Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 2500

Tonight's special guest is Janine Robben from Portland, Oregon, an attorney, author activist and mom. Janine prosecuted sexual crimes committed against children in Oregon for seven years. Later, in her second career as a newspaper reporter, she covered the disappearance of two girls. Her work was was publicized in People magazine and described as 'stranger danger' but actually turned out to be grooming of girls for sexual abuse by a neighbor whom they loved and trusted .. because he was the father of one of their friends. Janine was the first executive director of the Oregon Crime Victims Law Center, and worked in private practice with an attorney who represented victims who had been assaulted by priests in Oregon. "Most importantly, and bizarrely, I am both a member by marriage of a family that rallied around one of its members when he was accused of child sexual abuse, and a mother who later learned that her child had been sexually assaulted by that beloved relative." Janine's book, 'Closer to Home; Murders and Memoir', discusses childhood sexual abuse from three perspectives: as a prosecutor, a reporter and a mother. "A big part of it is explaining how children are groomed for sexual abuse, why their non-offending family members may be blind to the abuse and may not believe them when they finally do tell, and how much pressure non-offending family members are under not to break ranks, using my family as an example." Janice goes on, "It’s true crime, but I really wrote it for people who work in this field and victims and their families, because what happened to my family – even after I’d spent years prosecuting child sexual abuse – was incomprehensible to me. How can this happen?"