State lawmakers established a task force on Thursday to closer examine how state agencies respond to allegations of child sexual abuse.
This comes after a shocking case of sexual assault surfaced in Bristol, where a now 28-year-old woman told police she was raped thousands of times over the span of more than a decade by a man who was her caregiver.
She said the abuse started at age 9 and lasted until she was 20. She was even impregnated by her abuser at age 13, according to an arrest warrant. Roger Barriault, 63, was charged with first degree sexual assault.
“This particular care really underscored for me the need for this legislation,” Rep. Liz Linehan (D-Cheshire) said.
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Linehan is co-chair of the Committee on Children, which established the task force during their Thursday afternoon meeting.
“It’s gonna look at past cases. How did we react? It’s gonna look at cases throughout the country. How did they do it better? It’s going to find systemic problems in maybe how one department communicates with the other,” Linehan said.
The task force will look closer at how the Department of Children and Families (DCF), judiciary and the probate court operate when sexual assault claims are made.
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“Let us intervene very early on and not have people’s lives ruined because of lack of that intervention,” Rep. William Pizzuto (R-Middlebury) said.
The attorney for the accusor in the Bristol case was at Thursday’s committee meeting, and said his client’s case is a multi-level failure by DCF.
“It’s a failure in investigating abuse and neglect, which is the primary job that they have,” Nate Baber said. “It’s a failure in managing their foster care system. This young lady was a foster child after all. The foster mother had moved away [and] they didn’t even know it.”
DCF has previously denied that the Barriaults were the woman’s foster parents, and said they were placed in the home by the probate court.
“You’re never going to be able to stop one or two incidents of abuse,” Baber said. “It’s never gonna end. However, you can stop this repeated trauma if you have the safeguards in place to make sure that it doesn’t happen, or you notice it or you say something, and you take care of the issue early on as opposed to waiting 12 years.”
He hopes systemic change is made from the lawmakers’ efforts.
“I want to make sure that I can do whatever I can as somebody that represents clients to hold their feet to the fire and make sure that they’re not just paying lip service to this issue, but they’re having real concrete action and steps necessary to make sure that to the best that we can we stop this abuse," Baber said.
