When a child is the victim of or witness to a crime, it can be a traumatizing situation. The Southwest Mississippi Child Advocacy Center works as a mediator to find out what happened and help the child become a child again.
Trish Artigues, the center’s outreach coordinator, spoke to the McComb Exchange Club on Thursday. The Exchange Club, whose national mission is to fight child abuse, donated $3,000 to the center.
Artigues said the first children’s advocacy center began in 1985 when former U.S. Rep. Bud Cramer of Alabama, then a district attorney, was prosecuting a sex abuse case. She said the grandmother of the child told Kramer he did more harm than good by requiring the child to tell what happened to them over and over to different officials.
The Southwest Mississippi Children’s Advocacy Center is one of nine in the state and 900 nationwide. It provides forensic interviews, in which child victims of and witnesses to crimes give their testimony and receive counseling.
The center is accredited by the National Children’s Alliance and is undergoing the process of reaccreditation. The center is funded by the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Mississippi, the Victims of Crime Act and each of the five counties it serves — Pike, Walthall, Copiah, Lincoln and Amite — as well as private donations.
Pike County gives $18,000 annually, but the largest funding source is Victims of Crime Act funds, which come from money offenders pay into the system.
Artigues said Department of Human Services officials determine which cases the center will handle. “We have no say-so over which cases we get,” she said.
Then, law enforcement is alerted. “They are made aware of the situation and if it warrants an investigation then the child and the adult comes to the CAC,” Artigues said.
The forensic interview comes next.
“The child sits down with us in a child-friendly and neutral situation,” she said. “We conduct interviews in a non-leading way.”
She said this the first opportunity the child gets to bring what happened to them into the light.
“It’s a difficult process but we gather information as much as we can,” she said. “It’s not a therapeutic process, it’s fact-gathering.”
She said the next step is a meeting with a therapist. Artigues said a recent allotment of funds from VOCA allowed the center to hire a new therapist, cutting down on the wait time.
Artigues said that in 2015, 246 children came into the center for forensic interviews and of those, 205 of those were for sexual abuse, 24 were for physical abuse and 20 were witnesses to violent crimes.
She said in just seven months of 2016, the center has seen 244 children, 81 of whom are from Pike County.
“That’s over 20 baseball teams and over 12 baseball teams in Pike County alone,” she said.
