APRI Highlights - Spring 2002

National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse

Victor Vieth, Director

Although APRI’s National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse hosts several national conferences and participates in many others, training professionals at the national level may not be the most effective means of reaching front line investigators and prosecutors. Many communities simply lack the resources to send child protection professionals to national courses. Even communities that have resources can typically send only a small number of professionals.

Instead, we chose to emphasize training at the state and local level. Instead of spending scarce resources to send a handful of child protection professionals to a national conference, communities contract with NCPCA for one or more trainers who travel to that community and provide an intense training tailored to local needs. As a result, a community can train hundreds of local child abuse professionals for less than the cost of sending a small number of these professionals to a national conference.

This shift in emphasis has enabled NCPCA to expand its reach in the past two years, from training 4,000 child protection professionals per year to more than 14,000. Since most of this training is done at the state and local level, it is easy to forget that NCPCA is, without question, the nation’s pre-eminent trainer of child protection professionals.

Consistent with this approach, we are now working with states to establish their own five-day forensic interview training programs. This initiative, entitled “Half a Nation by 2010,” will establish forensic interview training programs in 25 states by the close of the decade. The programs will be operated by the states but must maintain the excellence established by our forensic interview training course, Finding Words. Two states, South Carolina and Minnesota, have already completed the program and are using the Finding Words model to provide top-quality forensic interview training to child protection professionals throughout their respective states. This year, Indiana, New Jersey and Mississippi will complete the program, followed by Georgia and Missouri in 2003. If you are interested in receiving an application packet to bring this program to your state, please call us at (703) 549-4253.

Jackie Robinson once said that our lives are only significant to the extent they impact positively on others. In bringing our training to the state and local level, APRI’s National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse is positively impacting the lives of thousands of front line child protection professionals and, more importantly, impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.