Meet Suffolk DA's LGBT liaison

Though she acknowledged it's a big old clich?, Jennifer Stott said her work as a victim witness advocate for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley stems from her desire to help people.

"Within this job you are there with people during, a lot of times, the worst thing that's ever happened to them - whether it's the homicide of a family member or something that they themselves have been the victim on," said Stott. "And to be able to be with somebody during that time and make it just a little bit less painful and to help a little bit is very meaningful to me."

As Conley's newly appointed liaison to the LGBT community, Stott now aims to make life a little less painful for LGBT crime victims and witnesses. In addition to continuing her current duties as a victim witness advocate in Conley's Major Felony Bureau, Stott will now track cases with LGBT victims and witnesses and consult internally with prosecutors, investigators, and her fellow victim advocates to ensure that LGBT victims and witnesses are served with sensitivity and compassion.

According to advocates and Conley spokesman Jake Wark, Stott is the first LGBT liaison ever appointed to the Suffolk DA's office.

The 24-year-old Stott, a Revere native (with not a trace of the famous Reveeah accent unless, she said, "I get mad enough") who now lives in Jamaica Plain, joined Conley's office in 2006. She is a 2005 graduate of Ithaca College, where in addition to earning a degree in Spanish and minoring in Women's Studies, she spent four years volunteering at the college's LGBT Resource Center. Stott was honored for her work with in Ithaca's LGBT community with the Sylvia Rivera Award. She was a workshop presenter at the 2005 and 2006 TRANSforming Feminism Conferences - which focus largely on trans issues - in New Paltz, New York and the co-creator of the 2005 documentary film Either Or/ Neither/ Nor, which explored gender identity and tension within the trans community.

Based on her history of LGBT activism, it goes without saying that Stott is looking forward to helping the Suffolk County LGBT community access the criminal justice system. "I'm a member of the community and it's been there for me," she said. "The community in Ithaca specifically, when I was in school, was wonderful and we were just such a politically active and engaged group it was hard not to get swept up. I've maintained that involvement."

Conley created the LGBT liaison position in response to what Wark called "a small but steady increase" in reports of anti-LGBT hate crimes to the Boston Police Department, particularly in District 4, which includes the city's South End. The BPD's Community Disorders Unit is currently investigating a possible anti-gay hate crime in Charlestown (See "Boston PD investigating Charlestown gay bashing," p. 15)

Just as with other crimes of violence in the wider community, Wark stated in an e-mail, it's hard to resolve anti-gay hate crime cases successfully "without victims and witnesses who are completely on board with the prosecution. If we expect those victims and witnesses to step up and do the right thing, he felt, then we had to do the same."

Wark also cited the historical lack of representation of LGBT folks in local law enforcement as a reason for Stott's appointment. "The DA is committed to leading an office that represents the diversity of the county, and one way to achieve that is to make leadership appointments that reflect our staff and our jurisdiction," he stated.

Beth Leventhal, the executive director of The Network/La Red, an organization that assists lesbian, bi women and transgender victims of domestic violence, said Stott's appointment was a helpful move for LGBT crime victims. "That's a starting point for people who really need a system of intervention in order to become safe - that they know that there's somebody that they can start out with who's going to be friendly, at least on the GLBT stuff. It makes for an opening into institutions that have historically been used against us rather than to support us as a community."

Stott expressed a similar sentiment about the importance of her new role. "There's been a lot of people saying things like this isn't going to decrease the number of hate crimes in the city or anything like that. And I don't know whether it will or it won't, [but] just people coming forward and cases being prosecuted may over the long term have an effect in keeping people from committing such crimes," she said. "But the main focus for our victim witness advocate program once somebody has been the victim of the crime is to just help them through it from that point and to keep them ... from being victimized again by the system."