INNISFAIL – Between 2020 and 2023 there were 2,769 abused children and youth in Alberta who sought help from the Central Alberta Child Advocacy Centre (CACAC).
There were 2,511 accused perpetrators from 3,098 cases of reported abuse.
Girls were more likely to be abused than boys by a ratio of two to one.
According to the 2023 Statistics Canada report, 67.5 per cent of people born in Alberta reported experiencing child maltreatment before the age of 15.
The annual economic cost of child sexual abuse nationally is estimated to be about $3.6 billion.
These staggering facts come from the State of Child Wellbeing in Central Alberta community report; a 36-page document released in April by the centre in partnership with Red Deer Polytechnic.
“Some of our smallest communities bear a disproportionate burden of these occurrences per capita,” said the report.
This month, the CACAC reported to the Albertan that dozens of Innisfail victims – a total of 84 since the agency’s inception on Dec. 1, 2017, were triaged at the agency.
In this Central Alberta region another 89 came from Olds.
CACAC also triaged 35 from Didsbury, while an additional 51 coming from Red Deer County, 33 from Sundre and six more from Carstairs.
The centre triaged an astounding 1,027 from Red Deer.
Innisfail RCMP Const. Craig Nelson has been the local detachment’s community schools resource officer since late 2017, around the same time CACAC established its first office in downtown Red Deer.
“Of those 74 (Innisfail children) that went to the child advocacy centre I probably knew most of those cases pretty intimately,” said Nelson. “That's quite a bit, isn't it? But of those 74 there's many that aren't captured.
“I use the centre all the time, not necessarily just to bring kids there specifically, but also just as a resource. I even made a recommendation today (May 7),” he added. “And it’s not always for those major traumatic incidents. Sometimes it’s just for advice, or for guidance.
“Sometimes it’s for, ‘hey, where do I go to get information about this? You know what? Call the centre because everybody’s there.”
On May 16 the CACAC was the centrepiece of the official grand opening of the new $29-million, three-storey Sheldon Kennedy Centre of Excellence on the campus at Red Deer Polytechnic.
The CACAC occupies the entire third floor of the 69,000 square foot facility.
The agency is joined by its strategic partners, which include Alberta Health Services, Red Deer Polytechnic, RCMP, and provincial justice system officials.
The centre is being hailed as the first of its kind in North America.
Innisfail RCMP Staff Sgt. Ian Ihme played a key role in the early development of the centre when he was with Red Deer RCMP’s General Investigation Section.
Ihme was assigned to work with leading business people who desperately wanted to find a solution to a rash of suicides that jolted the city; a trio of young men and Lindsey More, a popular outgoing 22-year-old who tragically took her own life on Sept. 20, 2015.
“Lindsey knew them,” said her father Rick, now a CACAC board member, of the other suicides. “At (her) funeral, and there was over 1,000 people there, we were pretty stunned about that, for sure.
“There were business people there, kind of shaking their heads and going, ‘we’ve got to do something. This has got to stop.”
Ihme worked with a coalition group that ultimately grew to about 20 members. The group included Rick More; Mark Jones, future and current CACAC CEO, future board chair Terry Loewen, and Duane Sokalski, of JEDCO Energy Services who co-chaired the centre’s capital fundraising committee with Brad Dufresne of The Phone Experts Communications.
His roles were to assist with the policing side of the project and help bring in important players from essential government organizations.
“Eventually my role just morphed into just overseeing all the policing aspects that were happening at the child advocacy centre,” said Ihme, who continued in that role up until his transfer to Innisfail in 2022. “I ended up getting a corporal and a constable, and a lot of my roles passed on to them.”
And now that Ihme is fully entrenched in Innisfail as the detachment commander he looks at the completed Sheldon Kennedy Centre of Excellence, with its new 23,000 square foot space for the state-of-the-art Central Alberta Child Advocacy Centre, as a resource that has changed the way “we as a society are able to respond to child abuse.
“Before places like the centre existed the police would have an investigation, children's services would have an investigation, and maybe there was a mental health therapist and some victim services,” said Ihme. “But now everything's all one big wraparound service.
“The big part of it is that now Innisfail, being so close to Red Deer, has access for their children and really for the whole rural community.”
Rural Central Alberta applauds
On May 1, Olds celebrated the groundbreaking for Kirsten’s Place, a first-ever emergency shelter for individuals and families fleeing domestic violence in Mountain View County and the urban centres within and around it.
The new facility, which will cost more than $1 million when completed, is named in tribute to Kirsten Gardner, who was murdered during a horrific incident of domestic violence in Bowden in March 2021. Her killer, Ross Arran McInnes, pleaded guilty on May 13 in Calgary's Court of King's Bench to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with 15 years of parole ineligibility.
The planned two-storey, 1,350-square foot shelter with a maximum capacity for 30 people is a 15-year long project by the Mountain View Emergency Shelter Society (MVESS).
When the shelter is completed by the end of 2024 victims will no longer have to be referred to shelters elsewhere in the province - including in Red Deer and Rocky Mountain House.
While the new facility’s mandate is not specifically designed nor programmed for abused children or youth, it has an all-inclusive policy.
“We take anybody that is a victim of violence,” said MVESS president Joe Carignan, a retired RCMP police officer whose shelter will accommodate victims, adults and/or children, for up to 28 days.
Tara McDonald, the MVESS outreach coordinator, said if there is suspicion of a case of child abuse there is a protocol to follow.
“We are bound by confidentiality. However, there's three disclosures we will break confidentiality over and that is; one, self-harm, two is harm to anyone else, and three is any form of harm to a minor,” said McDonald. “If any of that is disclosed in the intake process, or during our time with a client, then we have to break our confidentiality. We have to report that.”
Carignan pointed out that when his office refers a client to an agency, that service, either the RCMP or FCSS, then decides the resources to be used.
“If we have a child attacked or you're assaulted then the police decide, and I know some of the children from here have gone to the (Luna Child and Youth Advocacy Centre) in Calgary,” said Carignan. “But now that one's opening up in Red Deer that may change again.”
Carignan and McDonald both agree the closer proximity of Red Deer’s new child advocacy centre to their community will give young victims a promising measure of hope.
“We'll definitely have a look at the Red Deer centre because I'd like to know what benefit or what they can help us with because it's ongoing all the time,” said Carignan. “Any new resources are actually a benefit to us.”
NEXT: Part 3: Lindsey’s ultimate landing is right on target
