Just call the cops. Dial 911. Let police officers trained to investigate do their jobs.
But instead, after allegations of a sexual assault by 13-year-old boy on a 9-year-old boy at the Walpole campus of the Home for Little Wanderers, staff there called the state Department of Children and Families. Most of us, for good reason, have lost all confidence in DCF’s ability to protect children or, sadly, even to tell the truth.
DCF Commissioner Olga Roche is gone. Yet nothing has changed. Joan Wallace-Benjamin, who runs the Home for Little Wanderers, might have offered some clarity yesterday.
But she declined interviews and the home put out a statement that raised questions about its own credibility and DCF’s even more.
The home downplayed the “incident,” calling it a “behavioral health matter.”
Walpole police, however, called “the incident” a sexual assault — a rape, in fact. And the social worker at Norwood Hospital, which treated the 9-year-old, apparently agreed with police. That social worker alerted cops by requesting a sexual assault evidence collection kit.
“The home would typically call the local police,” the home’s statement read, “if and when we suspect and have reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed.”
What are we to make of that? That the home is right, but police and Norwood Hospital and now the Norfolk District Attorney’s Office, which is investigating, too, are wrong?
Walpole Deputy Police Chief John Carmichael told the Herald this is just the latest example of the home’s reporting crimes there too late or not at all.
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| Olga Rochecaption |
To be clear, we don’t know for sure what happened in Walpole.
But in January, in the midst of exposing a series of tragic mistakes by DCF, the Herald reported on an 11-year-old child whose claims of sexual assault were dismissed by DCF as “consensual sex.” That’s hard to fathom when the legal age of consent in Massachusetts is 16; under federal law, it’s 18. And this was an autistic child in foster care.
DCF never explained its bizarre conclusion.
Here’s a safe bet: Neither DCF nor the home will ever detail why its staff did what it did in this case either.
Yesterday the home said that “out of respect for the dignity of the children” and “the ongoing investigation we are unable to provide further information.”
But an agency’s refusal to explain itself is almost never about dignity or ongoing investigations. It’s about hiding misdeeds.
“No one wants anyone else to know what they’re doing,” longtime victims’ advocate Laurie Myers said yesterday — which means horrible things will keep happening to children, in secret. And nobody pays.
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/margery_eagan/2014/05/eagan_a_child_s_allegations_swept_away_again
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