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Pam Blevins, assistant Buchanan County prosecuting attorney, handles cases involving child-sex crimes.

The defendant is on the witness stand, drawing on a map to show where police arrested him. He tries to show that he wasn’t trying to meet the 13-year-old girl from the Internet — that it was a misunderstanding.

Prosecutor Pam Blevins objects to showing the drawing to the jury.

The lawyers approach the judge’s bench to argue the objection. The defense lawyer is holding the drawing at his side. The drawing faces the jury, perhaps absentmindedly.

Ms. Blevins, in heels, is several inches taller than the defense lawyer. She walks around to the lawyer’s side.

She snatches the drawing from his hand.

She loses the objection, and the jury gets to see the drawing. Later, the jury convicts the man of enticement and attempted statutory sodomy.

***

Ms. Blevins always wanted to be a lawyer, but not this kind of lawyer. For five years, she has handled child-sex crimes for the Buchanan County prosecutor’s office.

Business law, that’s what she wanted. She got her undergraduate degree in finance, then she worked to get her finances straight.

She worked construction — as a flag person on a road crew — for three seasons to save money for law school.

She’s tall, blonde and competitive. She ran track and played basketball and softball during high school in Unionville, Mo., and her 400-meter relay team finished third at state one year. She possesses a glare that many married men will know as “the look.”

In short, she’s the type of person you want on your team. You do not want to be standing in her way.

“Emotions run high in these cases because these children have been hurt,” Ms. Blevins said. “I’m making a child tell the worst thing that ever happened to them in front of the person that did it.”

After law school at the University of Missouri, she clerked for a year in state appeals courts. She came here in 1997, hoping to gain a few years of trial experience.

She prosecuted child-support cases, then a mix of cases, then drug cases. She left for a year to prosecute child-sex cases in Platte County, but returned to Buchanan County in late 2003, where she handles sex crimes almost exclusively.

“I never wanted to do criminal law because I didn’t want to have to worry about who picked my kids up from school,” Ms. Blevins said. “Then I got here for trial experience, and I just fell into it. I love it.”

***

The defendant is on trial for molesting his own children. His 4-year-old daughter will testify next.

When the girl sees her father, she crawls into the fetal position behind Ms. Blevins. Ms. Blevins takes her out, calms her down and prepares her to re-enter.

Ms. Blevins tells the girl about going through the special magic tunnel.

The tunnel is the hallway from the judge’s chamber to the courtroom, so the girl can get to the witness stand without having to walk directly past her father. The girl opens the door and sees him. She turns back into the hallway, and she runs.

There will be no magic. She will not testify.

As a result, the jury also isn’t allowed to see her video interview with a case worker. But other witnesses testify. The jury convicts.

***

Ms. Blevins doesn’t win every case. She also doesn’t keep count.

“If I go to trial, I remember all of them because I’ve bonded so much with the kids,” Ms. Blevins said. “But I think more about the ones I’ve lost.”

Her boss, Buchanan County Prosecutor Dwight Scroggins, has said these are the most difficult cases to win. Getting children to testify is difficult. Getting children to testify in a way that makes sense to adults is difficult. Proving something that may have happened long ago is difficult.

“I think that society still wants to believe that it doesn’t happen,” Ms. Blevins said. “They hold the child to such high standards.”

The work is intense. She’s aware of possible burnout.

“Believe me, some days I wonder, ‘What were you thinking, Pam?’” she said. “I feel like I make a difference.”

The sex offenders won’t stop, she said.

“I think that they cannot be rehabilitated,” Ms. Blevins said. “All the studies show that they cannot. That worries me.”

She allows some distinction between crimes against actual children and crimes on the Internet or with pornography. Those are “differing degrees of illness.” The illness is a desire to have sex with children.

A person who gets away with an act will likely grow bolder, Ms. Blevins said.

“They get smarter, and the kids don’t disclose. Only 3 percent of kids disclose,” she said. “You might not get a second chance at them.”

***

A man is being sentenced for failing to register as a sex offender. It’s a relatively minor case, and Ms. Blevins rehashes the man’s original crime as she argues for strict probation conditions.

An older woman sits in the back row of the courtroom. She’s waiting for a different case on the docket — for the sentencing of the man convicted of molesting his own children, the woman’s grandchildren.

The woman says, to no one in particular, “Get ’em, Pam.”

Joe Blumberg can be reached at joeblumberg@npgco.com.