Children’s Cove Serves Region, Offering Advocacy, Training, Curriculum For Handling Cases of Child Abuse

CCB MEDIA PHOTO Lenny Fontes, associate director at the child advocacy agency Children's Cove, sits in the room with a two-way mirror where he does forensic interviews with children ages 2 to 17.

CCB MEDIA PHOTOS
Lenny Fontes, associate director at the child advocacy agency Children’s Cove, sits in the room with a two-way mirror where he does forensic interviews with children ages 2 to 17.

BARNSTABLE – Lenny Fontes loves his job. Fontes is often the first person to hear the full story after children on Cape Cod are abused.

He is the associate director at Children’s Cove, the Cape and Islands’ child advocacy agency.

“Helping a victim, nothing beats it,” Fontes said.

Fontes, who used to be a probation officer in Brockton and before that in Texas, has been working at Children’s Cove for 15 years.

He is one of very few men working in his field.

He credits his success as being “personality specific,” in other words, the father of two knows how to talk to kids.

CCB MEDIA PHOTO Children's Cove Associate Director Lenny Fontes walks through the stairway lined with handprints to the interview room. The handprints are meant to help children realize they are not alone in suffering abuse.

Children’s Cove Associate Director Lenny Fontes walks through the stairway lined with handprints to the interview room. The handprints are meant to help children realize they are not alone in suffering abuse.

He said the interviews he conducts are investigative but non-therapeutic. They are done to assist law enforcement in the prosecution of perpetrators of violence toward children.

The interviews are conducted in a room downstairs in the Children’s Cove facility, which is in a secluded section of the Mid Cape.

The stairway to the room where, over the years, thousands of children have told their grim stories, is lined with hundreds of multi-colored children’s handprints.

The artwork is meant to make children feel more comfortable.

“Sometimes kids come here and they think they’re the only one,” Fontes said. “I can say these are all the handprints of the boys and girls who were here before you, and it helps them, kind of relieves the stress a little bit.”

Children’s Cove handles about 200 cases a year, interviewing children between the ages of 2 and 17.

“We see kids who have been sexually abused, severely physically abused or witness to domestic violence,” Children’s Cove Director Stacy Gallagher said.

Fontes conducts 99 percent of the interviews.

The agency was founded 18 years ago as a way to address the problem of children who have been abused having to repeat their story over and over again, to hospital officials, police, attorneys, court officials and counselors. Children’s Cove works with police and the District Attorney’s office to conduct “forensic” interviews with children behind a two-way mirror so that the child only has to tell the story once.

Besides Gallagher and Fontes, the Children’s Cove staff includes a pediatric sexual assault nurse examiner, a mental health coordinator and a family/victim advocate.

There are 11 child advocacy agencies throughout the commonwealth, one in every county, and 700 across the country.

Children’s Cove is run by the county and is under the Barnstable County Department of Health and Human Services. It also has a nonprofit arm that conducts fundraising for its programs.

Last year, the agency started its Trauma-Informed Provider Network, or TIPNet, in which it trains individuals and agencies who work with children on how to handle incidents of child abuse.

“We found that kids are better served going to other counselors that we can provide training for, for specialized trauma counseling. So that’s what we’ve done in the last year. It’s been very successful. We’re going on our second training in September,” Gallagher said.

The next TIPNet training takes place September 24 and 25.

In addition, the agency is producing a state-wide training curriculum that is designed to be used by people in education and law enforcement throughout the state.

“It will provide mandated reporting, sort of Child Sexual Abuse 101, and every child advocacy center will be using that as their training curriculum. It will be the blanket curriculum for all training,” Gallagher said.

Children’s Cove is also one of the first pilot agencies nationwide to participate in a program through a US Justice Department $1 million grant for training and technical assistance to prevent child exploitation and trafficking. The initiative begins in October.

“They’re happening everywhere. We don’t have the resources to handle these cases right now. We do see these cases,” Gallagher said.

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