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Northeast Corner Confronts an Overload of Abuse

By Tracy Gordon Fox
Originally published by The Hartford Courant, May 27 2001

In a sunlit hospital room decorated with rainbow-striped curtains and stuffed animals, the children are asked to lie on a small examination table and to spread their legs like a froggie. Using games of peekaboo and bubble wands, doctors distract the youngest from the rubber-gloved hands and the scope that will probe them for signs of sexual abuse.

There’s a disturbingly high number of sexual assaults against children in Connecticut’s northeast corner, doctors, police and social workers say. It is evident in arrest reports, at rape crisis centers and in Windham Community Memorial Hospital, where 20 months ago they set up a special room equipped to examine child victims.

For years, police and social workers only whispered about the high incidence of rape and incest in the region. No one talked about how Superior Court in Danielson had a larger percentage of sexual assault cases than any other judicial district in Connecticut, or how the state police were inundated with child rape cases.

Now, those who confront the problem almost daily have begun treating it like a disease rather than a secret. Doctors are turning to university professors to find the root causes. Police and rape counselors are teaching schoolchildren how to combat sexual abuse. Mental health professionals, knowing that children who were sexually assaulted might turn their rage on themselves or toward others, are looking for those signs.

“If this was leukemia, would the CDC and the Department of Health not come in?” asked Dr. Joseph Kozachek, an emergency room doctor who worked at Windham hospital for five years.

It might be years before anyone knows whether these intervention and education efforts have helped. But Wendy Moher, director of the Women’s Center of Northeastern Connecticut, a rape crisis service, said people can no longer remain silent.

“We need to come together and work collaboratively to take it out of the closet and put it into the light of day and to say in our community we will not tolerate this,” Moher said.

The Cases Pile Up

Uniform crime statistics compiled by the FBI from law enforcement agencies around the country do not include cases of sexual assaults against children. But information from courts, some state police records and rape crisis centers support the anecdotal observations that professionals such as Moher have been making for years.

In Windham County, 36 percent of the felony cases pending in the judicial district are for first-degree sexual assault, the largest percentage for that crime in any of the state’s 13 judicial districts, including Hartford and Bridgeport. In the majority of those Windham cases, the victim is a child.

The judicial district also has one of the highest conviction rates for sexual assault.

“My first week here, I threw up. I couldn’t believe how many of the warrants had to do with that,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Debra A. Collins, who handles many of the cases.

Those cases are piled up on her desk in the new courthouse in Danielson center, where she struggles to keep up with them. Among the latest victims, Collins said, is an 11-year-old raped repeatedly over two years by her mother’s boyfriend, a 6-year-old raped time and again by an uncle and an 8-year-old girl forced by her stepfather to have oral and anal sex almost every day for a year.

The number of sexual assaults in northeastern Connecticut taxes Troop D in Danielson, where far more rapes are reported than at any other barracks. Of the 90 rapes and molestations reported in 1999, 80 percent involved children.

So many sexual assaults are reported that rookie road troopers find themselves investigating rape cases that would normally be handled by detectives in the barracks. The Eastern District Major Crime Squad, in an effort to help out, has assigned a detective to investigate only sexual assaults.

Every trooper or police officer in the region has a story to tell about rape or incest.

“I can tell you from experience, it’s unprecedented,” said Sgt. Michael Spellman, a veteran supervisor at the Danielson barracks. “It definitely raises eyebrows. There are a lot of cases.”

Caseworkers with the state Department of Children and Families have an office in the Danielson barracks because the two agencies work on so many cases together. DCF records also point to a high number of sexual assaults in northeastern Connecticut, where Killingly, a town of 16,472 people, had 17 cases of confirmed sexual abuse in 2000, the highest of any town its size in the state.

This summer, the state Department of Public Safety will inject an eight-member, community policing task force into the Danielson area to deal with problems endemic to the region, such as rape.

“It’s been there for a while,” Col. John F. Bardelli, commander of the state police, said of the high number of sexual assaults. “I don’t know the answers. Hopefully, we’ll figure it out. We need to put police officers in there to say this lifestyle won’t happen anymore.”

The Quiet Corner

Windham County, with its winding roads that attract thousands of leaf peepers each fall, seems an unlikely place for violent crime. Antiques collectors browse the numerous shops along the main streets of small towns that still have 1950s-style diners and general stores. Dubbed the “Quiet Corner” by the local tourism bureau, the region is best known for its country fairs, vineyards and private schools.

But it is also home to some of the poorest people in the state, often single parents struggling to raise their children on their own.

Sexual assault and pedophilia occur in every race, every economic class. But authorities see a disproportionate number of victims in northeastern Connecticut who are poor and uneducated and who come from homes that lack traditional boundaries. A mother who must work might ask a boyfriend to watch her children.

Some of the first patients Kozachek saw when he joined the emergency staff at the Windham hospital in Willimantic five years ago were troubled teenage girls from broken homes who had mutilated themselves with razor blades.

“I learned they had all been sexually assaulted,” Kozachek said.

He knew from his studies that children who are raped are stripped of their self-esteem before their personalities are fully formed. Some girls become promiscuous as teenagers. Others turn their rage inside themselves, as Kozachek had witnessed.

He had been in emergency medicine for 17 years, but it wasn’t until he got to Windham that he began seeing so many sexual assaults against children.

“I was seeing much more penetration and rectal trauma,” Kozachek said. One of the worst cases he saw was that of a man who was raping his son. The man “whispered in his ear every night he was going to kill him if he told.”

To make matters worse, Kozachek said, these victims had to travel more than an hour to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, the nearest facility with a colposcope, a medical instrument primarily used to examine a woman’s vagina for signs of rape or cancer.

As head of the hospital’s emergency department, Kozachek joined the multidisciplinary investigative team, known as MIT, that was established in each county a decade ago to better address crimes against children.

The team, which in the past two years has become more proactive, asked Kozachek to start a child advocacy clinic at the Windham hospital because St. Francis had too many cases coming from northeastern Connecticut.

Kozachek agreed, and with a $10,000 grant from DCF the hospital purchased a colposcope, which searches for the tiny tears that occur when a child is sodomized or raped, and set up the clinic that includes a teenage pregnancy program.

“There were days when it was very hard to do. There were days when I was doing this back to back,” Kozachek said of the examinations, some performed on children as young as 10 months.

Kozachek recently left the hospital to become a medical director for Aetna. He also works on a per diem basis in St. Francis hospital’s emergency room.

His colleague, Beth Cheney, a registered nurse, will pick up some of the examinations, although she cannot do it full time. Several nurses seasoned in emergency medicine have left the clinic because it was too stressful.

“It’s heartbreaking, to be honest with you,” Cheney said from her office, where pictures of her own small children adorn her desk and file cabinet.

“There is a sadness about it. There’s no pleasure in it. With this particular group, it’s just such a heavy feeling as a woman and a mother.”

Searching For Answers

No one is exactly sure why there are so many sexual assaults in this part of the state. There are many theories.

“I think that’s the $64,000 question, to be honest with you,” said Scott Stevens, a family therapist who has been treating sexual offenders in northeastern Connecticut for 20 years.

“I finished graduate school in 1980. One of the things people were talking about then was the high percentage of incest. Twenty years ago, we were aware of this,” Stevens said.

Stevens said he has seen children who were abused continue the pattern.

“Literally, we are treating the children of folks we were working with 15 years ago,” Stevens said.

But Stevens believes there are other, as yet unknown factors besides family histories at work. “There is something we have yet to identify, that caused this originally,” Stevens said.

Health workers and law enforcement officials in the region are hoping John C. Kilburn Jr., an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Eastern Connecticut State University, can help provide some answers.

Kilburn wants to study the rate of sexual assault in northeastern Connecticut to determine how high it is compared with other parts of the state and to try to identify the reasons why.

“Anecdotally, it is absolutely high, the stories that are told,” Kilburn said.

He believes there are certain areas where specific types of crimes occur more frequently.

“In certain cities, there is theft in this neighborhood and violence occurs [more] in that neighborhood,” he said. “They are not evenly dispersed. Just like that, there are certain areas where sexual assaults are more likely to occur.”

One possibility for a higher rate might simply be opportunity, Kilburn said. Many of the victims come from homes with single, working mothers, who often are forced to leave their children with boyfriends or neighbors. There might not be nearby day care or it might not be affordable, Kilburn said.

“Rural areas just don’t have the support systems. The kids are not as public,” Kilburn said. “The wealthy people send their kids to day care. It’s a lack of options.”

Moher, the director of the woman’s center, said sexual assault against children happens because it can. She does not have any answers for why it appears to be happening more in northeastern Connecticut.

“Children are easily victimized and told to be silent,” she said.

Joy Caldwell’s daughter did not speak of being sexually assaulted by a family friend when she was 12. Two years later, during a fight with her mother, the secret exploded from her.

“She just blurted it out,” Caldwell said, recalling the day three years ago she learned her sister-in-law’s boyfriend had raped her daughter, leaving her with permanent internal scarring. “He threatened her, ‘you tell anyone and I’m coming after you.'”

Caldwell said her daughter went through the agony of testifying against her attacker in court. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 to 40 years in prison. After sentencing, however, he was released on an appeal bond. His case is still pending.

“I don’t believe in the court system,” Caldwell said recently from her home out of state, where her daughter is an active high school student who is on the cheerleading team, and never speaks of the attacks. “If I could shoot him and get away with it, I would.”

Even when victims speak up, rape is not something people want to talk about, Moher said.

“There is this taboo. Child victimization is the under-crust that goes on in society,” Moher said.

Takaya Owens was 10 years old in fourth grade when her mother’s boyfriend put his hands in her pants as they lay on the living room floor watching television.

She told her mother, who did nothing.

“From that, I just closed up,” Owens said. “He molested me until I was in seventh grade. It was bad. Every single day I was being touched and molested.”

Owens’ mother worked at Windham hospital, and would leave her daughters with her boyfriend until she arrived home at dinnertime. Eventually, Owens looked to the man as her boyfriend and was jealous when he would spend time with her mother. That ended when he grounded her one day and she warned him in front of her mother, “I’ll tell mom what you do.”

Owens led her mother downstairs to the basement, where she showed her the plastic cup of Vaseline he kept hidden to aid in their sexual encounters. Her mother confronted him, and he backed her against the wall and threatened her. The family moved and hid until the man was arrested.

Now 20, with a baby of her own, Owens said the experience has left her angry, yet always hungry for affection.

Experts say young girls who are molested often mistake sexuality for love.

“I don’t think about it every single day, but it effects my life every single day,” Owens said, her large brown eyes glassy with tears. “For me, that’s the way you show me you love me, by touching me. If you don’t touch me all the time, I don’t think I’m pretty.”

Owens is not ashamed of what happened to her. She has even considered going on television talk shows to educate young girls that they must talk about it the first time it happens to someone who will listen.

That’s the same message educators from the rape crisis centers are getting out to students in schools in the area in a special program aimed at childhood and teenage sexual assaults. A $300,000 federal grant aimed at curbing violence in rural areas is helping to pay for the programs.

Moher said teaching only “stranger danger” to children in the area is not identifying the people who could be the biggest threat to them – people they know or live with.

“Overall, 86 percent in my [rape crisis] statistics are people that you know. You teach them you don’t have to sit on Uncle Joe’s lap. We talk about safe boundaries,” Moher said.

At Plainfield High School, 780 students in grades 9 to 12 were taught about those boundaries by educators from the rape crisis center and police officers.

“I think it’s a good message for any teen today who is socially active.

It was very well received,” Principal Charles Lungevin said.

Lt. Lawrence Gibeault, who commands the state police barracks in Danielson, is optimistic that education eventually will be the answer to reducing the number of sexual assaults in eastern Connecticut.

“By being out there and educating the public, we get more reported,” Gibeault said. “If there is a history in the family and you break it, if you break the mold, you’ve done a good thing.”