelphia -- I

24 never see my wife -- among others. Without variation, they

25 report that resistance happens at the beginning, satisfaction 77

1 happens in the end. You might consider helping that process

2 along, perhaps requiring an MOU in order to obtain this

3 additional State funding, kind of as an incentive to play nice

4 and to be on one's best behavior.

5 Representative Harhart brings this bill first as a

6 filing-fee bill. It kind of morphs into -- but we all know

7 about filing fees and how hard it is to get money out of stone

8 and everybody wants those dollars, so it morphs into a

9 background-check fee. In all, we're passing the hat, and

10 that's pretty sad. And we shouldn't kid ourselves; that's what

11 we're doing.

12 We've established and you have heard today, it's a

13 public function; it's the state of the art; it's the way we

14 should be doing it. And so you have to ask, if it's your child

15 or grandchild, do you want to be one of the cases they can't

16 afford to get to this way? And there are thousands of kids,

17 kids whom I represent, kids whom you know, who we can't get to

18 this way.

19 There should be a line item in the budget. We've

20 been talking about this, well, from before Representative

21 Harhart wrote the bill -- all right? -- and we haven't been

22 able to get it. We're sure not getting it in bad times; we

23 weren't able to get it in good times. I want to urge you to

24 think about how it can be made a line item, how it can be made

25 a part of the fabric of how we do business. There are police 78

1 stations; there are firehouses: there should be CACs.

2 Second, there's some confusion and lack of clarity

3 around the different types of teamings that we've created.

4 You've heard this word a lot. We like teaming, right? We like

5 collaboration. Not because we're soft and fuzzy social

6 workers, though some of us are. We like those types, right?

7 It's because different people have different information, and

8 the old way of doing it, and sadly, the way it's going to be

9 done in counties that are closing down their programs, oh,

10 let's just let the worker do what she used to do with these

11 cases; she's really good at this. Or, let's let Officer Joe

12 interview the child; he's got grandkids. That's what people

13 say in our work all over the State, and that's what's going to

14 happen.

15 But we have these teamings, and the law, right in

16 the same section, calls for multidisciplinary teams, joint

17 investigative teams, Act 33 child fatality teams. We need to

18 look more closely at the interaction of those three kinds of

19 devices. And I can tell you, from county to county, people

20 don't really get it about the difference of them, and it's in

21 part because the law wasn't so artfully crafted.

22 We're pleased with the amendment if it's going to be

23 this kind of a fee structure, that the additional fee on

24 background checks exempts foster and adoptive parents, certain

25 volunteers. But we urge that the additional fee should not be 79

1 assessed on any volunteers nor on people who are working in

2 nonprofit organizations. I run a nonprofit. If somebody comes

3 to work for me, I pay their fee, because I think that's just

4 fair. You're putting that additional charge on me.

5 I recruit volunteer lawyers. Now, you may think,

6 well, lawyers got deep pockets. A lot of our lawyers are

7 stay-at-home moms, all right? We're picking up their

8 malpractice coverage through our general policy. They're not

9 making any money.

10 Oh, by the way, we need you to pay an additional

11 $10. Most importantly, when you add this fee, know what the

12 total fee is. The law now requires, Pennsylvania law now

13 requires FBI background checks, plus a State Police background

14 check, plus a DPW background check. FBI check, $27.50; child

15 abuse check, 10 bucks; State Police check, 10 bucks. We're at

16 $47.50 if you're doing the math. The price just went up by

17 $10.

18 Finally, since the legislation appears to focus on

19 establishing expanding CAC services, we're concerned that funds

20 generated by or through this legislation should be restrictive

21 and additive. So you've done well in drafting to create an

22 account. It looks a bit like a lockbox. This is a good thing.

23 But what State government is very good at -- you know this --

24 is supplanting this dollar with that dollar. This should be

25 supplemental, not supplantive, all right? You've got to 80

1 somehow guarantee that it becomes additive.

2 In the interests of full disclosure, since 1992 I

3 have served as a member of the Board of Directors of the

4 Philadelphia Children's Alliance, where Ms. Kirchner serves as

5 the Executive Director. By the bylaws of that organization,

6 our agency gets a seat at the table. I believe that this

7 service has offered me a valuable window into the workings of

8 one of the nation's premier CACs, as well as its challenges in

9 developing and then going forward. I'm wishing that

10 organization well. I don't come to you entirely free of a

11 fiduciary agenda, but then, what advocate does?

12 In all, I believe that the CAC model is outstanding

13 in its approach to children and families. It's just and it's

14 fair for defendants and the accused, and it's worthy of the

15 public's investment and trust.

16 Thank you.

17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Questions, Members?

18 Representative Ellis.

19 REPRESENTATIVE ELLIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

20 Thanks for the testimony. I just had a couple

21 thoughts.

22 You had referenced how every county in New Jersey

23 has one. You suggested this should be a line item. How are

24 they funded in the New Jersey budget, and also, what would your

25 thoughts be about how much of a line item we would need to 81

1 really implement this in Pennsylvania?

2 MR. CERVONE: Yeah. So it is potentially a big

3 number. I don't know the answer to the New Jersey scene. I

4 believe it's hardwired into the State budget, but I can find

5 out.

6 MS. KIRCHNER: It's actually hardwired through the

7 prosecutors' offices. So they are prosecutor-based centers

8 that had some history of teaming, and so they expanded that

9 into the children's advocacy center model across the State

10 through the prosecutor's office in each county.

11 MR. CERVONE: So Chris's organizational budget can

12 help you understand this. You know, the case needs a forensic

13 interviewer -- all right? -- and that forensic interviewer is

14 going to do so many cases a year. It needs somebody who's

15 going to convert those interviews into reports. There's

16 somebody that's going to convene the multidisciplinary meeting.

17 And we are eventually going to do the math. So as you heard,

18 Lehigh County has, I believe it's four staff, multicounty

19 offices.

20 You know, we haven't done the calculation, but we

21 certainly can get you some form of a calculation. It really

22 depends in part on how far you're willing to go in making it

23 wholly publicly funded as opposed to some mix of charity and

24 public. I don't think any of us aspire to it being wholly

25 publicly funded in the way, for instance, a Children and Youth 82

1 agency is. But we'd love to have it in every Children and

2 Youth agency's budget.

3 Lots of them are spending -- just to make it very

4 clear here -- lots of Children and Youth agencies are spending

5 both State and Federal dollars drawn down through their Act 148

6 process on these programs, either the per-service billing that

7 you heard earlier or a line item in their budget, as I think

8 we're okay to reveal in the Philadelphia budget's public

9 document. The Philadelphia model is to put a number in, right

10 into their budget. They hardwire it. They've rationalized it

11 through their needs-based budget process. DPW ought to invite

12 every county to put a line item into their needs-based budget

13 process.

14 REPRESENTATIVE ELLIS: And finally, from the

15 testimony today we're hearing about a lot of the, like you

16 said, privately raised money, but also the Federal dollars. Do

17 you know off the top of your head, are the dollars that you're

18 receiving from the Federal Government shrinking? are they

19 flatlined? are they growing? What kind of commitment are you

20 getting from Washington on the centers?

21 MR. CERVONE: Do you want to talk about VOCA?

22 MS. KIRCHNER: Well, I'll talk about the Victims of

23 Child Abuse Act.

24 MR. CERVONE: Yes; good.

25 MS. KIRCHNER: The funding that was obtained by 83

1 Congressman Cramer when he was still in Washington peaked at

2 about $22 million 2 years ago, but that's for the entire

3 country. And it has gone down to about $20 million, so it has

4 sort of been flatlined. That funding supports the operations

5 of the national office in Washington D.C., which is sort of the

6 membership organization which does the accrediting. And then

7 it funds the four Regional Children's Advocacy Centers, of

8 which we are one of the training centers, at a million dollars

9 a year, so that takes you down to $16 million. And then that

10 $16 million is distributed throughout the country via

11 competitive grants, and the priorities are set by our national

12 office.

13 So, for example, a couple of years ago, one of their

14 priorities was urban centers. They recognized that although it

15 looked like there was a center in Philadelphia, we couldn't

16 cover 100 percent of kids and so we might need additional

17 resources, so we were able to get some of that.

18 This past year they noticed that a lot of centers

19 were not able to get accredited because they didn't have

20 appropriate medical providers. So some of that competitive

21 money this year was set aside for training of medical

22 professionals, so communities across the country could apply

23 for that.

24 So although it was $16 million that was available to

25 the country, by the time you divided it up by all the centers 84

1 and you look at some of the priorities that are put on it, it's

2 not really available at all for general operating dollars.

3 It's available to strengthen and expand programs, but it's also

4 time limited. They're all 1-year grants, and so once the

5 1 year is over, you're back to looking for additional funding

6 to maintain that.

7 So there has been Federal money. It has not been

8 anything that any of us could use for, you know, general

9 operating expenses.

10 REPRESENTATIVE ELLIS: And then my final question

11 would be, what State has the best model? What State should we

12 be looking at?

13 MS. KIRCHNER: Texas. They have, I think there are

14 a similar number of counties to Pennsylvania, and of the

15 65 counties, 60 of them have children's advocacy centers. They

16 all get $50,000 as a baseline grant, regardless of the size of

17 their community. And then the additional dollars -- they have

18 $8 million appropriated -- is distributed by population. So

19 every county gets some population money, but one county might

20 get $2,000 and another county might get $100,000, and it's

21 based on population. And I think $8 million is the peak, is

22 the highest amount that any State is allocated for their

23 distribution to their CACs.

24 MR. CERVONE: And if you're in Houston or Dallas,

25 ask the cabby to take you to their program. You'll be blown 85

1 away by the facility. You'll be a total adherent to the

2 movement when you see how they do it. By place and process, I

3 saw them both 12 years ago, and it convinced me.

4 REPRESENTATIVE ELLIS: Thank you very much,

5 Mr. Chairman.

6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Representative Stephens.

7 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

8 Just briefly, in addressing your suggestion about

9 the funding stream, and maybe Seán is best to speak to this,

10 but am I correct that the autonomy that the CACs, at least in

11 Pennsylvania, provide in not having their funding flow through

12 the prosecutor's office is a benefit during the prosecution in

13 terms of cross-examination and things like that? Would you say

14 that's accurate, Seán, or, I mean, is there a benefit to having

15 that autonomy and not having the CACs directly receiving funds

16 from the prosecutor's office, do you think?

17 MR. McCORMACK: There can be in that in the

18 courtroom, the center---

19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Seán, could you speak

20 into the mic?

21 MR. McCORMACK: I'm sorry.

22 There can be---

23 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: There's more on your

24 panel.

25 MR. McCORMACK: Yeah. 86

1 In prosecuting a case in front of a jury where you

2 have our center and it's not part of the District Attorney's

3 Office, although many of the centers are prosecution based and

4 come out of DAs' Offices, I've always appreciated that our

5 center, to some degree, appears to be neutral and not just an

6 agent of the District Attorney's Office. So in that way,

7 there has been some benefit for us when we've been prosecuting

8 cases.

9 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Great.

10 MS. KIRCHNER: And that is the most common model,

11 private nonprofits, for the very reason of neutrality. You

12 want all agencies to feel like they're an equal player in what

13 happens at the children's advocacy center, that it's not just

14 about prosecution, its also about child welfare issues and

15 safety and all of that.

16 So, you know, certainly there are a percentage that

17 are hospital based, prosecutor based, even law enforcement

18 based, but private nonprofit is the most common model, and the

19 majority of CACs are that.

20 REPRESENTATIVE STEPHENS: Thank you.

21 MR. CERVONE: The availability of videotape cured a

22 lot of these, what we often refer to as "taint" issues and the

23 lean of the system. You know, the videotape becomes discovery.

24 The defense counsel gets it; they see what everybody else is

25 seeing. 87

1 MS. KIRCHNER: And CACs really helped advance the

2 videotaping in the State of Pennsylvania. Our prosecutors

3 needed to feel comfortable that our interviews were top quality

4 and that they weren't putting something on video that was going

5 to come back to cause a problem. And so the videotaping holds

6 us accountable for the quality of our interviews while also

7 creating some transparency around children's disclosures and

8 interviews.

9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN MARSICO: Well, thank you very

10 much. Just remain seated there for a second.

11 I'm making this announcement that written testimony

12 has been submitted by Charles Songer, the Pennsylvania Children

13 and Youth Administrators, and submitted on behalf of the County

14 Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.

15 But I've got to tell you, on behalf of the

16 committee, I'm sure as well will all agree, that the

17 presenters, the panelists today, you guys did an outstanding

18 job providing us excellent information and recommendations.

19 So I'm really impressed by what was done today by the

20 panelists, and I'm sure, once again, that the Members feel the

21 same.

22 And staff, you did a nice job, a really good job of

23 putting this together, so I thank you as well.

24 I just want to say, once again, thanks for your time

25 in coming here, and we'll look forward to working with you. 88

1 And Representative Harhart -- I had to distinguish

2 that -- thanks again, Julie, for your leadership with this

3 issue, and this concludes our hearing. Thank you.

4 MR. CERVONE: Thank you.

5 MS. KIRCHNER: Thank you.

7 (The hearing concluded at 12:30 p.m.)

25 89

1 I hereby certify that the foregoing proceedings are

2 a true and accurate transcription produced from audio on the

3 said proceedings and that this is a correct transcript of the

4 same.

6 Debra B. Miller

7 Committee Hearing Coordinator/

8 Legislative Reporter

9 Notary Public

11 Diana Sharbaugh

12 Transcriptionist