This is the 2021 Annual Report of the National Children’s Alliance (NCA), whose primary mission is to develop and provide resources for Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs), which are committed to preventing, identifying, and treating harms to children that threaten their physical and mental health.
The report first notes that in 2020, due to the pandemic, the CACs served fewer children than the previous year. The NCA viewed this decline as due to the confinement of children to their family homes, which limited the interaction of potentially abused children with mandated reporters of child abuse. As the nation increased its prevention and treatment efforts, CAC engaged in significant outreach to those children who may have been abused during the early and home-confinement phase of the pandemic. As a result, the number of children served by CACs in 2021 reached 386,191, the highest ever in one year. This report notes that since it is impossible to cover all that CACs accomplished together in 2021, it presents a few notable statistics that indicate the level and nature of services CACs provided to abused children. A total of 939 CACs served the 386,191 children who needed their services. A total of 2,860,465 people who trained in child abuse prevention by CACs. In 2020-21, NCA - in concert with adult sexual assault and domestic violence organizations, state attorneys general, and VOCA administrators - prioritized the creation of a “permanent fix” to the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which funds many victim-serving organizations. Congress passed the VOCA Fix Act in July with a unanimous vote in the Senate. This new law is already making a difference by bringing in $254 million to the Crime Victims Fund in September 2021, the largest one-month amount in more than 4 years.