Concord — Vivian Torres was just 9 years old when police executed a drug raid at the Manchester apartment where she lived, and charged her father, Eddie Torres, with selling cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy.

Until that day in 2008, she had always depended on her dad, and then suddenly he was gone — sentenced to a federal prison too far away for her to visit.

For three years, she was known as a prisoner’s daughter. She felt betrayed by her dad, but she didn’t tell people that; instead, she kept her emotions bottled up inside.

“People would ask me, ‘Are you the daughter of the criminal?’ Before, he was known as a nice person but now all people knew him for was what he did,” Vivian, now 17, said on Friday in Concord during a conference focused on children of incarcerated parents.

Vivian said she felt abandoned, and she responded by shutting herself off from the world. The only person she wanted to be with was her dad.

“I stayed silent for years until he came out,” she said.

Eddie Torres returned home in 2011. He got custody of Vivian two years later.

Vivian was one of six people to share her story on Friday during a panel discussion at the “Counting the Days” conference hosted by Child and Family Services and the Family Connections Center, a support program of the state’s department of corrections. Approximately 250 people, including state child care advocates, corrections staff, judges, and educators, attended the one-day event at the Grappone Conference Center downtown.

In the crowd was Eddie Torres, who said in an interview during lunch that Vivian is the reason why he turned his life around. Torres said the odds were stacked against him and the likelihood of recidivism high, but he quit “hustling” because his daughter deserves better.

“My father gave me presents, but not his presence,” said Torres, who grew up in a Bronx neighborhood where dealing drugs was a way of life. “When my daughter is a grown adult, I want her to say, ‘My dad loved me.’ ”

Five percent of New Hampshire children have at least one parent who is incarcerated in jail or prison. There are 271,400 children in the state, which means that 13,570 of them are affected, according to a study released in 2016 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

One of the biggest myths is that those children will end up behind bars, too, said the conference’s keynote speaker Ann Adalist-Estrin, director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated at Rutgers University.

Adalist-Estrin said there is an intergenerational cycle of incarceration, but that it is not simply the result of bad kids modeling bad parents. One’s personal history, including prior trauma and responses to anxiety and stress, as well as social factors, such as race, must be considered, she said.

The children of incarcerated parents and their caregivers said during Friday’s panel discussion that too often society is quick to judge prisoners and their families. Many spoke about the stigma of incarceration and their hopes of challenging it.

Panelist Sue Hills, of Exeter, N.H., is a foster parent of nine years and fostered a 15-year-old boy whose mother and father were serving time. Hills said she and her husband committed to monthly visits to correctional facilities in the state so that the teenager could continue his relationship with his biological parents.