ABOUT US
Our Mission
To protect and support all children, families and adults by strengthening our community’s response to abuse through investigation, prosecution and intervention while fostering professional collaboration to promote education and advocacy regarding the prevention of abuse.
The Chittenden Children’s Advocacy Center (CCAC)
is a 501(c) (3) non -profit entity and an accredited program of the National Children’s Alliance. The CCAC is a child focused Chittenden County based program in which law enforcement, child protection, prosecution, mental health, medical, and victim advocacy work together to make team decisions about the investigation, treatment, management and prosecution of child abuse cases. This team approach helps give a more complete understanding of each case and allows us to respond in the most effective way to child victims and their families.
The primary goal of the Chittenden Children's Advocacy Center is to ensure that children are not further traumatized by the intervention system designed to protect them. This program has many benefits, with an approach that allows for faster follow up to child abuse reports, more efficient medical and mental health referrals, fewer child interviews, more successful prosecutions, and consistent support for child victims and their families. The CCAC makes victim support and advocacy services available to all our clients, as well as specialized mental health services for children and non-offending family members. It was started in 2003.
The Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations (CUSI)
is a multi-agency task force who works in tandem and is co-located with the CCAC. CUSI provides criminal response to reports of sexual assaults, serious child abuse, child fatalities and human trafficking. CUSI was started in 1992, for over 30 years, the primary focus has been to protect and support all children, adults and families. CUSI defined what is now known as a true multidisciplinary team (MDT) method to investigating crimes of this nature. The multidisciplinary team is the heart of CUSI and is composed of seven police detectives, a director, a victim advocate, a CUSI assigned investigator with the Department for Children and Families (DCF), and a CUSI assigned prosecutor from the Chittenden County State’s Attorney's Office. We work jointly with mental health providers, medical providers and Department of Corrections. The types of cases include sexual assaults, lewd and lascivious conduct, serious child abuse, child fatalities, sex offender registry violations, child pornography and human trafficking.
CUSI Intake Process
The Chittenden Unit for Special Investigations (CUSI) investigates crimes against children and some sexual assault cases involving adult victims, but CUSI is not a first response agency. What this means is that CUSI will accept investigations from police departments and the Vermont Department for Children & Families (DCF).
A victim of any crime that wants police to investigate the crime should report the incident to the police department in the jurisdiction that the incident occurred in, and this process is no different for sexual assault victims or crimes against children. Uniformed police officers will obtain only enough details to see if the incident is something that CUSI would investigate. Vermont DCF should also be notified of any incident of abuse in which the victim is under 18 years of age – 1-800-649-5285.