It is difficult to determine just how pervasive sex crimes against minors are in Butler County.

Treatment professionals and child welfare advocates say stigma associated with the crimes can keep victims and their families from reporting the abuse.

Law enforcement and social services agencies say their statistics on the crimes is often incomplete or misleading because of internal or external factors that impact how the crimes are reported and tracked.

The result is a mix of data and anecdotal evidence that can be contradictory and difficult to interpret.

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Heidi Artman, the executive director of Butler’s Victim Outreach Intervention Center (VOICe), said her organization sees about 30 cases of statutory rape per year. The center provides counseling and other services to both the victims and their parents in cases of statutory rape.

Artman said the vast majority of those reports come from parents, though she said that some likely don’t want their children “potentially traumatized” by the system and never report the crime.

Artman said there’s also a simpler explanation for nonreports: no one ever learns about the illegal sexual contact.

“I also think a lot of it isn’t reported because people don’t know,” she said. “It’s very, very secretive. They (victims) romanticize. As a younger person, that feels good to have that attention from an older person and there is not a realization of this is not OK.”

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County Children and Youth Services director Charlie Johns said the county had 413 alleged abuse cases this past year, with 108 of those being sexual abuse.

Of the 413 total cases, 10 have been “indicated” — which means the case has been found to have merit — and another 11 are pending criminal court. Three cases are pending CYS determination.

CYS did not have a breakdown on how many of these 24 cases involved alleged sexual abuse.

Johns said the department’s number of total investigations is up 80 percent from 2014 as a result of new state laws that have expanded the definition of mandated reporters, people who are legally required to report suspected crimes against children.

“I don’t think that there are any more indicated and founded cases than there were in the prior year,” Johns said. “But we are investigating more.”

The Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, citing a 2011 nationwide study, says sex crimes against minor victims represent a significant portion of rape cases.

More than 12 percent of female victims were first raped at age 10 or younger, according to the coalition; 30 percent were first raped between the ages of 11 and 17; and nearly 28 percent of male victims were first raped at the age of 10 or younger.

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Johns said offenders in statutory rape cases are overwhelmingly male and frequently well-known to their victims.

“A lot of these kids know the alleged perpetrator,” Johns said.

According to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, minor victims are most likely to be abused by friends or family members: 37 percent of abusers are the victim’s biological parents, 23 percent are non-biological parents or the partner of a victim’s parent; and 40 percent are either family members or known, nonfamily members.

“I don’t know if it’s happening more or not,” said Kristen Houser, coalition spokesman, of statutory rape. “I think it’s always happened a lot.”

She said that when it comes to assault cases involving teen pregnancy, it has “almost always been true” that the fathers in those pregnancies are older men rather than teenagers.

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Yearly reports by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services portray statutory sexual assault as relatively rare compared to other sexual crimes against children.

In 2014 the department reported 103 substantiated cases of statutory rape — about 4 percent of the 2,485 “sexual injuries” to children statewide.

According to the state Department of Human Services, the crime is happening less frequently now than several years ago. In 2008 statutory rape represented nearly 5.5 percent of sex crimes against children in Pennsylvania.

In Butler County, state data shows four substantiated statutory rape cases from 2011 to 2014. All of those cases came in 2013, the department said.

A Department of Human Services spokesman said the department’s data is “very limited and wouldn’t give you a clear picture” of the issue.

Because statutory rape is a crime — the most severe cases can carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a $25,000 fine — the cases are investigated and prosecuted by police agencies.

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But even police data on statutory rape isn’t solid. The crimes are graded as either second or first degree felonies, but they often are not the lead charges against defendants.

That means the digital tracking system used by the state police doesn’t always log the cases properly, said Capt. Steve Ignatz, commander of the state police barracks in Butler.

He said troopers have investigated 17 cases of statutory rape since 2013 in the region, and he doesn’t think that’s outside the norm.

“It appears that it’s pretty steady,” Ignatz said of the frequency of such cases. “I don’t see any great increase.”

Like Johns, Capt. David Dalcamo of the Butler Police Department said changes to Pennsylvania’s child welfare laws likely have prompted the increase in reports.

Dalcamo said that recent cases the department has handled have involved children who tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases, which required doctors and nurses to report the situation to police.

“I think there are more people that are mandatory reporters,” Dalcamo said.

Both views — one that says statutory rape is an infrequent occurrence, and the other that says it is a stigmatized and isolating crime that’s more widespread than people realize — are correct, said Bruce Mapes, a forensic psychologist in Chester County who has been working with juvenile sex crimes for more than three decades.

“We know there’s a lot of offenses that never get reported, and that’s for a variety of reasons,” said Mapes, who has served on the Pennsylvania State Sexual Offenders Assessment Board since 1997.

“I’m going to say the rate (of statutory rape) is low, but we don’t actually know what it is,” Mapes said.