A Suicide Attempt, an Order to Keep Silent: a U.S. Agency Mishandled Sex-abuse Claims

By Christopher Weaver
Wall Street Journal
June 7, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-suicide-attempt-an-order-to-keep-silent-a-u-s-agency-mishandled-sex-abuse-claims-11559923793

When employees at a U.S. Indian Health Service facility here saw a video of their maintenance man disappearing with a 16-year-old patient into a private bathroom, they strongly suspected he was sexually involved with her.

After two staff members questioned the girl, she dragged a chair to the bathroom shower and tried to hang herself from the curtain rod, according to internal documents and people familiar with the September 2016 incident.

Although suspected sexual abuse of minors on Indian reservations is supposed to be reported to law-enforcement officials and social workers, several employees said an IHS manager told them not to say anything.

Months later, the maintenance man, then 47 years old, was told he was fired over the incident—then unfired. He returned to work at the Unity Healing Center, a teens-only residential substance-abuse treatment facility, although by then there was a federal investigation into his conduct. His duties included reviewing safety incident reports, including those about sex abuse.

The IHS, which provides health care for 2.6 million Native Americans has allowed employees accused of sexual misconduct to continue working and has struggled to meet U.S. requirements for reporting such allegations, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. At Cherokee, no one contacted law enforcement about the maintenance man until about seven months after the incident, and senior agency officials didn’t intervene.

In February, the Journal and the PBS series Frontline reported that IHS pediatrician Stanley Patrick Weber had sexually assaulted young male patients, and that the agency ignored warnings and tried to silence whistleblowers over two decades. The day the Journal/Frontline report was published, the IHS announced a written policy to improve its handling of sexual-abuse allegations.

Yet in interviews in early April, more than two months after the new policy was enacted, employees of the North Carolina facility said they hadn’t yet gotten any details about the new policy or received any training. The Cherokee case suggests that some of the problems that enabled Mr. Weber’s misconduct persist.

Beverly Cotton, the IHS leader of the region that includes North Carolina, said in an interview she thought the subsequent federal investigation of the Cherokee incident had failed to substantiate the misconduct allegations, and that Unity’s policies complied with federal law. “If there was a report of sexual misconduct and a supervisor advised another licensed provider not to report that, both of them hold responsibility,” she said. Law-enforcement officials said the federal investigation is continuing.

A White House task force is investigating the Weber case and the agency’s policies for handling sexual abuse. At a meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., in May, task force members discussed weaknesses they had discovered in the agency’s sex-abuse reporting practices, including confusion among staff members, and a lack of standard policies.

“There is a lack of clarity when it comes to the immediate steps that need to be taken to report suspected child abuse,” said Trent Shores, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma and a task force leader. He said the task force is examining whether IHS employees understood their legal obligation to report child abuse, and whether any supervisors might have discouraged such reports.