Bucks County Leads PA in Child Abuse Arrests, Prosecutions
April is Child Abuse Awareness Month, and Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn is using that backdrop to tout the county’s success in prosecuting child abuse cases.
“We are leading the state,” Schorn told the county council. “The Bucks County District Attorney’s office has more arrests and prosecutions than any other county in this commonwealth.” That includes more populous counties, including Philadelphia and Allegheny, she said.
“This past year, my office dedicated every available resource to work with our municipal police partners to build our Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, and we have done so. It’s a literal force multiplier.
“I am so proud to say that we will not abide by child abuse, we will never turn a blind eye, we will commit every resource to combat this crime,” said Schorn.
According to data from the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC), the state charged more than 32,000 people with child abuse between 2019 to 2023, resulting in 10,915 case convictions.
Schorn said prosecuting these cases is particularly difficult.
“Unlike most other crimes, child abuse happens behind closed doors and in secret, and most often there are no witnesses to the crimes other than the child victims who suffer the unimaginable. The individuals who perpetrate these crimes are masterful at identifying ways to access our children and carry out tactics to silence them from ever disclosing the abuse,” Schorn said.
Child abuse has changed from ‘stranger danger’ to people who are known to the child and family, to strangers who access children through the internet, she said.
“And so, we pivoted, and we developed the knowledge to understand grooming and what grooming really was. By the time I was a prosecutor here at the Bucks County District Attorney’s office over 25 years ago, with the sole intention of prosecuting child abuse cases, we were really good at identifying grooming and understanding the concept because we had to be.
“So, we had to educate our community so that they were aware of the known potential perpetrators in their lives. And we had to educate our juries, because jurors would often wonder why the lack of a prompt report, why the lack of disclosure, and we had to educate them so they understood the dynamic. And to break it down, as simply as possible, is that grooming was so effective in that with the young children, the person would shower them with love, attention, and affection, and then commit these crimes, and the child didn’t even know that what was happening to them was wrong,” said Schorn.
Schorn said one of the “worst things” she’s seen from child abusers is “the grooming tactic of perpetrating the unimaginable sexual crimes upon a child and telling them ‘if you don’t let me do this or if you tell anyone, I’ll then perpetrate it on your younger sister or your younger brother.’ They were already doing that and saying the same thing,” she said.
Seeing institutional abuse going unpunished, district attorneys lobbied the legislature to change the laws and extend the statute of limitations.
In recent years, there has been a monumental shift in perpetrators finding their targets online and through social media.
“Now, those people are often not known to us, the parents and caregivers, yet our children are unwittingly inviting them into our homes and into their own bedrooms. They are exploiting our children in ways unimaginable, and the platform that social media provides allows them to do so with anonymity and to do so with false identifications, so the child thinks they’re talking to a peer. And we have seen devastating results. It is literally like drinking from a firehose, the number of cases we are seeing as far as online exploitation.”
But law enforcement has stepped up and prosecutors in her office “headed up by my Chief of Special Victims Kristin McElroy, the county detectives and every member of the child protective services unit, and the CAC in Bucks County and our victim advocates at NOVA, have worked in collaboration with one another to fight fire with fire.”
“We advocated for legislative change so that internet service providers are mandated to provide cyber tips to law enforcement, but if you don’t have the resources to fight the cyber tips, you are losing the war on child abuse.”
