News & Events

The following article by Linda Fairstein appears in Issue 4 of Joyful Heart Foundation’s magazine, Reunion. Linda Fairstein, former prosecutor and best-selling novelist, is America’s foremost legal expert on crimes of violence against women and children. She currently serves as the Vice-Chair on Joyful Heart’s Board of Directors. Her newest crime novel, NIGHT WATCH, is being release on July 10, 2012 and is currently available for pre-order. Visit her online at www.lindafairstein.com and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. All photography by Michael Webber.

Whenever I think about child victims of sexual and physical abuse–and there are sadly so many thousands of them across this country–I start with the fact that not only are they our most vulnerable population, but they have also traditionally been terribly underserved by a criminal justice system designed for adult survivors.

In 1977, when I was a young prosecutor in charge of the country’s pioneering special victims unit, New York City established a multi-disciplinary task force to create innovative ways to deal with these long-ignored issues: sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. Assistant district attorneys, police officers, advocates, mental health experts and physicians met regularly, but some agencies were so territorial that we despaired of finding a more comfortable way for children to disclose abuse.

In some cities and towns—like New York in the ‘70s—it is still the practice that a child who reports sexual abuse, for example, is taken first to a police station and exposed, often in the middle of the night, to everything from perpetrators in handcuffs to jail cells, as well as lots of men and women in uniform. They are then taken to a hospital emergency room, where it would just be a matter of good luck if a trauma pediatrician is on duty, where the child waits to be triaged after car accidents, shooting victims, strokes and other urgent matters. Eventually, he or she might meet with a prosecutor in a courthouse, a child welfare investigator and ideally someone to counsel the victim. Each of these steps takes place under a separate roof, at a distinct day and time, and, while necessary, the process often adds to the child’s trauma instead of relieving it.

The concept that seemed so hopeless to us in the ’70s came to fruition in 1986, when the country’s first “child advocacy center” (CACs, as we call them) was developed in Huntsville, Alabama. From that first center in Huntsville, a national movement was created. Today, there are nearly 700 child advocacy centers nationwide, and more on the way. But it was here in New York City in 1996, when Safe Horizon opened the first fully co-located CAC in the United States, that the idea blossomed and yielded the great results we see today.

A welcome sign hangs above the reception area at Safe Horizon's Manhattan CAC.

Let me tell you a little bit about Safe Horizon, the country’s largest victim advocacy organization, which is based in New York and was founded in 1978. It’s a non-profit with long and close ties to the Joyful Heart Foundation, for which I currently serve as the Vice-Chair on the Board of Directors. The two organizations have partnered on many important projects over the years. Mariska Hargitay, Joyful Heart’s Founder and President, served on the Safe Horizon board with me (as does her fabulous co-star, Stephanie March), and Maile Zambuto, Joyful Heart’s CEO, led their development team for several years. Safe Horizon is the only organization in the United Sates to operate four fully co-located, nationally accredited CACs in an urban setting–serving children ages 11 and under, almost five thousand cases a year.

What’s so important about being fully co-located? The first mission for providers is to ensure that children disclosing abuse are not further traumatized, as they might easily be in the example shown above. In Safe Horizon’s Manhattan CAC—which opened in 2009 and is my favorite place in the city, truly—the child-friendliness of the setting is obvious from the minute a visitor walks into the reception area. There are toys, games and books, child-sized furniture and friendly workers to put the kids at ease immediately.

The reception area of the Manhattan CAC is an inviting and playful space. Children wait here before they meet with Safe Horizon's warm and friendly staff in the facilities, which are decorated with artwork and gently lit throughout.

And then the key to the solution: a multi-disciplinary team–a superb trauma pediatrician with a private office designed to meet the medical needs of the victims, as well as to collect evidence; a detective specializing in child abuse, both physical and sexual; workers from the Administration for Children’s Services; a prosecutor from the DA’s office; and a social worker trained specifically to do a forensic interview—conduct a single interview, rather than five or six at agency after agency. This interview allows the police officer and others to watch through a one-way mirror, so the child is not overwhelmed by six interrogators.

A meeting room of the Manhattan CAC.

One flight down, part of the CAC complex, is an entire self-contained module of a special victims unit. It’s an NYPD facility that includes a room in which line-ups can be conducted without ever having to take the victim out of the building, a cell in which an offender can be held and a room in which the offender or other witnesses can be interviewed.

The CAC team can complete the medical exam, conduct a detailed interview of the child, perform a mental health evaluation, provide victim support and advocacy and then follow up with case review and tracking. This process ensures the best clinical aftercare and a far greater chance of success in the courtroom. The dream of better serving the often-fragile child victim, which many of us thought hopeless three decades ago, are realized in each of Safe Horizon’s CACs.

Nancy Arnow, the program director in charge of the CACs, rightly points out that “the need for treatment of child abuse victims is on the increase, and that Safe Horizon’s groundbreaking programs are proven, successful models to be replicated across the country.” I go to the Manhattan CAC often to tour prospective donors, talk with school groups or prosecutors about this important work or simply visit my friends who do this difficult work with such skill and enthusiasm. It is always a privilege and a joy to see how this team approach to intervention following abuse so dramatically improves the circumstances of the victims who come to the CACs. This model not only changes these young lives that have been so severely traumatized, but it also saves the lives of the kids, their parents and their siblings every single day. To my view, Safe Horizon’s four CACs have set the gold standard for the way every child victim should be met when disclosing the awful truths of abuse.

Child Advocacy Centers are also located in Joyful Heart’s other locations in Los Angeles and Honolulu. The Stuart House is a part of the Rape Treatment Center in Los Angeles, and the Children’s Justice Centers are located in multiple cities in Hawai‘i. For more information, please visit www.911rape.org/about-us and www.courts.state.hi.us for details and contact information for the respective centers.

For information on Child Advocacy Centers across the country, please visit the National Children’s Alliance website at www.nationalchildrensalliance.org.

The Alice “Bobbie” Fairstein Medical Suite

One of the most important elements of the Manhattan Child Advocacy Center is the Alice “Bobbie” Fairstein Medical Suite. Alice Atwell Fairstein of Mount Vernon, New York—also known as Bobbie—died on July 3, 2008 at the age of 88. Born on April 17, 1920 to James and Ida Atwell, she was a 1941 graduate of the Mount Vernon Hospital School of Nursing and served as a U.S. naval nurse during World War II. Alice was stationed at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia, where her first patients were pilots wounded during the battle of Guadalcanal.

In 1943, she married her husband, the late Samuel Johnson Fairstein, a Fellow of the American College of Anesthesiology and Chief of Anesthesiology at Mount Vernon Hospital from 1957 to 1984. In 1965, Alice joined the staff of Louise Wise Services of Manhattan, where she was a supervising pediatric nurse, participating in the care of thousands of infants and children until the agency closed in 2004, forcing her retirement at the age of 84.

After Alice’s death, in her honor—and in recognition of her devotion to the health and well-being of children in crisis—her family and friends created the Alice Fairstein Medical Suite and a memorial fund to support its operation. The facility was dedicated in November 2008.

Alice will be remembered for her skilled medical care and compassion, her wise counsel to friends of all ages and the great spirit of joy with which she lived her very full life. Her memory will also live on in the level of expert and compassionate care provided to child victims of physical and sexual abuse in the medical facility that bears her name.