Issue Position: Children

Issue Position

Issue Position: Children

As the District Attorney for Madison County, I started the National Children's Advocacy Center in Huntsville in 1984. This program was the first of its kind to provide comprehensive support and services for physically and sexually abused children in a child-friendly environment.

The Children's Advocacy Center quickly developed into a national and international model for best practices in addressing the complicated but urgent social problem of child abuse. The Center has become the world's largest child abuse training resource for child welfare workers and other professionals.

I continue to travel across the country visiting Children's Advocacy Centers to see first-hand how different communities are working to improve child welfare and to help combat child abuse. I am also working to promote the CAC concept internationally.

The Children's Advocacy Center programs are part of a non-profit, membership organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., called the National Children's Alliance (formerly known as the National Network of Children's Advocacy Centers). I founded the Alliance in 1987 in response to the needs of a growing number of facility-based child abuse intervention programs and the demand for guidance from grassroots organizations working with child victims.

In 1990, I took the fight for children in my own community to Congress. I drafted and passed the "National Children's Advocacy Program Act", a landmark law that established the Children's Advocacy Center program as a model for the U.S. Department of Justice in assisting communities seeking to improve their response to child abuse. I have been dedicated to providing funding to continue to expand the Children's Center program into new communities. My vision is to establish a program in every community that needs and wants one.

To raise awareness of the issue of child abuse among my colleagues in Congress, I co-founded and continue to serve as co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. This bipartisan coalition is made up of over 100 members of Congress devoted to helping find missing children and raising public awareness about child abduction. The Caucus has also played a major role in helping protect children from sexual predators on the Internet, including the passage of federal legislation to ban virtual pornography.

Most recently, I worked to shepherd House passage of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, Title I of which was the Cramer Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2005. The Adam Walsh bill is a comprehensive bill that improves sex offender verification systems, expands notification requirements, and creates new criminal penalties for sex offenders who fail to register.

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