The Office of the Child Advocate this month issued its report on Connecticut Probate Court Guardianship Proceedings.
A 2024 law required the report in response to the horrific allegations of sexual abuse made in 2023 by a young Bristol woman against her guardians, Roger and Darlene Barriault. The victim, referred to in the report as Jane Doe, is my client.
The victim alleges that Mr. Barriault molested and abused her from the time she was nine years old until age 20. He impregnated her at the age of 12. Amongst other detailed findings, the report confirms the obvious: as far back as 2005 the Department of Children and Families missed numerous opportunities to intervene to protect Ms. Doe. In fact, OCA confirms DCF as recently as 2023 failed to provide to critical information about Mr. Barriault’s alleged sexual abuse to other authorities.
OCA reviewed my client’s case and used it as a proxy to better identify the numerous and obvious systematic failures still present when DCF investigates and provides its assessments on guardianship application. The report sets forth OCA’s conclusions that in the victim’s case DCF missed crucial opportunities, warning signs, and obvious red flags, and submitted guardianship assessments that “[omitted] critically important information.”
In fact, DCF approved and endorsed the Barriaults’ guardianship application when Ms. Doe was 5 months pregnant with Mr. Barriault’s daughter. Ms. Doe was only 13 years old.
A week after the OCA report, news broke that Waterbury police arrested a woman and allege that she held captive her now adult stepson for nearly 20 years. The man’s former school principal stated that he and others made nearly 20 calls to DCF. DCF claims it has no records involving the family or of the calls it allegedly received.
DCF’s refusal to apologize to the victims and accept blame is perhaps its biggest failure. In both cases, DCF’s responses is intended to serve only its primary goal: deflect, deny, and defend. It begs the us to let bygones be bygones.
In Ms. Doe’s case, DCF decided, in its wisdom, to respond to the OCA’s thorough report by purposely minimizing her case and stating that it has “little utility.” It falsely claims her matter to be “decades old,” that deserves no consideration. Of course, it knows its response is a lie: OCA concluded that as recently as 2023/2024, DCF fumbled the information it had concerning her abuse and failed to follow its own policies when it submitted its studies about the Barriaults to the court.
Lest there be any confusion about how misleading DCF’s response is, OCA specifically found that DCF in its December 2023 report to the court “made no mention of the July 2023 substantiation of allegations of sexual abuse” or “any of the seven accepted reports between 2016 and 2019” in violation of DCF policy. It failed again in 2024 when it submitted another inadequate study.
DCF’s response to news of the Waterbury case is just as useless. It deflected and hid behind its own self-serving cursory conclusion that its legal and statutory obligations require it to expunge records after 5 years. No, DCF’s commissioner did not announce that she proactively ordered a detailed investigation to determine whether anything was missed, or if any of its policies, procedures, or systematic failures could have, in any way, uncovered the alleged abuse. Instead, she called for an it takes a village approach to provide cover for its thinly veiled accusations that, yet again, others are to blame.
DCF makes careful use of words like “decades old” and “adult victim” in its dual responses. Its goal is to demand that we let bygones be bygones.
Any public officials, in the legislature and elsewhere, who unabashedly mimic DCF’s false talking points, share the same goal. They, too, seek to paint DCF as an unfair target of criticism that instead deserves sympathy – after all, they falsely claim, these issues are “decades old.” As I have seen firsthand, DCF’s and those public officials’ intentional decision to deflect and deny blame, and defend even when indefensible, does more harm than good.
In my client’s case, DCF’s cruel response to the OCA report was devastating and has caused her tremendous grief. It confirmed for her that DCF continues to treat her the way it did when it first learned she was allegedly being sexually abused: as a just a girl with little value, “little utility,” who deserves nothing more than passing concern.
It begs the question whether DCF’s leadership is more concerned about its image or about attempting to determine how many other children fell through the cracks.
Ms. Doe knows the answer.
Harsh? Well, perception is reality. To child sex abuse victims, the perception and the reality is that, when confronted with their own failures, too many government officials will go to great lengths to avoid saying the words that matters to them most: “We hear you. We are sorry.”
Nate Baber is an attorney based in Middletown, Connecticut. He has represented dozens of sexual abuse victims, including the Jane Doe identified in the latest report on Connecticut Probate Court Guardianship Proceedings from the Office of the Child Advocate. He and his wife have been licensed as foster parents by DCF, and the agency has awarded them one of its Foster Parent of the Year Awards. In addition, although he does not speak on its behalf, he was appointed to a State Task Force created to review how state agencies and the judicial branch respond to child sex abuse cases.
Source: www.courant.com – All rights belong to the original publisher.
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