MISSION

The Center for Children promotes healing and justice for children who are victims of violence and sexual abuse, while striving to make the community safer through prevention, education, and advocacy.

WE VALUE

Compassion, Integrity, Mutual Respect

The CAC Model

The investigation and treatment of child abuse looked very different prior to the 1980s. A child victim who came forward with an allegation of abuse oftentimes had to share their story multiple times in different locations and situations that regularly lacked consideration for the child’s level of comfort. A caregiver would frequently have to make time to schedule appointments with law enforcement, child welfare, prosecutors, and many others to ensure that each respective party received the information needed to progress forward with a case. This story would even be repeated to community professional services aimed at ongoing support for the family.

Repeated retellings of a child’s abuse narrative can have an adverse effect on the child and case outcomes:

• The child is subjected to the recollection of trauma again and again – the child’s emotional well-being becomes less prioritized than the facts themselves.
• The approach is not child-centered – the child is the one who bears the burden of appearing at different offices to tell their story, forcing them to adapt to each environment rather than seeking an environment that is suitable to them.
• Details become less consistent – a story shared to multiple people asking different questions in multiple environments is likely to change over time.

The need to alter this approach to child abuse & neglect cases was first recognized in Huntsville, Alabama in 1985. There, a multidisciplinary team (or MDT) of dedicated community professionals and officials concluded that the best approach for child abuse investigation and treatment process should focus on the child first, at a single, neutral site designed to adapt to the child’s needs rather than the other way around. The parties responsible for assessing the investigation and treatment needs of the child would then gather so that the child only must share their story one time.

After this realization, the question then turned to where the most appropriate place to serve as this neutral setting would be. Would it be a police station? The child welfare division’s office? Perhaps a more clinical setting at a local therapy center? Weighing the options before them, it was clear to the Huntsville team that no location among their partnership would be the most ideal spot for all parties involved, including the children themselves. The site would have to be warm and child-friendly to allow for appropriate treatment of the child, but also fulfill the technical requirements for the investigative elements of a case.

Knowing that there was no such location in existence at the time, Huntsville decided to create their own. They called their facility the Child Advocacy Center (or CAC). The Huntsville Center, better known as the National Children’s Advocacy Center, was the first of its kind and sparked a wave of interest for similar facilities in communities across the United States as the premiere choice for effective service provision to victims of child abuse & neglect and their non-offending caregivers.

With the use of the CAC model…

• Case prosecution is strengthened – details collected through a forensic interview process that takes place at the CAC are team-oriented, thorough, and sensitive to both the child’s development and the legal considerations for court.
• The child shares their story one time – all required partners offer input to ensure that all mandates are being met simultaneously.
• Most importantly, the approach is child-centered – a network of agencies collaborates as a team in one place that suits the child’s comfort level best.

There are now more than 1,000 child advocacy centers spread across America, with further expansion of the model now appearing globally.