Fundraiser set for Thusrday evening
By Bill Petzold
Editor
CARO – One in three girls and one in four boys.
Child sexual abuse happens with alarming frequency around the country and in Tuscola County, but now area families have a new resource to help them find justice for victims of child abuse.
The Child Advocacy Center of Tuscola County opened May 1 in downtown Caro and employs a multi-disciplinary team approach to interviewing children believed to be in abusive relationships, and works together to rescue that child from a bad situation.
Amber Spencer, executive director of Tuscola County’s center, said that in that short time, the center has interviewed more than 35 children. Prior to May, finding help for those kids would have resulted in the children, their parents or guardians, as well as law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates, Department of Human Services workers to travel to Lapeer.
The Child Advocacy Center of Lapeer is partnering with the new Caro center as efforts are underway to raise funds.
“We were doing so many (interviews) for Tuscola County, forensic interviews of children that allegedly had been sexually abused – that we were just too busy,” said Deborah Pascoe, executive director of the Lapeer center. “So Amber came on board to set up Tuscola County, and we’re kind of doing a joint thing until this (office) is fully established and they can take over 100 percent of their cases.
“In the United States there are about a thousand child advocacy centers. Most of those, maybe about half, are accredited child advocacy centers through the National Children’s Alliance. The National Children’s Alliance is a federally funded non-profit children’s agency that encourages counties to set up child advocacy centers because the need is so great across the country. I’m sure you know these (statistics), but one in three girls and one in four boys will be sexually abused in some way before the age of 18, and that’s national statistics. And actually they’re taking (statistics) outside the United States and building them – it’s happening everywhere. Tuscola meets those national averages, which is really scary, and the numbers are really high.”
Children are referred to the program by law enforcement personal, DHS workers, Child Protective Services workers and family members. The best CAC forensic interviewers have the ability to speak to children, as well as the ability build a rapport with the children and get them to confide the truth of the situation. The center has a closed circuit television system by which the multi-disciplinary team can observe the interview and make suggestions about how to procede. The system allows for safeguards against false accusations by children, as well as the knowledge and authority to act on confirmed cases of abuse.
“In this room, the members of what’s called a multi-disciplinary team, led by the prosecutor, a victim advocate from the prosecutor’s office, a child protective service worker, forensic interviewer, anyone else that is required and legally needs to see this interview is welcome to be part of that multidisciplinary team. And what happens is the child only sees one person and doesn’t know this room is full of all those people – they just meet one person. … The rest are at this table watching the interview, which I am still so impressed with, because in the old days before child advocacy center or a multidisciplinary team was at the table, a CPS worker would be called up to say a school, say a teacher called and said, ‘I think this child is being sexually abused,’ this worker would go out, pull the child out of class (which is traumatizing to me already, to be called down to the principal’s office), and then the worker would actually interview that child at school. Pulled out of class … and if mom’s boyfriend had sex with you last night and you think you have to go home, how much do you think you’re going to tell to this young worker that comes in and says, ‘What’s going on at home?’”
Beyond feared repercussions, Spencer said that another benefit to the multidisciplinary team approach to forensic interviewing is the elimination of the need to relive the details of abuse.
“I think it’s sometimes that these kids could tell this story up to 15 times, versus one time face-to-face with one person,” Spencer said.
“We would see kids where this happened,” Pascoe said, “they would tell a teacher in their classroom, the teacher would go get another teacher, they’d go get the school counselor, and the kid would keep telling it to the principal, then would they call in child protective services, who then would call in the police, then they’d take them to the (emergency room) and everyone throughout that chain would do the same thing.”