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  • Children's Advocacy Centers

Children's Advocacy Centers

Children’s advocacy centers (CACs) are community-based, child-friendly, and trauma-informed organizations that coordinate a multidisciplinary response to child maltreatment allegations. CACs deliver a best practice model that bring together, often in one location, child protective services investigators, law enforcement, forensic interviewers, prosecutors, family advocates, and medical and mental health professionals to provide a coordinated, comprehensive response to victims and their caregivers. Children’s advocacy centers have found success providing a safe, neutral environment for children and their families where the child’s well-being is a priority. At a CAC, children can speak to a forensic interviewer who is trained to understand child development, how to manage bias, and is knowledgeable in addressing secondary trauma and other best practices for interviewing children. This multidisciplinary team approach results in better outcomes for child abuse investigations.

CAC Coverage Maps
National Children’s Alliance
Provides maps showing children’s advocacy center locations and the areas they cover. Learn more about coverage in a particular State or region by clicking on the map.

Children’s Advocacy Centers
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Provides an overview of children’s advocacy centers including a description of their purpose, programs, funding, research, and training and technical assistance.

Find a CAC
National Children’s Advocacy Center
Presents a map featuring children’s advocacy center State chapter locations and allows website users to find the closest chapter by clicking on the map.

How CACs Help Kids [Video]
National Children’s Alliance (2018)
Describes how children’s advocacy centers provide child-friendly, supportive services to children who have been abused.

How the CAC Model Works
National Children’s Alliance
Provides information on the National Children’s Alliance and a flowchart of CAC investigation, intervention, and decision-making process.

A National Survey of Characteristics of Child Advocacy Centers in the United States: Do the Flagship Models Match Those in Broader Practice? (PDF - 251 KB)
Herbert, Walsh, & Bromfield (2017)
Child Abuse & Neglect
Examines characteristics of children's advocacy centers and whether models used in practice match the model presented in research literature. Findings showed different types of advocacy centers exist and some do not match the full-service models commonly described in the literature.

Tell Us About It, Episode 21: Measuring Outcomes in Children’s Advocacy [Podcast]
Center for Victim Research (2019)
Presents a podcast about the development and implementation of an outcome measuring system for the nation’s more than 900 children’s advocacy centers.

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