Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members of the committee.
My name is Bob Hassel, and I'm the chief executive officer of the Zebra Child Protection Centre in Edmonton, Alberta. I'm fairly new to this role, having just taken over about a month ago. I'd like to thank you very much for allowing me to speak to you about the centre and about the very important issue of violence against indigenous women.
I thought it would be important to start with a brief history of our child advocacy centre, what we do and what we represent. Before our centre opened in 2002—we were the first centre of this type in Canada—a child who disclosed any type of physical or sexual abuse was treated the same way as an adult. They went into a police facility, and quite often they had to tell their tragic story of what happened to them numerous times before the case would even get going. Things were disjointed. Information was disjointed. There was great difficulty in building a case for justice.
That has changed. Thankfully, that has changed. Zebra, our centre, is away from a police facility. We're a stand-alone centre. We're in a place where a child can feel safe and protected. You probably can't see what's around me here, but everywhere in our room we have blankets, stuffed toys, etc., to make our children comfortable. They need to feel strong comfort when they come into our centre.
We also are a multidisciplinary team. We work with a community of professionals within this centre. We have the Edmonton Police Service, Alberta children's services, crown prosecutors, and a child-at-risk response team, which has social workers and police constables working together for that first intervention. We have professionals who do medical and trauma screening and we have volunteer advocates.
Our program provides a continuum of support to children and their non-offending caregivers through the entirety of the investigative and judicial processes. We create individualized support plans for appropriate community referrals and connections that are in the best interest of both the child and the family.
We also recognize that no one agency or profession alone is fully equipped to prioritize the well-being of an abused child and balance community needs. The shared efforts of several organizations will yield the best results.
Discovering the truth behind suspicions and allegations of child abuse is a time-consuming and complex task. Balancing the needs of the child with the needs of the justice system requires a special set of skills and knowledge, as well as sensitivity. We're fortunate that our collaborative approach creates a network of support that lends strength to the child during the entire investigative process, and also lends strength to law enforcement and the legal agencies behind it.
We sincerely believe this is a best practice, a leading practice. I believe there are now 26 child advocacy centres across Canada. I know that Calgary Police Service recently partnered and opened one up within the last year as well.
On our team we have child advocate volunteers. We have approximately 40 volunteers who help the centre run. We have seven full-time Zebra staff, and that includes me. We have Alberta child and family services. They've supplied two investigators and six social workers. With law enforcement, we have twelve detectives and six constables, who, as I said before, work with our social workers, with supervisors attached to that—a staff sergeant and two sergeants.
Just this week I was told that the RCMP will be joining us in our centre, which is fantastic, for a trial period of one year. That will help us get to the rural environment and hopefully spread the type of programming we have so that we can get out into the smaller agencies and areas.
We have Alberta crown prosecutors, mental health and medical personnel, and two dogs that we use to help with the interviews.
What's important to note is that we all have our own mandates, but we work together with the common goal of making the centre an appropriate place for the kid, where the kid can tell their story as to what occurred. We start the day with a multidisciplinary meeting. We support the team, we support the families, and we support the non-offending caregivers as well by providing trauma counselling and whatever we can do to help them get through this. Then, of course, working with the court system, hopefully we'll ensure that we deal with the offenders in an appropriate way.
I think I'm getting close to my time here, but I have some statistics to share. In 2012 we had 669 clients come through our centre, and 21% of those clients self-identified as indigenous people. In 2013 we had 861, so a huge increase, and 14.5% of those clients self-identified as indigenous people.
I'd like to thank you for allowing me to give those opening remarks. I know that one thing you're looking at is front-line assistance and prevention. When I look at that, I have a few ideas and a few things I've written down, and I've also talked to people, about what we would like to see.
While I still have a little bit of time here, I'll say that one of the main things is that in policing, in crown prosecution and in child protection areas, we're always looking at extra resources and at whether we are using our resources effectively.
I'm so happy that the RCMP have joined this centre with us, because I really believe we're doing a bit of a disservice to our rural areas by not having the same collaborative, multidisciplinary team approach that we have in Calgary and Edmonton. It would be of real benefit if we could get this out to some of our community partners. I know this is starting. There are some smaller areas that are starting with centres such as ours, where they will be working with a multidisciplinary team approach. I think it would only benefit the children who we work with.
Thank you very much for allowing me the time to tell you about our centre and what we do.