NPR Editor's note: This report includes graphic and disturbing descriptions of assault.
Pauline wants to tell her story — about that night in the basement, about the boys and about the abuse she wanted to stop.
But she's nervous. "Take a deep breath," she says out loud to herself. She takes a deep and audible breath. And then she tells the story of what happened on the night that turned her life upside down.
"The two boys took advantage of me," she begins. "I didn't like it at all."
Pauline sits after practice for a Christmas show with fellow group members of a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania. Pauline, who has intellectual disabilities, has been with the Arc program since 2014, after an emergency removal from her previous caretaker's home by Adult Protective Services when she was sexually assaulted.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
ABUSED AND BETRAYED: KEY FINDINGS
At a moment of reckoning in the United States about sexual harassment and sexual assault, a yearlong NPR investigation finds that there is little recognition of a group of Americans that is one of the most at risk: people with intellectual disabilities.
People with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate seven times higher than those without disabilities. That number comes from data run for NPR by the Justice Department from unpublished federal crime data.
People with intellectual disabilities are at heightened risk at all moments of their daily lives. The NPR data show they are more likely to be assaulted by someone they know and during daytime hours.
Predators target people with intellectual disabilities because they know they are easily manipulated and will have difficulty testifying later. These crimes go mostly unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished. And the abuser is free to abuse again.
Police and prosecutors are often reluctant to take these cases because they are difficult to win in court.
Pauline is a woman with an intellectual disability. At a time when more women are speaking up about sexual assault — and naming the men who assault or harass them — Pauline, too, wants her story told.
Her story, NPR found in a yearlong investigation, is a common one for people with intellectual disabilities.
NPR obtained unpublished Justice Department data on sex crimes. The results show that people with intellectual disabilities — women and men — are the victims of sexual assaults at rates more than seven times those for people without disabilities.
It's one of the highest rates of sexual assault of any group in America, and it's hardly talked about at all.
Pauline was part of that silent population. But she says she decided to speak publicly about what happened to her because she wants to "help other women."
NPR's investigation found that people with intellectual disabilities are at heightened risk during all parts of their day. They are more likely than others to be assaulted by someone they know. The assaults, often repeat assaults, happen in places where they are supposed to be protected and safe, often by a person they have been taught to trust and rely upon.
Pauline is 46, with a quick smile and an easy laugh. (NPR uses rape survivors' first name, unless they prefer their full name be used.) She has red hair and stylish, coppery-orange glasses.
Pauline (far right) leads fellow group home housemates into a day program at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
In February 2016, Pauline was living with her longtime caretaker and that woman's extended family.
On the night of Feb. 20, she was in the basement of the family's second home, in Pennsylvania. According to the police criminal complaint, Pauline was raped by two boys who were part of the family.
She told them repeatedly to stop. They warned her not to tell.
But she did.
Raise your hand
At a conference in a large ballroom, Leigh Ann Davis asked the audience in front of her a question: How many of them had dealt with sexual assault or sexual harassment in their lives? Davis was referencing the #MeToo campaign on social media. Almost every woman — about 30 of them — raised her hand.
Davis runs criminal justice programs for The Arc, a national advocacy group for the 4.7 million people with intellectual disabilities, their families and the professionals who work with them. This was at the group's convention in November in San Diego. The room was filled with professionals and parents as well as people with intellectual disabilities themselves.
Then Davis posed a second question: How many in the audience knew someone with an intellectual disability who had been the victim of sexual harassment or assault? Only two hands went up.
Pauline stands in her room after coming home from a day program for adults with intellectual disabilities.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
"What does that say about where we are as a society?" Davis asked. "Where people with intellectual disabilities are more likely to be victimized, but we don't see more hands being raised."
Davis focuses on the issue of sexual violence. She is familiar with the high number of rape reports among people with intellectual disabilities.
"It means people with disabilities still don't feel safe enough to talk abut what's going on in their lives," she said. "Or we haven't given them the foundation to do that. ... That there are not enough places to go where they'll feel they'll be believed."
Unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished
Intellectual disability is now the preferred term for what was once called "mental retardation." The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, which represents professionals and helps determine the official definition, describes an intellectual disability as "characterized by significant limitation in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behaviors." Those adaptive skills include social skills — such as the ability to deal with other people, to follow rules and avoid being victimized — and practical skills, things like being able to work and take care of one's health and safety.
"Developmental disability" is another commonly used term. And while this mostly refers to people with intellectual disabilities, it describes a larger group of people, including some without intellectual disabilities. People with cerebral palsy and autism, for example, are counted as having a developmental disability.
Completed jigsaw puzzles are displayed at the Arc Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
NPR reviewed hundreds of cases of sexual assault against people with intellectual disabilities. We looked at state and federal data, including those new numbers we obtained from the Justice Department. We read court records. We followed media accounts and put together a database of 150 assaults so serious that they garnered rare local and national media attention. We talked to victims, their guardians, family, staff and friends.
We found that there is an epidemic of sexual abuse against people with intellectual disabilities. These crimes go mostly unrecognized, unprosecuted and unpunished. A frequent result was that the abuser was free to abuse again. The survivor is often re-victimized multiple times.
"It's not surprising, because they do have that high level of victimization," says Erika Harrell, a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "That high vulnerability is just reflected in our numbers."
Harrell writes the Justice Department's annual report about crime against all people with disabilities. But the report doesn't break out sex crimes against people with intellectual disabilities. When NPR requested those data, she came up with the stunning numbers that show people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at much higher numbers — "more than seven times higher than the rate for persons with no disabilities."
"If this were any other population, the world would be up in arms," says Nancy Thaler, a deputy secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services who runs the state's developmental disability programs. "We would be irate and it would be the No. 1 health crisis in this country."
For people in the field, like her, the high rates of assault have been an open secret.
"Folks with intellectual disabilities are the perfect victim," says Thaler, who has been a leader in the field for more than 40 years — in top state, federal and national association jobs. She is also a parent of an adult son with an intellectual disability.
"They are people who often cannot speak or their speech is not well-developed. They are generally taught from childhood up to be compliant, to obey, to go along with people. Because of the intellectual disability, people tend not to believe them, to think that they are not credible or that what they saying, they are making up or imagining," she explains. "And so for all these reasons, a perpetrator sees an opportunity, a safe opportunity to victimize people."
Harrell could think of only one other group that might have a higher risk of assault: women between the ages of 18 and 24 — but only those who are not in college. Those young women tend to be poorer and more marginalized. Compared with women with intellectual disabilities, they have an almost identical rate of assault, just slightly higher.
Erika Harrell writes the Justice Department's annual report about crime against all people with disabilities.
Jennifer Kerrigan/NPR
But the rate for people with intellectual disabilities — the Justice Department numbers count people ages 12 and older — is almost certainly an underestimate, the government statistician said. Because those numbers from household surveys don't include people living in institutions — where, Harrell said, research shows people are even more vulnerable to assault. Also not counted are the 373,000 people living in group homes.
The 1998 law that requires the Justice Department to keep statistics on disabled victims of crime — the Crime Victims with Disabilities Awareness Act — actually only mentions people with developmental disabilities. It calls for a report to spur research to "understand the nature and extent of crimes against individuals with developmental disabilities." But the DOJ expanded its collection to look at people with all disabilities and made a more useful annual report.
Vulnerable everywhere
Most rape victims — in general — are assaulted by someone they know, not by a stranger. But NPR's numbers from the Justice Department found that people with intellectual disabilities are even more likely to be raped by someone they know. For women without disabilities, the rapist is a stranger 24 percent of the time, but for a woman with an intellectual disability it is less than 14 percent of the time.
And the risk comes at any time of day. Half the sexual assaults take place during the day. For the rest of the population, about 40 percent of sexual assaults occur during daytime. The federal numbers, and the results of our own database, show that people with intellectual disabilities are vulnerable everywhere, including in places where they should feel safest: where they live, work, go to school; on van rides to medical appointments and in public places. Most of the time, the perpetrators are people they have learned to count on the most — sometimes their own family, caregivers or staffers, and friends.
Often it's another person with a disability — at a group home, or a day program, or work — who commits the assault. Pennsylvania, at NPR's request, compiled data from more than 500 cases of suspected abuse in 2016. Of those, 42 percent of the suspected offenders were themselves people with intellectual disabilities. Staff made up 14 percent of the suspects; relatives were 12 percent; and friends, 11 percent.
One reason for the high rates of victimization is that so many adults come in and out of the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, according to Beverly Frantz of Temple University's Institute on Disabilities. Frantz estimates that a typical person with an intellectual disability who lives in a group home or a state institution deals with hundreds of different caregivers every year.
"If you think two to three different shifts, five days a week, 365 days a year, it adds up pretty quickly," she says.
Pauline helps set the table for dinner at her group home. "I was scared the first day I went to the house," she says, referring to the group home she currently lives in. "I didn't know anyone." Since coming into the group home, Pauline says, she is happier.
Michelle Gustafson for NPR
The high number includes the consideration of weekend shifts, too; high staff turnover, staffers on vacations or on sick leave, plus assistance from family members.
The vast majority are professional, dedicated and caring. But for someone who wants to be abusive, the opportunity is there. Caregivers have a role that gives them power. They may assist with the most intimate care — dressing, bathing, toileting — for some with significant physical disabilities. A person with intellectual disability is often very dependent upon those caregivers.
"We treat them as children," Frantz says. "We teach them to be compliant."
For many people with intellectual disabilities, caregivers — including professional staff — become their friends, often their best friends, among the people who know them best and care about them the most. But that, too, is a line that can be easily crossed.
"We use the word 'friend' a lot, and the boundaries are sometimes nonexistent," Frantz explains.
"It was a predator's dream"
Stephen DeProspero is serving 40 years in prison for filming himself sexually assaulting a severely disabled 10-year-old boy he cared for at a state institution in New Hartford, N.Y.
"There was nothing in the back of my mind that caused me to seek out a job with vulnerable people so I could take advantage of them," he wrote in response to a query from NPR. "I wholly prided myself on doing a selfless job for people who are disabled and can tell you many nice stories about all the lives I touched in a positive way."
When the boy's family sued the state, DeProspero said in a handwritten affidavit that it was easy in the house to abuse the boy unseen. "I could have stayed in that house for years and abused him every day without anybody even noticing at all," he wrote. "It was a predator's dream."
DeProspero now regrets those words, he told NPR in his letter, because he says he wasn't a serial predator. He blames his crime on an addiction to pornography, including child pornography.
In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why?
Goats and Soda
In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why?
NPR wrote to several men in prison or awaiting trial for sexually abusing an adult or child with an intellectual disability. Most of the men did not write back. Some claimed that the sex was consensual.
In his letter from the Attica Correctional Facility, DeProspero says he has spent years trying to understand why he raped a disabled child. He speaks of having a difficult childhood. As an adult, he had few friends, he says.
He took a job at a group home for children with severe disabilities in 2004. There he met and cared for the young boy who could not communicate with words.
"I took a liking to him," DeProspero wrote. "I spent the most time with him and taught him how to brush his teeth, tie his sneakers and even ride a bike. I would often take him for [shoulder] rides, at his request, and carry him around the residence."
One day, DeProspero wrote, the boy was upset and alone in his room. "My memory of child porn videos sprang back into my mind and I suddenly got the urge to place my penis into his mouth."
For weeks afterward, DeProspero says, he was "beside myself with guilt and grief."
He says he looked for another job. He got one, at a group home for adults with intellectual disabilities. But first he went back to sexually assault the boy one more time, and this time filmed it as "a momento [sic] to remember him."
That act, too, went unnoticed. Five years later it was discovered, by accident.
Police investigating Internet child porn seized DeProspero's computer and cameras — and found images of children. He was given a six-month sentence.
Afterward, his lawyer asked police to return DeProspero's computer and cameras. They agreed but first did one last check of the equipment. That's when they discovered more pictures, including the film clip of DeProspero, from years before, assaulting the 10-year-old boy.
"I let this child down in the worst way imaginable," DeProspero said the day he was sentenced.
The state of New York paid the boy's family $3 million in damages.
"People who perpetrate these crimes are always looking for justification for what they do. It's never their fault. It's always someone else's fault. ... They're very manipulative people," says Dawn Lupi, the Oneida County prosecutor in the case.
One of the most memorable moments in the case, Lupi said, was when she met with the other staffers in the large group home where the boy was raped by DeProspero. "They were very caring," she says. "They were devastated that they didn't stop it."
Barriers to prosecution
It's rare for these cases to go to court. Some people with intellectual disabilities do have trouble speaking or describing things in detail, or in proper time sequence. Our investigation found that makes it harder for police to investigate and for prosecutors to win these cases in court.
Even when these cases do go to court, there are barriers. In 2012, a jury in Georgia found a man guilty of raping a 24-year-old woman with Down syndrome three times over one night and the following morning. A judge, two years later, overturned the decision, saying the woman did not "behave like a victim." Appeals Court Judge Christopher McFadden questioned why the woman waited a day to report the rape and said that she did not exhibit "visible distress." The jury had heard evidence that the man's semen was found in the victim's bed and that a doctor who examined the woman found evidence consistent with a sexual assault.
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