National Children’s Alliance (NCA) is a nationwide 501(c)3 nonprofit membership organization formed in 2000 from a network of children’s advocacy centers. NCA’s mission is to promote and support communities in providing a coordinated response to victims of severe child abuse; it also provides services to children’s advocacy centers, multidisciplinary teams, and professionals across the country.
In 1985, the first children’s advocacy center opened in Huntsville, Alabama. This program was initiated by a prosecutor seeking a safe, competent, and reliable service for interviewing children suspected of having been sexually abused. The Huntsville organization soon expanded its services and was renamed the National Children’s Advocacy Center. The Huntsville model became popular and gained national support from the U.S. Department of Justice, resulting in a national network of children’s advocacy centers.
Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) offer a comprehensive approach to services for abused children and their families, with programs designed by professionals and volunteers to meet the needs of their own communities. CACs emphasize coordination of investigation and intervention services by bringing together professionals from child protective services, law enforcement, and health and mental health services as a multidisciplinary team to create a child-focused approach to child abuse cases. The goal is to ensure that children are not revictimized by the systems designed to protect them.
What makes the CAC model so effective is the multidisciplinary community response to child abuse that enables law enforcement, prosecutors, child protective services, and the medical and mental health professionals to work together as a team to investigate and prosecute cases of child abuse. CAC programs strive to minimize trauma, break the cycle of abuse, and provide communities with increased rates of prosecution of perpetrators. In many cases, the child suspected of having been abused may be examined and interviewed only once with the interdisciplinary team members conducting or observing the process; this approach prevents the possible trauma of the victim being interviewed and examined several times by the various agencies and professionals concerned with the victimization.
The NCA is an umbrella organization that provides a standard setting, education, and accreditation for the CACs throughout the country. To be accredited, CACs must offer all forms of assessment services with the exception of perpetrator interviews and examinations, and they may also provide mental health facilities. CACs may be based in any number of community institutions such as hospitals, or they may be housed in their own buildings. Whatever the setting, CACs make every effort to provide a child friendly environment and appropriate facilities for the multidisciplinary team to function effectively.
Many professionals in the field of child abuse believe that more than any other professional group, the NCA and the more than 400 component CACs are building a national model for coordinated and competent child abuse interventions and services—one that is fully committed to the multidisciplinary team approach that is essential for all competent professional work regarding child abuse.
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