The term Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) represents a class of public and private agencies designed to serve as a hub of a coordinated community response to child maltreatment. While the model has its origins in the early efforts to create multidisciplinary child abuse investigative and/or assessment teams in communities across the nation in the 1970s and early 1980s, the specific term and core elements of the CAC model emerged from Huntsville, Alabama, in 1985. Spurred on by the explosion of child sexual abuse reports locally and across the nation in 1983, and by the resultant unexpected influx of child witnesses in the courtroom, the district attorney, Bud Cramer (later a U.S. Congressman), encouraged a broad community task force to look for a better way to handle these cases. Fanning out across the country they found examples of promising multidisciplinary investigative teams. Deciding to create a child-centered team in Huntsville, they added a key essential component of their new model, the “Children’s Advocacy Center,” a place that was neutral ground for all the agencies and disciplines involved and was designed specifically for the children.
Within a few years the model had spread and an increasing number of communities around the country were building a coordinated response to child abuse around their unique CAC. By 1987 many of these communities had organized into the National Network of Child Advocacy Centers (changing their name to the National Children’s Alliance in 1998) and soon established membership standards. CACs now exist in the largest urban areas in the nation and in remote locations throughout rural America. Some are freestanding nonprofit organizations, like the National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, Alabama, while other CACs are part of hospitals or large multiservice community nonprofit organizations and others are housed in government agencies.
By 2006 membership requirements had evolved in a 10-part set of accreditation standards. These standards require all centers to share 33 essential components, including a “child-friendly” facility that provides complete separation of victims and alleged offenders and where children can be interviewed while being observed by team members; a functioning multidisciplinary team with written agreements and protocols that provides for routine involvement in cases and regular sharing of information; regular case review meetings involving representatives from, at least, law enforcement, child protection, prosecution, mental health, medicine, and victim advocacy; a capacity to perform or secure through referral specialized medical exams; delivery of or referral to mental health services; victim advocacy services, all delivered with cultural competence and diversity; and the organizational capacity to maintain operational stability. Centers seeking accreditation must demonstrate compliance with each of these standards and other related “rated” subcomponents.
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