Louisiana task force takes aim at how state handles child sex abuse cases

BATON ROUGE, La. (KALB) – A newly created Louisiana task force targeting how Louisiana handles cases of child sexual abuse convened on Oct. 22, to find potential shortcomings within judicial and departmental operations.

The task force‘s hearing, chaired by Louisiana State Senator Regina Barrow, featured testimony from Kathleen Richey, Louisiana’s Child Ombudsman; a position with the Louisiana Legislative Auditor created with SB137, a bill authored by Senator Barrow in 2023.

According to Barrow, she chose to create the task force following a phone call she received from a constituent describing a case of child sexual abuse which ended with the accused abuser still having access to the alleged victim.

“Someone called me about a sexual abuse situation where the abuser was still able to get to the child,” recalled Barrow. “I asked her how does this happen, and why is it happening, and she said there are many aspects to this, and it’s not easy to figure out, it’s very complex. This is something we really need to take a look at.”

During her testimony, Kathleen Richey highlighted a statistic from her office, stating it‘s received almost 250 complaints in three weeks, with more than 10% of the complaints involving child sexual abuse.

According to the task force, the most immediate issues impacting the future safety of affected children are the cross-functional communications and processes between departments and courts, the lack of standardized training for chilld sexual abuse interviews and the absence of a written protocol for such investigations under the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and law enforcement.

Task force member and Lafourche Parish District Attorney Kristine Russell emphasized the importance of Multi-Disciplinary Team Meetings (MDTs): monthly intra-communications between law enforcement, DCFS, district attorney offices, and advocacy centers. According to Russell, the purpose of MDTs are to ensure the services and support a child receives are sufficient and to ”force communication” between the agencies.

“The number one issue that we’re talking about right now is a lack of communication between agencies and so MDT meetings force communication and in the end result everybody has better cases”

While discussing the interview processes, Richey highlighted a portion of her investigation on interview training, citing that DCFS does not have training specifically for interviewers handling cases of child sexual abuse. She further states that while training is available through advocacy centers and forensic interviews, interviewers “often don’t participate.”

“We have met with an intake interviewer, a worker with DCFS, and in the course of that interview we just did some play-acting and I said, ‘Okay, I‘m a grandma and I’m worried…that somebody is messing with my grandchild’ and, y’know, what do you ask me? There was a lot that I could’ve told them if they only asked, but they didn’t ask,” Richey explained.

Her suggested solution to the task force would be to develop a written code of protocol and provide accessible training to DCFS specifically for interviewers handling child sex abuse investigations.

“We also discovered there’s no training specific for child sexual abuse for an interviewer, and so we are working with the department [DCFS] to identify appropriate training

“Centralized intake has a protocol for a child fatality, they have a protocol for drug-exposed newborns, and a protocol for trafficking. There is no specific protocol for the extent of the interview for the report of a child sexual abuse.

The task force is set to reconvene on November 13 to potentially create new policy and/or legislative recommendations for 2025.

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