Millions of dollars in federal funds will no longer be used to train professionals who conduct sensitive child abuse interviews, confounding proponents.
Cozy rooms outfitted with kid-sized couches and toys that help with seemingly impossible conversations. Professionals specially trained to speak to traumatized children. The right to a single interview about the abuse they’ve endured — rather than reliving the pain under questioning from a parade of doctors, police officers and social workers.
These are among the offerings provided by children’s advocacy centers across the country, which are one of the latest targets of the Trump administration.
Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego had received a three-year $3.6 million federal grant to operate the Western Regional Children’s Advocacy Center to serve local children and provide training and technical assistance to more than 100 similar centers across 13 states. But it is now among the 365 nonprofits that received notices last week their federal funding had been slashed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Neither the hospital nor the children’s advocacy center responded to repeated requests for interviews in recent days. And it’s unclear how much of the total budget the federal funding cut amounted to, or how its training and technical assistance work will suffer.
But in an April 22 email, Maureen Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs, said the previously allocated funds will be redirected to “top-line” priorities for “law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault.”
Carrie-Leigh Cloutier, CEO of the nonprofit Casakids, which operates a children’s advocacy center in Roswell, New Mexico — a state served by the defunded regional center — was baffled by the government’s reasoning.
“This is child protection,” Cloutier said, “so I don’t get it.”
The cuts to the advocacy center are among other far-reaching cuts hastily rolled out early on in Trump’s second term in office. Sixty federal grants that have been eliminated, totaling $150 million, specifically serve children, teens and young adults, according to a list obtained by The Imprint. Affected groups include the national CASA association — which sets standards for more than 900 court-appointed special advocate groups nationwide — as well as an array of organizations that prevent youth violence and protect jailed teens.
The San Diego children’s hospital grant falls under the nation’s decades-old Victims of Child Abuse Act, and was supposed to last from 2022 through September of this year. Three other regional providers also receive funding to train and support staff at the roughly 1,000 accredited local children’s advocacy centers across the country, but their grants so far appear to have been spared, according to the current publicly available information. Those organizations include the Philadelphia Children’s Alliance, the National Children’s Advocacy Center and the Children’s Hospital of Minnesota. A grant supporting the Native Children’s Advocacy Resource Center has also avoided cuts.
The purpose of the grants is to “improve the nation’s response to investigating and prosecuting child abuse and neglect,” according to a 2022 Justice Department report: “Regional Children’s Advocacy Centers promote and support widespread, consistent implementation of evidence-based practices and a multidisciplinary approach to child abuse investigations, assessment, intervention, and prosecution, thereby ensuring effective outcomes for child abuse victims and their families.”
The Justice Department funding was vital to ensuring local programs, often called CACs, could execute this sensitive work, Cloutier said. The center her organization runs, Chaves County Children’s Advocacy Center, relies on the regional center to train interviewers and victims’ advocates, as well as to provide scholarships for additional training.
“CACs have to have extremely intense, expensive, consistent training in order to stay up with the research on forensic interviewing,” she said. The regional center’s team includes leading experts in the field who advise professionals from Alaska and Hawaii to Colorado.
Local centers also turn to their regional center to help troubleshoot challenging cases, or to navigate competing approaches among the various authorities working on child abuse investigations. They’re on call, Cloutier said, to answer questions like: “‘I’m having a problem with a detective, they’re wanting us to do this — is it appropriate, in light of this case, to do that?’”
