History

In February of 2001, a small group of six volunteers formed a Steering Committee for the purpose of creating a Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) in Iredell County, North Carolina.  This action was compelled upon discovery of multiple incidents of sexual assault against the 4-year-old son (by a neighbor) of one of our Committee members, which was responded to in an uncoordinated, less-than-satisfactory manner from many well-intended agencies within our community.  Through research, our Steering Committee learned of the CAC concept and discovered that Children’s Advocacy Centers across the country have largely eliminated the problem of uncoordinated, less-than-effective response to rising incidents of child sexual assault.   This small group of concerned citizens immediately developed a 3-phase Implementation Strategy, confirming their determination to strive for the development of Dove House, a CAC for Iredell County.  Statistical research at that time revealed to us that in the year 2000, in Iredell County alone, there were 153 reported cases of sexual assault against our children, where the perpetrator was the parent or caretaker of the child.  This disturbing statistic did not include incidents where the perpetrator was not a family member.  We discovered that statistics on cases involving non-family member perpetrators were not accessible in our county, so we also became determined to become a central repository for child abuse related data for Iredell County.

The Dove House Steering Committee spent many weeks in the spring of 2001 meeting with top county officials to confirm the need for, and assess the support of, a Children’s Advocacy Center.  Our first meeting was with our District Attorney of the NC 22nd Judicial District, whose positive endorsement propelled all of our other meetings with top agency executives.  With our DA’s office sponsorship, our executive meetings culminated in the Steering Committee’s hosting of an Interagency Forum on May 16, 2001, and, based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback from this Forum, by early Fall 2001, it resulted in the execution of an Interagency Agreement, signed by the highest management level in the District Attorney’s office, the Department of Social Services, four (4) law enforcement agencies, and many other medical and mental health agencies.  Multi-disciplinary commitment was now in place.  The consistent support of the creation of Dove House made it abundantly clear that this community was ready, willing and able to dramatically improve our response to victims of child sexual abuse.  We occupied our current facility in July 2002; opened our doors and began receiving clients in September 2002.