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OGDEN — Rod Layton admits he was very resistant when Tracey Tabet first approached him about changing the way child sexual abuse crimes were handled.
"I said, 'Absolutely not. Law enforcement knows how to interview kids. They know what they're doing. They know what they need for their cases,'" Layton recalled.
Tabet was asking him to train a forensic interviewer to conduct the conversations with victims of these crimes. Layton finally consented, sending his receptionist to the three-day training. He and a fellow police officer in Roy allowed the receptionist to conduct an interview with a child victim one day soon after.
"She went in, and holy cow," Layton said, "that was so much better than we do."
He said the other officer turned to him and said, "I'm never doing any more of my own. She's doing all of them."
Trained forensic interviewers have "dramatically changed how we interview kids," according to Layton, the executive director of the Weber-Morgan Children's Justice Center.
For the span of his career in law enforcement investigating crimes against children, Layton would regularly sit the children in front of a desk in the police station, where the victims were intimidated or overwhelmed. Officers often asked leading and suggestive questions to get kids to say what they wanted to them to say — admissions that can often be difficult to defend in court.
Children's justice centers changed all that, creating spaces designed for children to feel comfortable and safe.
The center also changed the way children were given medical care. Layton said he used to open a phone book and select a doctor to conduct a medical exam on a child. "Pediatricians had no idea how to do a forensic exam," he said.
Now, trained nurse practitioners working for Primary Children's Hospital provide services for the children at the center.
Those changes and more were celebrated Thursday as a crowd gathered under canopies in a gravel parking lot bordering Ben Lomond High School for the groundbreaking of a new facility for the Weber-Morgan Children's Justice Center.
"It's a very sobering experience," Weber County Commissioner Jim Harvey said, "if you've ever sat inside a (justice center) and truly understood what goes on inside."
The center serves children 17 years of age or younger who are victims of sexual or physical abuse and have seen increased demand for services geared toward children who have experienced domestic violence, drug endangerment, and internet exploitation, according to the center's website.
Kids think the current facility is spooky, according to Layton. The mansion, built in the early 1900s is "not lit very well, it's very noisy, it's hard to control the temperature," and while it has served the center well, the biggest issue is space. The old facility, once a pioneering effort in changing the way victims of abuse were treated, can no longer handle the number of cases.
Growth of child investigation cases
The county reports that child investigation cases at the current Weber-Morgan Children's Justice Center have doubled in the past 10 years.
Tabet, the statewide program director of the state's multiple children's justice centers, pointed out that the original Ogden facility was one of the first two dozen in the country. Now, she says there are more than 1,000 nationwide.
"The need for bigger facilities is not attributable just to your area's growth," Tabet told the crowd, "but to the evolution of services in our (children justice centers)."
Population growth is only part of the reason cases have ballooned, according to Layton. "Twenty-five years ago, when somebody made contact with a child, they walk up to you and talk to you," he said. "Now, it's all social media."
Layton started the Internet Crimes Against Children task force for northern Utah in 2000 and has seen the dangers of online connection evolve.
"It's become so embedded into our communities, it's become so embedded into our lifestyles," Layton said. "When we become casual about something, then that's a dangerous place to be."
The new center
The new Weber-Morgan Children Justice Center Construction will look out onto the Wasatch range, with views of the Ogden River within walking distance from the facility. The Ogden School District, unable to donate the land outright, has leased it to the center for the next century at $1 per year. The state, counties, cities and private entities all collaborated to fund the new building.
The staff are hoping to move in by August.
Looking toward the future, Layton would like to see the state of Utah pass legislation, similar to that in Arizona, which only allows forensic interviewers to conduct those evaluations with children. "We're just not there yet," he said, though facilities like this center are helping close the infrastructure gap to make that possible one day.
