Valley revives sexual abuse response team

PALMER — When you look through court records in sexual assault cases, there’s usually one sentence in the description of what happened that Valley cases share: “The victim was sent to Anchorage for a forensic exam.”

That’s about to change.

“During a staff meeting, our police chief Gene Belden brought up that we were having to take our sexual assault victims all the way to Anchorage,” said Bert Cottle, deputy administrator for the city of Wasilla. “A lot of them were saying, ‘I don’t want to spend another hour in a squad car.’”

So a lot of those cases were falling apart before they could even get off the ground.

“Basically, the mayor turned to me and he said, ‘fix it,’” Cottle said.

Since then, Cottle said he’s been working on it. Part of that effort was on display Friday at Mat-Su College. That was the last day of training for members of what will soon be the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART). The nurses, Alaska State Troopers, Wasilla police officers, prosecutors from the Palmer District Attorney’s office and advocates from Alaska Family Services were all involved.

Lauree Morton is the executive director of the group putting on the training, the Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. She said examining a victim as close as possible to his or her own community is very important.

She said there are evidentiary concerns, that evidence of a sexual assault can dissipate over time.

“The sooner the evidence can be collected after an assault, the better evidence you’re going to get,” Morton said. “That is a consideration, but the primary consideration is the victim’s well-being.”

She pointed out that a lot of times, victims are asked not to change clothes and not to shower until they can be examined. It can get pretty uncomfortable, not to mention traumatic.

“This training is really, ‘how do we work together as a team to provide the best service and the least harm?’” Morton said of the weeklong training that culminated Friday.

In addition to the training sessions, a lot of the different disciplines will have extra training. Nurses, for example, will usually train in the field under a certified sexual assault nurse examiner. Some of those discipline-specific trainings also happen in breakout groups at the training Morton was helping run.

Cottle said that after the mayor told him to fix the problem, he set about finding funding sources and agencies to help. There had been a team in the Valley years ago, but it fell apart. Some of the people involved then have been helping Cottle now.

Overall, he said, $332,500 was pulled together to restart the SART team. That penciled out to a one-time state grant of $124,000; $200,000 from the Mat-Su Borough; $2,500 each from the city of Wasilla, the city of Palmer and the Mat-Su Borough School District; and $1,000 from the city of Houston.

He said that in the process of helping get this all started, he talked to people who helped set a program up before.

“They say that everywhere this has happened your numbers double within the first two years,” Cottle said.

Which means that in the Valley, the 35-40 yearly sexual assault cases might push as high as 100. Which, Cottle points out, is just that much more justice — and hopefully, a lower rate of sexual assault.

“I’ve talked to people on the parole board and they say, look we’ve got perpetrators out there that know that the odds of getting caught are less because the victims don’t come forward,” Cottle said.

He said the commitment from the state was a one-time deal, but the borough, cities and school district have signed on for the long haul. Which, he said, is as it should be. The Valley is maturing. Census numbers in 2010 pegged the borough at about 90,000. That’s not a small community.

“We’re 100,000 people,” Cottle said. “We should be able to take care of our own.”

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