Keeping kids safe.

Byline: SUSAN PALMER The Register-Guard

LOLITA TYMAS goes to her children's soccer practices and games, rain or shine. Her oldest, 7-year-old Tyler Hanks, has a new coach this year, and while Tymas likes him, she doesn't know him very well.

On a recent weekday afternoon as rain turned to hail, she stood under an umbrella watching Tyler kick the soccer ball in a high arcing curve over the heads of his teammates.

She had her younger son, 5-year-old Kyle, in tow. His practice would follow and she'd be there, too. "He's too young to leave alone," Tymas said.

Last year, she was a little less protective. She knew Tyler's coach and his family well. This year, she sticks around to be on the safe side.

"How do you forgive yourself if you take a chance and something happens?" she said. As the manager of before- and after-school programs for kids, she's doubly aware of the challenges parents face in keeping children safe.

Daily revelations about the extent of priest pedophilia and a rash of local abuse cases have underscored the harsh reality for parents that people in positions of trust aren't necessarily trustworthy.

That's one of the reasons Steve Swenson, a Eugene police captain, became a Scout leader. He wanted to keep an eye on his son as he moves through the Scouting program.

"Parents should never ever put 100 percent of their faith in someone else," Swenson said.

Neither should they rely on traditional programs designed to teach children to recognize and avoid abusers, prevention experts say.

The "no, go, tell" strategies that are most common fail because abusers patiently target their victims so cleverly that children often don't understand they're being abused until it's too late.

"There isn't any other domain in our life where we pit kids against adults or older juveniles and expect kids to prevail," said Keith Kaufman, a Portland State University psychology professor who has interviewed thousands of sex offenders in a study designed to develop abuse prevention strategies.

Instead, parents and adults who supervise children's programs need to be educated to take responsibility for protecting children.

The first step in that process is understanding that children are most at risk of being abused in their own homes, Kaufman said.

In 1998, the last year that the Oregon Department of Human Services reported the relationship between victims and their molesters, 63 percent of the children had been abused by family members, stepfathers or live-in boyfriends. Fathers or father figures represented 34 percent of the offenders, the state reported.

Yet adults are better versed in training children about the danger that strangers represent, warning them to stay away from people they don't know, Kaufman said.

"The most difficult thing to do is to get parents to look at the people the kids do know," he said.

Outside the family circle, about 18 percent of abusers are known to the victims, according to state research. They can be friends, neighbors, coaches or volunteers - and most often they're smart, manipulative and willing to take their time in identifying and approaching their victims.

Abuser profiles

M., 51, began fondling his girlfriend's daughter when she was 6 years old. The abuse lasted seven years. He also fondled his girlfriend's son at least once.

L., 33, had sex with his wife's 11-year-old sister. While on probation for that offense, he fondled a 4-year-old girl.

And he had many other victims, another 15 by his reckoning, ranging in age from 4 to 17. He was never caught or prosecuted for any of those incidents.

"Each person that I abused was an opportunity that I took advantage of when it came. I never went out seeking a stranger," he said.

The two men are registered sex offenders in Lane County and are currently in sex offender treatment programs. They agreed to interviews as part of their treatment and on the condition that their full names not be used.

Both men confess to a knack for recognizing the neediness of potential victims and to coercing them into sex in a grooming process that prevention experts say parents need to understand so they can guard against it.

They aren't the only molesters speaking out about their crimes.

Sex offenders in treatment at the Center for Behavioral Intervention in Beaverton have written a pamphlet for parents that spells out how they abuse children.

Sex abuse is a lengthy process, not a single incident, said Cory Jewell-Jensen, a nationally known expert on sex offenders who runs the Portland center with her husband, Steve Jensen. The center provides state-mandated treatment for sex offenders.

Molesters build relationships with children before abusing them, often starting with playful or affectionate touch within view of the parents so that children assume it's OK, the center's pamphlet explains.

They learn their victims' likes and dislikes and pay attention to them in ways that make children feel special.

With a child's defenses declining and trust building, more intrusive behavior begins. By the time victims question the contact, they're often involved to a degree that they may feel responsible.

M. began his abuse when he, his girlfriend and her two young children hopped in the shower together one day. Nothing happened then, but it was the moment he found himself excited by a child, he said.

Soon, he was encouraging nudity in the house while the children played together and while he read to them. Bedtime tuck-in sessions included massages that eventually led to fondling, and the fondling went on for years, he said.

Parents need to be watchful about behavior before it escalates, M. said.

"I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I'd take it a step farther and didn't get resistance and I'd take it a step farther. It just requires a lot of vigilance on the part of the parent about the behavior of a partner," he said.

Kids starved for attention

L. took advantage of children when they were placed in his care. Some children he abused while baby-sitting. Once, he took advantage of a homeless teen-ager, offering her a place to spend the night.

He often gave his victims marijuana or alcohol. "I was seeking my own sexual gratification, with no empathy for my victims. I believed in my own mind that they wanted to do these things," he said.

L. targeted emotionally needy children because they made the most willing prey.

"If they're starving for attention, they're looking for attention from anybody," he said.

Children receiving enough attention from parents and other adults would have been less likely victims, he said, and children well-trained about appropriate touch also would have been less likely to tolerate his advances.

"The smarter kids are about sexual touching, the more aware they are of what's not right, the better off they are," he said.

But educating children once or twice about touching isn't enough, abuse prevention experts say. Children need regular reinforcement about appropriate touch.

They also need to feel like they can talk with parents about a subject that makes many people uncomfortable, Jewell-Jensen said.

Once abuse has begun, molesters are adept at convincing children that they won't be believed or that they'll be in as much trouble as the molester or that other family members will suffer if they tell.

M. said that while he never directly threatened his girlfriend's daughter if she told, his angry temper kept the household under his sway.

Children also may struggle with mixed feelings about offenders, Kaufman said. If a child has otherwise enjoyed the nonsexual aspect of the relationship, he or she faces the dilemma of deciding what to give up. "Am I willing to trade off all the richness that this person brings to me and something that is strange or uncomfortable a few times?" he said.

Parents should be wary of adults who spend most of their free time with children and who seek "alone time" with children. They should question unexpected gifts or money and watch for changes in a child's behavior, experts say.

And parents also need to trust their own instincts, Kaufman said.

"I can't tell you how many times we've heard from parents: `You know, in retrospect, it does seem strange that so much of so-and-so's life was focused around kids.' But it's always in retrospect," he said.

Many victims

The Oregon State Police reported about 4,100 child and juvenile victims of sex abuse in 2000, the most recent numbers available.

In Lane County, the number of sex abuse victims from infant to age 18 has ranged from 400 to 500 annually from 1996 to 2000, according to the state police records.

Abuse prevention experts say those cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

Offenders in treatment report that they average more than 100 incidents of abuse before they get caught, Jewell-Jensen said.

"Our offenders tell us they touch lots of kids," she said.

Jewell-Jensen has spent a lot of time educating people in law enforcement and social service agencies about molester techniques, but in the past two years, she's turned her attention to parents, developing a workshop that she has delivered to about a dozen parent groups in the Portland area.

Her presentation includes tips on talking with children about sex, how to respond when a child reports abuse and the factors that place children at higher risk.

Among those: living in a single-parent home, drug or alcohol abuse by parents, sexually preoccupied parents and inadequate parental supervision.

Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has taken an interest in prevention. Despite its better-known focus on fighting illness, the agency gave Portland State's Kaufman a $700,000 grant in 1998 to study both adult and juvenile child abusers, documenting their patterns to come up with strategies to help keep kids safe.

Kaufman is also comparing the home life of children who have been abused with those who haven't.

"We're looking at what kind of household rules parents employ, what kind of supervision children receive and how parents monitor their children," he said. "We want to understand what happens normatively and what happens where abuses occurred."

The study is a year and a half from completion, but when the work is done, he expects to able to develop a program that will help parents identify suspicious behavior and give them reasonable ways to check it to minimize unfair accusations.

He envisions an education campaign much like that of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, with people talking as frankly and regularly about preventing abuse as they do about keeping drunks off the road.

Despite the national focus on pedophile priests, researchers say the number of abused children actually has decreased nationally in the past decade.

Figures compiled by the state police don't reflect that decline, and those who work with abused children don't have fewer clients.

"We're not seeing it," said Ray Broderick, director of the Child Advocacy Center in Eugene, which supports abuse victims interacting with the district attorney's office. In the past seven years, his agency has seen the number of clients increase from 150 in 1995 when the agency was open for half the year to 610 last year.

The pornography issue

Those who work with offenders in Oregon are anxious about the future, Jewell-Jensen said. They expect to see the state's numbers increase, driven by the explosion in Internet child pornography and a decrease in the length of parole for offenders coming out of prison.

Jewell-Jensen, who last month appeared on an Oprah Winfrey show that focused on child molesters, said online pornography is pushing more people toward active abuse.

"We're seeing people crossing the line who never would have offended before," she said.

Before the Internet, child pornography was more difficult to obtain. Now it's easily available, and pedophiles can find and encourage each other in chat rooms, she said.

FBI data support her concern. The agency reports a 1,200 percent increase in online child pornography and child exploitation crimes from 1996 to 2000.

Also of concern: Measure 11-mandated sentences give criminals the bulk of their time behind bars with less post-prison supervision once they get out. Sex offender treatment is required for almost all offenders when they leave prison, and it's a process that can take from three to five years, therapists say.

Many molesters come out of prison with less than two years of parole remaining, insufficient time for effective treatment, Jewell-Jensen said. The state ended in-prison sex offender treatment programs in 1997, in a cost-cutting move.

"We're sitting in these groups with more and more people who don't care if they re-offend," she said.

While changes in sentencing guidelines over the years make it hard to generalize about post-prison supervision, Lane County parole officer Jeff Collins says Jewell-Jensen's concerns are well-founded and cites two recent cases of offenders - one a rapist, one a hard-core pedophile - who got out of prison with only six months of supervision.

Within weeks of his release, the pedophile disappeared, Collins said. "These are the guys who keep you awake at night," he said.

M., who is three years into 10 years of parole, said it took a while for him to appreciate the sex offender treatment program he was required to take.

"In the beginning, I thought it was stupid," he said.

But 2 1/2 years into it, he said he's stopped lying about sex, stopped manipulating other people and made some progress toward confronting the attitudes that kept him from caring about how his behavior hurt others.

He doesn't think of himself as "cured."

"I can't say that I would never offend again. If I lose sight of what my goals are, I could revert," he said.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

Physical signs of abuse are:

Unexplained bruises, redness, or bleeding of the child's genitals, anus or mouth.

Pain at the genitals, anus or mouth.

Genital sores or milky fluids in the genital area.

Emotional signs of abuse also might be triggered by other stresses in a child's life, such as divorce, problems in school, or the death of a family member or pet. Several of them together should prompt a parent to ask questions.

Nightmares, trouble sleeping, fear of the dark or other sleeping problems.

Extreme fear of "monsters."

Spacing out at odd times.

Loss of appetite or trouble eating or swallowing.

Sudden mood swings: rage, fear, anger or withdrawal. Fear of certain people or places (a child may not want to be left alone with a baby sitter, a friend, a relative or some other child or adult; or a child who is usually talkative and cheery may become quiet and distant when around a certain person).

Stomach illness all of the time with no identifiable reason.

An older child behaving like a younger child, such as bed-wetting or thumb-sucking.

Sexual activities with toys or other children, such as simulating sex with dolls or asking other children/siblings to behave sexually.

New words for private body parts.

Refusing to talk about a "secret" he or she has with an adult or older child.

Talking about a new older friend.

Suddenly having money.

Cutting or burning herself or himself as an adolescent.

If you have questions, call 1-888-PREVENT. If you suspect abuse, call police or the Child Welfare office at 686-7557.

- Stop It Now, a child sexual abuse prevention agency

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Books: For children: "A Very Touching Book" by Jan Hindman; for teens: "No is Not Enough" by Caren Adams, Jennifer Fay and Jan Loreen-Martin; for adults: "By Silence Betrayed" by John Crewdson.

Online: Stop it Now - www.stopitnow.com or call the group's hot line at 1-888-PREVENT; National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information - www.calib.com/nccanch

Parent pamphlet: "Protecting Your Children: Advice from Molesters" is available locally at the Child Advocacy Center, 682-3938; or from the Center for Behavioral Intervention in Beaverton, [phone].

Child Welfare abuse hot line: 686-7557