Agency takes on dark issues

WASILLA — Tucked away in a neighborhood south of the Parks Highway is a place you may not have heard of and would rather not have to visit.

But if you do end up at The Children’s Place, chances are you’ll be glad it’s there.

Opened in March 1999, The Children’s Place is a child advocacy center, offering every service a family needs if and when a child is the victim of sexual or physical abuse or neglect.

“We all come to the family, so they don’t have to go from place to place,” said the center’s executive director, Jen Burkmire. “We try to make it as easy on them as possible.”

She said those services include medical exams and referrals for psychological counseling, but also interviews with law enforcement and even snacks for children when a session runs long.

Kibe Lucas, a Wasilla real estate agent and chair of The Children’s Place’s board of directors, said he believes the center serves a necessary function in the community

“Children, they’re basically helpless and they have to have somebody looking out for them, especially when there’s abuse and neglect involved,” Lucas said.

Sgt. Michelyn Grigg with the Alaska State Troopers agreed.

“I just don’t think they can be beat to interview kids,” she said. Troopers could do it at their post, but, “an interview room is pretty sterile.”

A drive to take as much trauma out of the experience as possible permeates every step of the process, Burkmire said.

For instance, police who conduct interviews never show up in uniform. A lot of these children, she said, have had frightening experiences with law enforcement. A lot of them come from homes where the parents use drugs.

Having law enforcement in plain clothes, Burkmire said, is a step toward showing children that these officers are there to help.

Interviews are video recorded and fed to a monitor in another room. Anyone else who needs to get information from that interview watches it happen in real time. Which, again, makes things more comfortable for the child, since the child isn’t subjected to multiple interviews and only talks to one person.

And then there are the medical exams.

“The medical exams are not traumatic,” Burkmire said. “They’re a head-to-toe checkup. They do not focus on one particular part of the body.”

The end result, aside from giving children what they need, is a pile of information provided to law enforcement that makes for some pretty tight court cases.

“Most of our cases that are referred for prosecution are (pleaded) out,” she said. “These are very sound, sound cases.”

Now and again, though, there are some cases that are simply impossible to make.

“Sometimes there’s just not enough evidence to put the alleged offender in jail,” Burkmire said.

So a lot of times, the most important part of the process is the referral for psychological counseling, Burkmire said.

“Families are never billed for The Children’s Place services,” Burkmire said.

Of course, that points to one of the biggest challenges the center faces.

“Funding is always a challenge,” Burkmire said. “We have an amazing base of community donors.”

Though the center has struggled in the past. Lucas said that now, with the economy the way it is, the challenges are just as great.

“In the economic times that we’re in there’s got to be cuts,” Lucas said. “It’s definitely tough.”

But that hasn’t dimmed the center’s ambitions. Burkmire said that soon The Children’s Place hopes to expand its building to incorporate a wing for the Alaska State Troopers’ Child Crimes Investigative Unit.

She said those troopers do a good deal of their work at the center now. Housing them in the same building would just make sense, and it would give troopers a little more room to spread out in their Palmer post.

Lucas said the project could start relatively soon.

“If all of our anticipated funding shows up we’d like to have it done before next year,” Lucas said.

Grigg said that unit of the troopers includes two investigators.

There is grant money to pay either the Palmer Police Department or Wasilla Police Department to contribute an officer, but the decision on who to bring over hasn’t been made.

She pointed out that an investigator’s work with a family doesn’t end after the child is interviewed. The officer is involved through the entire process as the case goes to court.

“For families it would be easier if they have kind of a one-stop shopping,” she said.

Burkmire started at the center as a part-time employee. Asked, in light of some of the heartbreak she sees on a daily basis, what it is that keeps her going, she said it’s the feeling of having done something to help a child who desperately needs that help.

“It is challenging, but it’s very rewarding too, because every child that we see is special and amazing,” she said.

It’s especially challenging for Burkmire, since she is married to Sgt. Mike Burkmire, one of two troopers in charge of the Palmer branch of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation.

Her husband helps oversee a lot of the law enforcement end of the cases that come to the center. Burkmire said they set up rules when they started dating, both to protect the integrity of the cases and their relationship from getting lost in their work.

Lucas said it’s the rewards that drew him to The Children’s Place.

“The children are the future of these communities, and if they’re not taken care of and healed once they have a horrible traumatic event like this in their life, you end up having all kinds of problems with them later on,” he said. “If they get the right help and they can heal, they can end up becoming productive, contributing members of our society.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.