Voices from the Field

Raising Our Voices, Elevating Our Movement

This movement we’ve built serves more than 300,000 children every year—kids who need healing, justice, and the chance to trust again after abuse. Their families need help to move forward. The members of their community need help knowing how to keep it from happening again. It takes a constellation of thousands of professionals working at NCA member Children’s Advocacy Centers and on the multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) at their core to serve these children, families, and communities. Forensic interviewers, therapists, case managers, victim advocates and many others work seamlessly alongside medical and mental health professionals, law enforcement, prosecution, child protective services, and other partners to deliver the coordinated response child victims of abuse need to get their childhoods back.

The CACs in our field do amazing work, but they don’t do it in a vacuum. Our state chapters, our RCAC partners, and our staff here at NCA are perpetually at work advocating for resources, engaging in research, tackling emerging issues, and supporting the more than 800 local CACs who serve children across the country to help elevate the practice. Increasingly, we have heard our members calling for a stronger movement-wide voice both from our profession to the wider public, and within our movement to promote the ideas and practices that will perpetually improve our work. We needed a platform to share.

I am proud to welcome you to CAC Voices, NCA’s brand-new blog. Over the coming weeks, CAC Voices will feature the thoughts of CAC professionals, partners, and experts in our field who work at the local, state, national, and international levels. While we’ll feature a wide variety of perspectives, every post will be written to help any reader learn something, whether a seasoned CAC professional or a curious member of the public who wants to know more about our work. We guarantee you’ll learn something that will help your work and expand your view of this movement and all the experts and professionals who support it.

Please check back regularly, see our Facebook page for updates, and share posts that may interest your stakeholders and communities far and wide. Finally, let us know if you have any ideas about what you’d like to see here, any burning questions you want answered, or any great ideas for expert authors and voices from the field. We hope you are as excited as we are to see how this new platform develops over the coming months and years and to watch it become a true gathering place for both the CAC movement and all those working on behalf of children who have been traumatized by abuse.  Our hope is that this dialogue can lead to innovation and the sharing of best practices to facilitate their healing.