Stearns County Sheriff Remains Hopeful That Wetterling Case Will Be Solved

9-6-2014 Wisconsin:

Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner says they will never stop trying to get the case of Jacob Wetterling resolved.

He says he hopes by being featured on CNN’s “The Hunt”, new information will be uncovered.

“Tips from the public solve cases. And we’re always hopeful that the next call will be the missing puzzle piece that we’ve been waiting for,” Sanner said.

It will be 25 years in October since Jacob Wetterling was abducted while riding bikes with his friends.

“A tremendous amount of work has gone into this case, from the local and state level, to the national level. And it is an unbelievable frustration that we can’t provide the family and the community with the answers they want and need,” he said.

There’s been renewed interest in the case, and a possibility of other victims.

“Twenty-five years ago investigators looked at other similar cases in the area and tried to link them, so that’s nothing new. Although now with the new interest, it just generates input,” he said.

Jacob’s mother Patty Wetterling has dedicated her life to the mission of finding missing children, and created a foundation to help others. ..Source.. by

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Teens report emotional abuse more prevalent

2-13-2012 National:

A 17-year-old from Red Wing says her boyfriend tries to control her.

He has her Facebook password, checks her messages, deletes "friends" on her account and tells her she can't hang out with certain people, she said Thursday, after the release of a report about teen-dating violence in Minnesota.

"It's not healthy, for one thing, because you need your privacy," she said.

During the study, in focus groups with more than 200 youths, they reported "that while physical abuse occurs, it's emotional and verbal abuse that they see most often in teen relationships," said Patty Wetterling, sexual violence prevention director for the state Health Department.

Minnesota was one of six states chosen for a teen dating violence prevention initiative funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The initiative studied the programs in the state to prevent teen-dating violence and made recommendations to prevent such violence.

The report said that even though many people and organizations are concerned with preventing teen-dating violence, there is little coordination of efforts.

During the 18 months the report was compiled by the Minnesota Health Department and Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women, 10 young people died in the state as a result of dating violence, said Sasha Cotton, prevention specialist for the battered women coalition.

"Teen-dating violence is a serious problem that youth are facing, probably at rates higher than we had expected," she said. "This process, this plan and these recommendations are only the beginning. ... We know that dating violence is 100 percent preventable, but it will require partnership."

Wetterling said the report's challenges began with the language.

"The first was the word 'teen,' " she said. "Youth don't relate to the word 'teen.' Teen does not translate literally into Spanish, and it's more restrictive in age than what we were working with. And youth really don't date anymore. They sort of hang out."

Then there is "violence." It "conjures up different images in people's heads, so we wanted to be clear that people understood that it also could include emotional abuse," Wetterling said.

Youth said they didn't have "consistent people or places in their lives modeling healthy, respectful relationships," the report's executive summary said.

Children need to learn about respectful relationships before they reach adolescence, the report said.

"Most of our partners agree that if healthy, respectful relationship building was a part of core curriculum in elementary school as well as being modeled in the home and community, there would be fewer incidences of bullying and TDV (teen-dating violence) as our youth get older and relationships become more intimate and complex," the report said.

About one in three adolescent girls in the United States is a victim of physical, emotional or verbal abuse from a dating partner, according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

The teen from Red Wing said she hopes the report spreads the word about teen-dating violence: "It's not healthy to stay in a relationship if you're being abused emotionally or physically."

The report contains five recommendations to prevent teen-dating violence:

-- Prevention efforts in Minnesota should be implemented and coordinated.

-- There should be "a strong statewide network of youth service organizations, domestic and sexual violence organizations, schools, faith communities and community groups working on prevention efforts."

-- Youth leadership should be involved in prevention efforts.

-- Media messages "that reflect positive messages about teen dating violence prevention work" are needed.

-- "Every child in the state needs to have access to teen dating violence prevention resources and services." ..Source.. by Mara H. Gottfried

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MN- Missing boy's mom: Jaycee's story 'makes my heart smile'

9-1-2009 Minnesota:

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (CNN) -- News of Jaycee Dugard's safe return after 18 years in captivity gives Patty Wetterling hope.

Wetterling's son Jacob is still missing after a gunpoint abduction almost 20 years ago near their home in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

"Jacob was with his best friend and his brother. They witnessed it," Wetterling says, recalling that day back in October 1989. "They saw this masked man with a gun."

Jaycee Dugard's return "is reaffirming," Wetterling adds. "There are cases where nobody believed [the children] were coming home, and they did. This is one. So for me, it makes my heart smile. It's a success."

Both children -- Jaycee Dugard and Jacob Wetterling -- were 11 years old at the time of their abductions.

Wetterling met Dugard's mother, Terry Probyn, on a television show -- "it might have been 'Geraldo,'" as Wetterling recalls -- shortly after Jaycee's disappearance, and they also spoke on the phone occasionally.

"It's just phenomenal," Wetterling says of Dugard's case. "I know a lot of parents of missing children, and we all hope and pray that one day we'll get to hold our kids again. That's the goal."

Wetterling says she hasn't spoken to Probyn since her daughter's discovery because the media chaos has yet to subside and since the family undoubtedly "needs some time, they need some space ... to heal."

But knowing that the Dugard family now has a chance to rebuild their lives does more than fuel her optimism for Jacob. It gives her reason to go to work every day.

Since her son's kidnapping, Wetterling has turned being an advocate for families of missing children into a full-time job.

After helping create the sex offender registry for Minnesota and subsequently for the nation, she helped build Team HOPE -- Help Offering Parents Empowerment -- a parent-to-parent mentoring program for mothers and fathers in similar situations.

"Most parents know nothing about child abduction, so when it happens you just scramble for what's out there," Wetterling says.

She felt so strongly that children needed a bigger voice in government that she ran for Congress in 2004 and 2006. She lost, but not without garnering more than 40 percent of the vote each time.

A secondary math teacher until just shortly before Jacob's abduction, Wetterling currently heads up the sexual violence prevention program at the Minnesota Department of Health in St. Paul.

"We're all seeking solutions ... some kind of protection, some kind of prevention work. So that's really where my energy flowed. 'How can we stop this from happening in the first place?'"

A large portion of Wetterling's job centers on ending social norms in television, video games and advertising that, she says, tolerate sexual victimization and in some cases "sort of encourage it."

"We [need to] collectively say, 'This is not OK -- you cannot sexually victimize.'"

Through the program's five-year strategic plan, Wetterling hopes to lower the numbers of children who become victims. But she says she'll also continue educating others and, specifically, urging people to report any peculiar behavior.

For example, the case of Jaycee Dugard's is similar to many of the children who've turned up after being abducted in that the only reason they were found is because of "somebody noticing something and calling the police."

With Dugard, it was a police officer who noticed something suspicious, and Wetterling urges everyone to be just as vigilant.

"These kids do not come running forward on their own. They are found by someone else," she explains. "The bottom-line lesson is to tell people to report things when they see them. Trust your instincts ... You'd want somebody sticking up for your child, so don't second-guess. And call."

Wetterling described another example -- the case of a child taken from Wisconsin to a hotel in Texas.

"The maid in the hotel said, 'There's something not right about this relationship.' And the second time this girl was on 'America's Most Wanted,' the maid was watching and called the show. Within minutes [the child] was found."

An instance like that or Jaycee Dugard's could very well be what brings Jacob home someday.

"C'mon home, Jake," Wetterling says when asked what she'd tell her son in the event he sees this story. "We never quit. We need you home. And to the man who took him: It's time. It's time to lift the burden that you've carried, as well, for all these years and tell us where he is and what happened. It's time." ..Source.. by Chris Welch

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Patty Wetterling: The harm in sex-offender laws

9-14-2007 Wisconsin:

ST. JOSEPH, Minn. -- My son Jacob was kidnapped on Oct. 22, 1989. Neither his brother nor his friend saw the man's face. He was masked, he had a gun and he ordered them to run to the woods. By the time they looked back, Jacob was gone and so was the man. Since that day, I have been on a journey to find him and to stop this from ever happening to another child, another family.

But I'm worried that we're focusing so much energy on naming and shaming convicted sex offenders that we're not doing as much as we should to protect our children from other real threats.

Many states make former offenders register for life, restrict where they can live, and make their details known to the public. And yet the evidence suggests these laws may do more harm than good.

Jacob's Law was the first federal attempt to prevent convicted sex offenders from repeating their crimes after release. It was the outcome of my unwanted education in sexual violence against children.

Soon after Jacob was taken, I learned that sexual motives are usually behind child kidnapping. That was a thought totally out of my realm of consciousness. Who would do that? Who would sexually harm a child? As the search for Jacob went on, I asked law enforcement, what do you need? An investigator told me: A ready list of potential suspects, a central database of offenders convicted of sexual violence against children.

The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children Sex Offender Registration Act was part of the 1994 Crime Bill signed by President Bill Clinton. Our goal was to give law enforcement a tool to help build safer communities. Back in 1990, when we first recommended registering convicted sex offenders, we were met with resistance: "You can't do that. These people have rights!" How times have changed. Few people today are concerned about the rights of sex offenders. Most now complain our laws are not tough enough.

But they might be missing some basic facts. First, in most states "sex offender" covers anyone, including juveniles, convicted of any sexual offense, including consensual teenage sex, public urination and other non-violent crimes. Second, Jacob was the exception, not the rule: more than 90 percent of sexual violence is committed by someone the child knows. And third, most shocking to me, sex offenders are less likely to re-offend than commonly thought. A Department of Justice study suggested ex-offenders have a recidivism rate of 3 percent to 5 percent within the first three years after release.

Another study found that, after 15 years, three out of four do not re-offend.

Shortly before Jacob's Law was passed, Megan Kanka was kidnapped, raped and murdered. Her parents felt it wasn't enough for law enforcement to know where sex offenders were: they thought we should all know. Maybe, if they'd known that there was a convicted sex offender living next door, their child would be alive today. Megan's Law was created to let people know when a violent offender was released into their community, so they could talk to their children and perhaps save another child from sexual violence. But the law has been expanded so that now anyone with an Internet connection can download details about almost any offender, whether or not they pose a risk, and whether or not they live nearby.

Are these policies working? Are our "get tough on sex offenders" laws having the desired effect? Human Rights Watch has taken on the challenge of looking at sex offender policy to see what parts are working and what aren't.

This week it published a 143-page report, "No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the United States." The researchers examined whether we are building safer communities with these laws, and what issues policy-makers should consider. HRW found that many laws may not prevent sexual attacks on children, but do lead to harassment, ostracism and even violence against former offenders. That makes it nearly impossible to rehabilitate those people and reintegrate them safely into their communities -- and that may actually increase the risk that they'll repeat their crime.

We need to keep sight of the goal: no more victims. We need to be realistic. Not all sex offenders are the same. Not all sex offenses are the same. We need to ask tougher questions: What can we do to help those who have offended so that they will not do it again? What are the social factors contributing to sexual violence and how can we turn things around? None of us want our loved ones to be victims of sexual violence. None of us want to be the parent or sibling or child of a sex offender. But since the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the family, sexual violence becomes personal very quickly. It affects all of us.

We need better answers. We need to fund prevention programs that stop sexual violence before it happens. We need to look at what can help those released from prison to succeed so that they don't victimize again -- and that probably means housing and jobs and treatment and community support. Given that current laws are extremely popular, taking truly effective measures may exact a high political price. But that's surely not too much to pay to prevent the kidnap, rape or murder of another child. ..more.. Opinion by Patty Wetterling

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