April is Child Abuse Prevention month and April 4th, 2023 was Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) Day in South Carolina. Hundreds of professionals and CAC supporters joined Attorney General Alan Wilson, the South Carolina Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers (SCNCAC), Children’s Trust of South Carolina, and members of the General Assembly for the 12th Annual Children’s Advocacy Center Day both in person and via livestream from the South Carolina State Capitol.

Governor McMaster issued a Governor’s Proclamation declaring April 4, 2023 as Children’s Advocacy Center Day in South Carolina to recognize the valuable contributions that Children’s Advocacy Centers make to protect children and enhance the response to child abuse. In addition, the South Carolina House of Representatives approved House Resolution 4154 and the South Carolina Senate approved Concurrent Resolution 629 declaring April 4, 2023 as Children’s Advocacy Center Day in South Carolina to recognize the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers in the statewide response to child abuse.

The press conference was held on the statehouse grounds and Tom Knapp, Executive Director of the South Carolina Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, opened the press conference by welcoming everyone and then giving a summary of Children’s Advocacy Centers activities and some collaborative efforts to improve the statewide response to child abuse in South Carolina.

Summary of Tom Knapp’s Opening Comments

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Tom Knapp and I’m the Executive Director with the South Carolina Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers. We want to welcome all of you to our 12th Annual Children’s Advocacy Center Day or CAC day for short. We want to thank Attorney General Allan Wilson and his staff for hosting this press conference and for all their help and support for the Statewide response to child abuse throughout the year.

April is Child Abuse Prevention month, and the Governor has declared today as Children’s Advocacy Center Day in South Carolina. I know most of you know, what a CAC is but maybe some on live stream do not. When law enforcement or the Department of Social Services believe a child may have been abused, the child is brought to the CAC where they are interviewed by a highly trained forensic interviewer. The multidisciplinary team professionals involved in the investigation convene at the CAC for the forensic interview, which provides the opportunity for all parties to be present to hear the child’s disclosure, share case information with one another, and determine next steps in the investigation. It is also through the CAC that the family will receive continued advocacy and specialized mental health and medical services.

Now if you look around the room today and behind me, we have CAC Representatives, multidisciplinary team members and others who are holding blue pinwheels. These pinwheels are provided by Children’s Trust of South Carolina, and they’re really the national symbol for the prevention of child abuse. They represent the dream for childhoods that are free from abuse. Unfortunately, we all know that many children don’t live lives that are free from abuse. In fact, child abuse and neglect is really a public health crisis in South Carolina and across the country. Just last year alone our 28 CACs provided services for 12,897 victims of abuse and that was a 16% increase over the prior year. In fact, over the past six years Children’s Advocacy Centers in South Carolina alone have served almost 63,000 children which is a 51% increase over that six-year period. We know and statistics tell us that 1 in 10 children will suffer some form of sexual abuse before their 18th birthday. Think about that. That’s 10% of the child population.

During Child Abuse Prevention month. We try to remind people that an important part of prevention is having a strong evidence-based statewide response to child abuse when it occurs. In 2022, we really saw unprecedented collaboration in the Statewide response to child abuse in South Carolina. For instance, the Department of Social Services and SCNCAC worked on and implemented a database integration that provides hourly referrals from the Department of Social Services to our Children’s Advocacy Centers for cases of child abuse and it’s really designed to make sure referrals are made to Children’s Advocacy Centers when children need those services regardless of the child’s demographics or background. Another important thing that happened is the South Carolina Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers (SCNCAC) collaborated with the Children’s Justice Act Task Force of South Carolina to develop an online protocol training for the new child abuse response protocol act for all professionals involved in the child abuse response system. As of today’s date, over a thousand professionals have registered to take that training.

As important as those statistics are it’s also important to understand that behind each one of those numbers there is a child that’s hurting and a child that needs help. A couple weeks ago. I was thinking about what I would say to all of you today about the importance of the CAC movement and I was talking to an old friend of mine who suffered some serious abuse as a child. He did not have the Children’s Advocacy Center model in his area when he was a kid, but he reminded me of a story of abuse he had suffered when he was 9 years old. He used to wet the bed and when that happened his caregivers would physically punish him and then they would make him go stand in the yard of his house in just his soiled underwear until they thought he had learned his lesson. Again, there were no CACs at that time in that area. During my discussion with him a few weeks ago, he said his abusers made him believe that the abuse was his fault and if his behavior was better, he wouldn’t be getting abused or neglected. He admitted to me, even as an adult, he still feels like they might have been right that it’s his fault, even though he knows as an adult better than that. He still feels that way sometimes because abusers are very good at making their child victims feel the abuse is their fault.

Now contrast that story to a young teenager and a mother that I helped when I was a sheriff’s department detective who were suffering severe physical and sexual abuse from the person that lived with them. Their abuser also made them believe the abuse was their fault. You see abusers are very good at making victims believe that what they’re suffering is because of their actions and it’s their fault. Unfortunately, both that mother and that teenage daughter believed the abuse was their fault. However, after the CAC services and mental health therapy they received through the CAC and after the case was adjudicated. I got a letter from that mother. She thanked, everyone that had been involved in helping them and she also said in that letter that after the therapy services at the Children’s Advocacy Center, which took a long time, she finally knew that it wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t her daughter’s fault. In fact, she cut out a clip from a book and put it with the letter. The quote meant something to her, and she wanted me to read that quote to help us understand that she knew the abuse was not her fault. I normally wouldn’t read a quote to you here but I’m going to do that now as it helps to highlight the different results between the two stories I have shared today. This quote is from a mother who went through CAC services to learn that the abuse was not her daughter’s or her fault and this is the quote. It’s a quote from CS Lewis and I will read the portion that was included with the letter.

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is. Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.” (C.S. Lewis – Words to Live by)

Children need to know that no matter what they are doing or have done, the abuse they are suffering is not their fault. Last year Children’s Advocacy Centers helped 12,897 children know that that the abuse is not their fault. Together through our coordinated statewide response to child abuse, we will continue to help children know their abuse is never their fault and help them to heal and even thrive. I want to thank all of you for being here to support us today.

We are now going to hear from some of our partners who work as a part of our prevention efforts and statewide response to child abuse. I would like to introduce Senator Katrina Frye Shealy, who will say a few words about the General assembly Resolution for CAC Day.