After 5 years in Nashua, child advocate to lead state centers

NASHUA – Five years ago Kristie Palestino was alone, putting the finishing touches on her one-room office and designing admission forms to one of the state’s first child advocacy centers.

Last week, she was joined by about half-dozen employees as many police chiefs and dozens of community partners, including Gov. John Lynch, in a suite of rooms on Wellman Avenue celebrating the Nashua Child Advocacy Center’s fifth birthday.

Workers have interviewed more than 2,400 child victims of sexual assault since 2004 at the center and its sister site in Manchester. Palestino has been given an award recognizing her as a champion of children in the state and is leaving the Hillsborough County centers to take over the coordination of the state’s 10 child advocacy centers that have been founded to help New Hampshire children.

“In the last five years, we have mastered the multi-disciplinary response to these assaults and these crimes,” Palestino said. “We just wanted to bring everyone together where we can talk about what we’ve done for the last five years and our plans and goals for the next five years.”

Palestino is taking a job as the director of the New Hampshire Network of Child Advocacy Centers. Instead of leading the Hillsborough centers, she will be mentoring and leading directors of centers throughout the state. The Nashua Child Advocacy Center has started interviewing candidates for its director position.

“I think it will be good to have some change. With that comes growth,” Palestino said.

“My job will be to help them and their communities grow their centers and work with their communities,” she said. “I feel like the children in other counties deserve the same response they get here.”

At the fifth anniversary celebration last Thursday, Lynch credited Palestino and the CAC staff for the work they do interviewing children.

“You’re in the business of saving lives,” Lynch said. “You try to lessen the trauma by dealing with them in such a compassionate and caring way.”

Before the center opened in Nashua, child victims of sexual assault had to talk about the assaults an average of eight times as police, doctors, school personnel and mental health experts interviewed them, Palestino said.

At the CAC, a trained interviewer talks to the child in a kid-friendly environment while all the other stakeholders watch and listen from a room nearby. Police, prosecutors and others can wirelessly communicate with the interviewer during the interview to make sure all bases are covered at once, thereby reducing the stress on the young victim.

The single interview is less traumatic for the victim, Palestino said, and makes for more successful prosecutions because the information is consistent rather than being filtered through eight or more interviewers.

Those interviewers are now seeing an average of 600 a year in Nashua and Manchester. About 5 percent of the interviews are with victims of serious physical abuse, Palestino said, and two or three times a year they interview children who have witnessed homicides.

That’s a scary number, Palestino said because, historically, only one in 10 sex abuse victims ever comes forward.

“We have a huge problem,” she said. “There are days when my interviewers are interviewing three to four kids a day. It’s intense.”

Palestino said another part of the centers’ mission is increasing awareness among potential victims and increasing the number that do come forward. Those that don’t often have serious problems much later in life, including being more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and to be in abusive relationships. About half the women in prison have been abused in their lifetimes, Palestino said.

“It impacts our community even 20 years later. People don’t like to talk about sexual abuse, but we have to,” she said. “I feel proud that we’ve worked really hard at getting that information out there. I want to reach those other kids. Those are the ones I worry about.”

Nashua police Capt. Scott Howe, a member of the center’s board of directors, said the center has been a big help to Nashua detectives.

“It’s a great asset. It’s worked out perfectly,” he said. “It’s just a great way to work cases and difficult cases.”

Bob Walsh, the new county attorney, said the centers across the state are but one outgrowth of a new way of dealing with child sexual assault victims that has developed over the last 20 years.

“It has become not only easier to prosecute offenders but (its) much less harsh on the children in these unfortunate situations,” Walsh said. “The people who work here are absolute saints.”

Although Hillsborough County-specific data isn’t available, Palestino said communities across the country with a CAC have shown as much as 40 percent increases in their successful prosecution of sex offenders who target children.

Nicole Martini, the program coordinator at the Nashua center, said the center has been successful largely due to Palestino’s believe in the child advocacy center model.

“She’s had a huge impact on the center. What we are today is really a result of Kristie,” Martini said. “At the heart of it, she wants to serve kids and give them a voice.”

Palestino was also honored earlier this month when she was named this year’s recipient of the Dr. Roger M. Fossum Award. The award is given in memory of the state’s first chief medical examiner and is given to a person who has made outstanding contributions to multidisciplinary efforts to improve the lives of child victims of abuse and neglect.

Lynch called Palestino “one of my favorite people in the world” and one of his heroes.

Joseph G. Cote can be reached at 594-6415 or jcote@nasuatelegraph.com.