Advocacy Center geared toward well-being of clients

Liberty facility consolidates child services

By Osei Helper and Anastashia Matos | Manor Ink

Liberty, NY – The Child Advocacy Center is a county-funded organization focused on centralizing services and resources for children who are victims of sexual and physical abuse. Meagan Galligan, the Sullivan County district attorney, founded the Child Advocacy Center with the help of the Sullivan County Family Response Team. Based in Liberty and running out of the campus of the Department of Family Services, the CAC has been active for the past 18 months. Manor Ink talked with Galligan about the center and the services it provides.

“The way that the Child Advocacy Center is designed, the child can go to one place for all of the services that relate to both family court and social services and criminal courts,” Galligan said.

For well over a decade, the Sullivan County Response Team was a section of the DA’s office that would review evidence for cases involving serious child abuse of a physical and/or sexual nature. But Galligan realized that the justice process didn’t have the mental well being of the children in mind. “Some of these young girls had to go down to Westchester Medical Center and sit there for hours, waiting for their physical examination,” she said. “Then, they would go to the Department of Family Services in Liberty, which can be a scary place for a kid, and then they would come to the dean’s office for more interviews. So there was nowhere where they could feel comfortable and like the space was designed for them.”

Creating a child-friendly space

Galligan decided that something had to be done about this, and started planning for the Child Advocacy Center, basing the facility on other centers in other counties that were designed with children in mind. “They have child-friendly colors, and all kinds of things like that. The furniture is designed for children,” Galligan said. “And there, they can feel at least comfortable, like they know where they’re going when dealing with the cases that result from the abuse.”

Through a grant from the Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Office of Victim Services, the Child Advocacy Center had the funding required to set up business. The center was also able to hire a crime victim advocate to educate victims on the justice system and the services they’re entitled to.

The Child Advocacy Center receives hundreds of potential cases a year. The investigators sift through every hotline call they receive each morning, weeding out the potential cases. “They will screen those calls for indicators that they’ve been trained to pick up on, things that show that there may be serious physical abuse, such as the child’s in the hospital, or there are signs of sexual abuse,” Galligan said. “If either of those is present, they will take that case.”

Types of cases handled by the CAC

Once a case has been taken, a family services worker, possibly aided by a police investigator, will be sent to investigate the situation. Confirmed cases can either be criminal or not. Non-criminal cases go to family courts, which could possibly result in the child being removed from home. Criminal cases can be less serious misdemeanors, such as child endangerment, or more serious felonies, such as physical or sexual abuse.

The Child Advocacy Center typically works with 10 to 25 cases each year, and they can take anywhere from a couple weeks to over a year. The victims range from infants to adolescents 17 years of age. Physical abuse tends to be seen in younger children, generally infants to toddlers. As children get older, they are more likely to suffer from sexual abuse. People who have been abused when they were children are more likely to become abusive to their own children in the future. “Physical and sexual abuse of children happens across all financial, ethnic and any other barriers that you can see,” Galligan said.

“COVID-19 has substantially reduced the number of reports that are being made to the child welfare hotline,” said Galligan. The reason for this is that lockdown restrictions mean that many students are staying home while attending classes. This affects the number of reports because many of them come from school faculty. Students often feel most comfortable talking to their teachers about their situations at home. One especially negative aspect of the quarantine is the mentally stressful situations it creates at home for many families. This results in a dangerous dichotomy, as likelihood for abuse rises and reports of abuse fall.

The work that the Child Advocacy Center does is very important, creating safe spaces for children and supplying them with monetary and mental health resources as they work through their cases. “If you have a suspicion that a child is in trouble, that a child’s been hurt, say something. Because as long as you act in good faith, there’s no harm in having family services go out and do a check,” Galligan said.