OGDEN, Utah — Two women illustrated this week that the most important person in a child sex abuse case is the survivor.
Nearly 35 years after members of a cult sexually abused them as children, Dawn Winter and Andrea Lithgow provided living examples that Children’s Justice Centers in Utah offer an opportunity for abused girls and boys to begin a journey to healing and wholeness.
The two women smiled and spoke confidently, plainly and gratefully about their experience at the state’s first Children’s Justice Center, which opened in Ogden weeks before police raided the polygamist Zion Society Cult.
“A week after I turned 10, I became one of the first children to walk into the Children’s Justice Center,” Winter said. “I was stubborn and terrified. What I didn’t realize was that I’d just been saved, saved in a manner not possible just months earlier.”
Winter and Lithgow spoke to about 250 people who gathered to celebrate the Weber-Morgan Children’s Justice Center’s move to a large, friendly, light-filled new building this week. The center is located next to the Ogden School District’s headquarters and the Spence Eccles Ogden Community Sports Complex.
The new building represents all the lessons learned at the state’s 25 Children’s Justice Centers about how to help children tell investigators about the abuse they have suffered, said Rod Layton, outgoing director of the Weber-Morgan CJC.
The building also is evidence of the combined efforts of the cities of Ogden and Morgan counties and many others, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which donated $350,000 to the project.
“We’re a partner to the cause,” said the church’s Utah Area president, Elder Kevin W. Pearson. “The church has every intention of being front and center, shoulder to shoulder in this until we can eradicate the problem.... This is a scourge that has got to be addressed.”
Elder Pearson, a General Authority Seventy, said the church has provided millions of dollars to CJCs over the years as part of its international efforts to root out and address all forms of abuse.
“It’s been a longtime relationship, and this is just the beginning,” he said.
Another partner, the Ogden School District, could not donate the land outright, so it gave the center a $1 annual lease for 100 years.
Layton said that the coalition that built the center’s new home proved that supporting child victims is an antidote to a divisive era.
“We are still together when it comes to children and protecting them,” he said.
The new CJC is one of 1,000 across the country where investigators can take children who report abuse. Investigators from Weber and Morgan counties now can use three forensic interview rooms in the building to record interviews with an unobtrusive camera mounted on the ceiling.
A 1994 amendment to the Utah Constitution provided that those interviews can be used in preliminary hearings. Most children recovering from abuse now tell their story just once, in a forensic interview room, because most cases resolve before trial.
The interviews or recordings are watched by everyone involved in a child abuse case, from police investigators to therapists, health care and social workers and child protective services. They convene after interviews to determine the best way to help the children heal and prosecute the perpetrators.
Winter said the centers give child abuse survivors the ability “to begin imagining life could be different than what you’re experiencing.”
“We exist so children understand that what happened to them does not define them,” Utah CJC Director Tracey Tabet.
“This is where healing begins,” said President Emily Belle Freeman, general president of the Church of Jesus Christ’s Young Women organization. “This is where the story can be told and justice, help and restoration can be found.”
Lithgow turned 16 the day she entered the center in 1991 after the raid on the abusive cult.
“You built more than walls. You built a safe haven of trust,” she said at the ribbon-cutting event Thursday. “You’re creating a place where voices are honored, where their healing can begin and where the possibility of wholeness is kept alive. For some of us that’s the first real step toward becoming who we were always meant to be.”
Utah CJCs served 20,038 children in 2024, according to the Utah Attorney General‘s annual report.
Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said the purpose of CJCs is to put children first.
“What we’re trying to do here in centers like this is look at these children holistically from every angle and figure out how, while we’re collecting the information we need from a law enforcement standpoint, we can recognize the real focus is on helping these children heal and live normal lives,” he told the Deseret News.
Brown said the CJCs stop generation cycles of abuse.
“We’ll never know the number of lives saved, the number who are not traumatized, who are not abused as a result of the work done here,” he said.
Layton, the outgoing director of the center, said the large windows that give the building a light, airy feeling were a direct response to a child survivor who said a past location was dark and scary.
“So many of these children come from a place of trauma, a place of secrecy, a place of darkness,” said Sister Amy A. Wright, first counselor in the Primary General Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ.
“They step into this facility,” she said, “and it’s a building of light, of space, of safety, of love, where they can take ownership of their story, where people will believe them and will do all in their power to help them. That’s critical to how far they will go.”
Elder Pearson said the world knows through scripture that Christ loved and cared for children.
“Would this not be an essential interest of his? It is,” Elder Pearson said. “I know it is. He would want his church to be deeply involved in it, and we are.”