The CDC tells us that one in four girls and one in 13 boys are, right know, as you read this, victims of sexual abuse – basically, let’s just call it what it is, child rape.
Do the math, and it’s not good – we’re talking about 14 million girls, 3 million boys.
Let that sink in: 17 million kids, in this country, our kids, raped.
We only know about a fraction of these cases, because 90 percent of child-rape cases involve a perpetrator who is known to the victim – a parent, close family member, family friend – who either manipulates the victim into silence, or worse, threatens or uses violence to keep the secret.
I can sense that you’re uncomfortable.
Nobody likes talking about child rape, which is a big reason why we have the problem we have.
Children’s Advocacy Centers
There are 961 Children’s Advocacy Centers in the U.S. that lead a multidisciplinary team approach that brings together under one umbrella the professionals and agencies needed to offer comprehensive services to victims of child abuse and child neglect, including child-rape victims: law enforcement, Child Protective Services, prosecutors, and mental health, medical and victim advocates.
As nonprofits, these CACs – there are 19 in Virginia, not even covering the entire state – have to offer these services, and also sing for their supper.
In Virginia, the state provides $7 million annually to our CACs, who operate on annual budgets that run in the area of $20 million annually in total.
“This is a problem, because the CACs are constantly going from one financial crisis to another. Not only do the staff have to deal with being short-funded by the governments, then they have to worry about not having money to pay their personal expenses, and they have to deal with these horrific things Monday through Friday, and then on Friday night they have to go and do a fundraiser to try and get the money to cover their bills for that month. It shouldn’t be like that,” said Brett Hayes, a Waynesboro-based businessman – among other things, you know him as the owner of the Zeus Digital Theater – who has appointed himself to lead an effort to get Virginia lawmakers to address the funding discrepancy.
His involvement with CACs came about by chance – a canceled flight landed him in a rented car with someone linked to the Valley Children’s Advocacy Center in Staunton, which he learned on the drive back was facing a shortfall due to federal budget cuts.
Hayes has helped raise $180,000 in each of the past two budget years to plug the funding holes for the Valley CAC, which is all well and good, but not something you can consider sustainable – having to go out and do that every year.
“Now I want to take that same approach, but instead of having to have me go out and find money for these guys, I think that the state should pay for this thing, and I’ve got a plan,” Hayes told me in an interview for our “Street Knowledge” podcast.
The plan: have the state commit to providing $20 million a year in funding for its CACs, which would, in essence, represent full funding for their work, with the money coming from an increase in the excise tax on liquid vape pens, taking the tax from 11 cents per milliliter to 30 cents per milliliter.
“We have an opportunity here to fix this funding problem, so that the people that are helping these poor kids that are in these horrible situations have the resources they need to do it,” Hayes said. “The payoff on that thing is exponential, because when you have the people at these CACs not having to go out and do 20 and 30 grants to piece together their funding, the 70 percent of their funding that they’re missing, and go out and do fundraisers and all these other things, that means they can spend their time going into schools and educating teachers on signs to look for, educating kids on what is acceptable, right? They don’t have time to do that because they’re just, they’re trying to hit the balls coming in the door, right?
“Imagine the one new case a day that almost of every one of these CACs have to deal with. If we can get them out of the fundraising business, where their funding is secure, they can then focus on getting upstream and trying to address some of these other problems that they can address, that they’re trained to address. But we need to give them the time to do that.”
Even bigger need
Even plugging this funding hole for existing CACs in Virginia wouldn’t address the entire problem we’re facing here – about 20 percent of the state doesn’t have access to a CAC, including, per a coverage map from the website of the National Children’s Alliance, a wide swath of Northern Virginia and the Northern Neck, and parts of the Richmond suburbs, Hampton Roads, Southside and Southwest Virginia.
“When you think of it, you’re like, OK, some holler down in Southwest Virginia is the one that’s missing this. No, Culpeper doesn’t have access to CACs. Farmville doesn’t have access to CACs. Culpeper is trying to get Charlottesville to take over and do their things, and they’re like, we don’t have the resources, we’ve got to hire more people to do this, we’ve got to put in facilities, we’ve got to do all this other stuff,” Hayes said.
Virginia CACs are already conducting 6,000 forensic interviews a year; extrapolating that number to include the unserved areas, we’re looking at another 1,200 cases, at least – and I think it would be a lot higher, considering the areas that are uncovered – that are falling through the cracks.
“This has to happen this year, because we’ve got a biennial budget,” said Hayes, who already has commitments from two state lawmakers who are pledging their support to the CAC funding plan being presented.
“Every year that we don’t do it, you know, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Justice delayed is justice denied,’” Hayes said. “Every year that we don’t have that 20 percent of the state covered, 6,000 kids a year get forensic interviews, we’ve got 20 percent of the state doesn’t have coverage, that’s 1,200 kids a year that continue to be raped, that continue to be assaulted, they continue to be harassed and left in this deep, dark hole, and we’re like, well, we’ll get to it next year, now’s not a good time, because we’ve got all these other problems, we got these federal budget issues, we got the government shutdown, we got this, we got that.
“They’re always going to say, it’s never a good time, and I’m saying, you’re going to go to those 1,200 kids per year, per year, 1,200 kids per year that we’re not able to serve, and tell them, sorry, you just have tough it out for another year,” Hayes said.
The challenge here is, no one wants to talk about child rape.
“You know, when a kid gets raped, they don’t do Make a Wish, they don’t get to go Disney World, they don’t get to meet The Rock, they don’t get to go to football games,” Hayes said. “Nobody says anything. These kids just suffer in silence, and they’re made to feel like what they did was wrong and shameful. It shouldn’t be like that. These kids should be treated same way that a kid who beats cancer is treated. I mean, it’s just as horrific for their experience as anybody else with a health thing, but yet we put them in the corner and turn off the lights.
“I tend to get a little bit ticked off when I’m talking to somebody that is in a position of power, who acts like I’m standing there with my hat in my hand. I’m not. This money belongs to these children,” Hayes said. “They have every right to as much justice as everybody else gets, and we’re denying them justice by not giving them the resources to have their crimes investigated properly and have their perpetrators put away, but more importantly, to get them separated from these things.”
Children’s Advocacy Centers: What CACs do, why they need your help
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Chris Graham
