It’s Not Easy for Child Advocacy Centers to Keep Up With Demand

More than 400 new child abuse victims sought help at one of West Virginia’s children’s advocacy centers for the 2017 fiscal year, and that’s an 11.26 percent increase over the previous year, according to the West Virginia Child Advocacy Network’s annual report released Monday. The rising numbers do not necessarily denote a stark increase in the act of child abuse, but rather that more children than ever are being referred into victim services West Virginia’s 21 children’s advocacy centers served 3,914 children in fiscal year 2017 — an average of one in every 100 children living in the network that covers counties such as Cabell, Lincoln, Boone, Logan, Mingo, Kanawha and Wyoming. The demand for those centers in 2018 is expected to remain high.