Children's Advocacy Center Shares Open Letter to Former Governor Bush

The Children's Advocacy Center is celebrating their 20th Anniversary of Senate Bill 81, and would like to share a letter written by Joy Rauls, who is the executive director of Children's Advocacy Center of Texas.

An open letter to former Gov. George W. Bush:

In the summer of 1995, you set about the task of addressing the trove of bills passed by the 74th Texas Legislature. While they were all important in their own way, we would offer that the most significant bill you signed was Senate Bill 81, which officially adopted the Children’s Advocacy Center model as the state’s approach to better address the issue of child sexual and physical abuse.

Twenty years after you put pen to paper, we are writing on behalf of at-risk and abused children across Texas to express our sincere gratitude for your important role in investing in the CAC model and thereby helping restore the lives of these children.

When Senate Bill 81, authored by Sen. Florence Shapiro, became law it built a strong foundation for the establishment and development of CACs in Texas. Your signature on this bill created the spark, which ignited the momentum to put child victims of abuse at the center of the state’s response to investigating and prosecuting child abuse. Through CACs, Texas is now not only the national but also the world’s leader in bringing justice and healing for child victims of abuse.

CACs created a multidisciplinary team, or MDT, approach to child abuse cases, bringing together Child Protective Services, law enforcement and prosecutors to intervene, investigate and prosecute these cases. Collaboration is the hallmark of the MDT, which best facilitates justice in the courtroom and healing for children and families at home.

Since 1995, the CAC model has grown in size, scope and influence across the state. The number of CACs in Texas has grown from 13 to nearly 70 centers serving the majority of Texas counties where more than 95 percent of the state’s population resides. In those centers, some 800 employees, including social workers and forensic interviewers, work to support child victims of abuse. In those communities, supporters representing the private side of the public-private partnership give of their time, their money and their hearts to enhance the work of these centers.

The CAC model itself has also evolved over the years. Initially created to minimize the number of interviews a child victim had to endure as the case proceeded from CPS to law enforcement to prosecutors and the courts, CACs pioneered the development of a discipline called forensic interviewing.

Carefully crafted in a way to avoid introducing bias into a child’s testimony of abuse, the forensic interview has become the baseline approach for gathering information from child victims of abuse for prosecutions. Our headquarters in Austin has become the clearinghouse for training on the technique for forensic interviewers across Texas and beyond.

As approaches to investigation and prosecution evolved, CAC leaders recognized the need to help child victims and their families move toward healing. Frustrated with the “counseling carousel” that victims often encountered, enduring session after session with no real progress, CAC leaders aggressively worked to implement a more appropriate kind of therapy. Known as trauma-focused therapy, the approach draws upon lessons learned in treating PTSD in combat veterans, categorically changing the trajectory for these children’s lives, leading them to hope and healing. This therapeutic modality is now being taught so frequently and thoroughly through our organization that Texas CACs are now home to more than 75 percent of the therapists certified in its use in Texas.

We realistically anticipate the need to help more child victims in the future. However, we are better equipped than ever to help restore the lives of abused children. We will continue to do so with the ongoing support of the Legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott, federal funding, local communities, family foundations and our private sector partners all over Texas. In fact, the 84th Legislature took measures this past session to further strengthen and improve the CAC model.

Joy Rauls is executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Texas, and Joe Cosgrove Jr. is board president.