"These women don't leave these men. For some reason they feel bound to them," she says. "They're sacrificing their child one more time."
Deron Neblett
Ellen Cokinos hears dreadfully sad stories in a beautiful setting.
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Leading questions in interviews are out. No confessions are forced. Anatomical dolls are brought out only as a last-ditch effort. "Seventeen years ago, yes, we asked horribly leading questions. 'Yes, your daddy did this to you, didn't he,' " says Cokinos ruefully. But training has made forensic experts of her troops, she maintains.
The videotapes mean not only does a child not have to tell her story over and over leading up to trial, but sometimes the bad guy pleads out, after his lawyer views a videotape and realizes the child is going to be a strong witness.
If the case does go to court, the child goes there armed with the confidence needed to make a better witness.
Other changes: As a young caseworker, Cokinos would drive to a child's house by herself and do the interview in one room while the perpetrator sat in the next. Now her interviewers talk to the child at the center, and there is police backup in bringing a child in. And instead of being handled a pile of files on the first day on the job and told to go do their best, interviewers are given three months of training.
There also have been improvements in how the district attorney's office reacts to these cases. Years ago the D.A.'s office was cutting deals. "We won't file a case if you go to class," Cokinos recalls prosecutors saying. Well, that didn't work.
Many of the children come here because they've finally had enough and told a teacher or counselor at school and the school immediately contacted CPS. Some tell a friend. Very few tell a parent.
Sometimes there's an accidental disclosure: Someone walks in on the child while he or she is being sexually abused. Those can be the hardest cases of all, interviewers say, because most of those children are still guarding their secrets and are not prepared to tell.
Schools are, in fact, bound by law to notify CPS. The way it's supposed to work is for CPS to come out, briefly investigate and immediately move the child to the center. A parent, never the alleged perpetrator, is called from there and asked to come to the center. Cokinos says they still have had trouble with some schools where officials wanted to "work things out" and called the parents first, saying they'd be contacting CPS. By the time CPS got there in most cases, she says, "they were in Mexico," packed up and gone with the kids.
That's part of her expansion plan, to get schools more knowledgeable of and involved in what they do at the center. She wants to reach other nonprofits and the courts and further educate D.A.'s ("Yes, we need specialized prosecutors to handle child sexual abuse cases.") She wants to open up a satellite center, start a hot line.
Cokinos and her investigators have been all over the city, she says. "Every private school, every public school. This Internet thing adds a whole new level of sick."
It's difficult to come out of the Children's Assessment Center and not be depressed. There are just too many dreary stories there. The three-year-old whose 14-year-old brother talked her into masturbating him, saying there was candy in his penis. The 39-year-old man on an hour-long tape explaining why and how he molested 102 boys starting when he was 12 years old and his cousin was six. The 13-year-old girl, sexually abused by her father starting at age six, who cried so many times to herself at night that there were no tears left when authorities finally discovered the abuse. The boy who loves his sister and hates her, too, for telling that their father has been abusing her, sending him to prison.
Then there was the 14-year-old boy who now has AIDS from being sexually abused by his uncle from the time he was five years old till he was ten. This was the case that caused veteran interviewer Fiona Stephenson to fear she was going to cry in a session for the first time in eight years. The boy kept reassuring her that he could handle what had happened to him. "It just broke my heart. He was so strong. His life was changed. He'll never have a normal life."
Victories are counted in children rescued, in perpetrators brought to judgment and removed from society, at least for a time. As Stephenson puts it: "You always have to think of the ones you've really helped. The abuse has stopped. That's what you have to think about."
That and the fact that in a world that has dealt with these boys and girls so harshly already, Cokinos and her allies know they have furnished a place that treats children with dignity, respect and unconditional love.
April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. To contact the Children's Assessment Center, call (713)986-3300.
E-mail Margaret Downing at margaret. downing@houstonpress.com.
