When a 7-year-old child told her mother she had been sexually abused by a family friend hours before, police contacted the team at the Lake County Children’s Advocacy Center to help her. The center arranged for the child to speak to a forensic interviewer, just one of the many resources it provides for young survivors of abuse, said Carrie Flanigan, the center’s executive director.
The collection of evidence through a SANE (sexual assault nurse examiner) exam was needed, in addition to a well-being medical exam. For that, the child was sent to an emergency room, where she had to wait for several hours.
This is a common scenario for abuse survivors, where an ER’s triaging system means it could take hours to receive care — and that’s if a hospital even has the proper staffing for the treatment they need.
“Imagine a 5-year-old who has been sexually abused, traumatized, sitting in an ER, surrounded by unfamiliar people — it’s not a child-friendly environment,” said Jeff Espina, Rosalind Franklin University’s vice president of clinical services. “And they can sometimes wait for appropriate care for several hours, only then to be transferred to another hospital, because the facility did not have the required and appropriate resources to care for the child.”
Now, the Lake County Children’s Advocacy Center is partnering with RFU Health Clinics to launch an on-site medical clinic to treat children who have been abused or witnessed abuse.
Leaders hope to have the RFU Children’s Advocacy Center Medical Clinic up and running in early 2025, Ms. Flanigan said. Instead of having a child waiting hours at an ER, the center’s medical team can mobilize immediately.
“In Illinois, this medical unit being a part of our Children’s Advocacy Center is a game- changer,” she said. “We can send children down to Chicago hospitals, and they do amazing work. But having these kids in-house and being able to treat them and minimize the trauma really makes a difference.”
The collaboration was an easy decision, Mr. Espina said.
“It certainly meets the vision and one of our missions at the university in helping care for and provide services for the community,” he said. “The estimate in the Lake County area is anywhere between 300 and 500 annual cases of sexual abuse are hitting the community, and quite a few of that patient population do not get the medical examinations they deserve.”
The advocacy center, the first of its kind in Illinois, started in 1987. A task force had found that children who were victimized were then being interviewed multiple times by different people in different places, repeatedly answering the same questions for investigators with different purposes.
“The child could have talked to 8–15 people, telling their story,” Ms. Flanigan said. “As you can imagine, in a state of trauma, that story can look a little bit different every time it’s told — not because a child is not telling the truth, but because the way a question is asked is indicative as to how a child is going to answer it.”
Helping Children Heal from Trauma
Children’s advocacy centers nationwide bring forensic interviewers, prosecutors, police, therapists, victims’ advocates and medical professionals into one space to guarantee a child’s safety and ensure a family has the resources they need. This also helps all these entities collaborate to gather the information and evidence they need to prosecute crimes against children.
“Even though all these different disciplines have very different needs and criteria — medical, law enforcement, attorneys — at the end of the day, this is a prime example of how collaboration and working together for the best interest of the child makes stuff happen,” Ms. Flanigan said.
Still, hundreds of young survivors of abuse don’t get proper medical exams each year because of the lack of trained personnel in local hospitals, poor access to treatment, fears around seeking care, insufficient collaboration among local authorities and other factors.
The Children’s Advocacy Center conducted 587 forensic interviews into allegations of sexual abuse of children in 2023. Only 120 of those children received a medical exam, according to the center’s recent report.
Having on-site medical care in this type of center is new in Illinois. The RFU Children’s Advocacy Center Medical Clinic will be the first such facility approved by the Illinois Department of Public Health.
The clinic will provide services for chronic and acute cases of children, ages 0–18, who are survivors of sexual abuse. The plan is to offer standard Monday–Friday business hours for appointments for children requiring medical examinations and some treatment, as well as access to SANE providers 24/7, when there’s an immediate need for a medical examination and to collect time-sensitive evidence.
The clinic will have the oversight of a medical director, and be staffed by a SANE manager, SANE coordinator, operations staff and a network of SANE providers certified to perform pediatric medical examinations to identify signs of trauma.
Training SANE Providers
The RFU and Children’s Advocacy Center teams also want to make the center a clinical training site to boost the number of SANE providers in the area. There has been a years-long shortage of SANE nurses nationally, with as many as 80% of hospitals not having them on staff as of 2022, according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network).
The medical clinic plans to expand partnerships with RFU colleges to offer educational opportunities for students who want to become SANE providers or work in public health.
For now, the focus is on launching the clinic, seeing patients as soon as possible and ensuring as many kids as possible get the medical care they need after experiencing trauma, Mr. Espina said. He hopes the clinic can serve at least 250–500 kids in the first year.
“Success for the program means we have increased awareness in the Lake County and healthcare communities by launching a program that provides an improved option for these children,” he said. “Success, for me, is to establish and earn credibility with law enforcement and agencies — having a process they can rely on because it works — and reimagining the standard in the industry for this patient population. A trip to the emergency department doesn’t have to be the norm anymore.
“The long-term success is that this model is mirrored across other regions or other areas and creates interest to launch something similar to serve the children in their communities.”
Dawn Rhodes is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She has worked in journalism for 15 years.