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What happens when a youth walks through one door and finds every person they need already there.
CYACC hired Kahani Pictures to make a film about the model itself. What happens when a youth walks through one door and finds every person they need already there. Erika Brown put it plainly at the kick-off: “We're trying to tell the model and what this looks like through various stories, from various perspectives.”
Karen Orser, who co-chairs CYACC and runs Luna in Calgary, named the real challenge. The film had to work for every CYAC in the country, not just the ones we talked to. She said she wanted people to watch it and think: “Yes. This explains it. I want my police chief to see this.”
It launches in October 2026 for Child Abuse Prevention Month. The primary audience is the general public, but the film also needs to move donors, institutional partners, and the people in government who decide where money goes. Our recommendation is that it earns all of those viewers by starting with one person and letting the scale of the problem arrive around her.
Between January and June 2026 we held ten conversations across the CYACC network: executive directors, frontline advocates, a child maltreatment pediatrician, a decolonization educator at UBC, the woman who built and now leads the BC provincial network, and one sixteen-year-old who was abused at six, told nobody for eight years, and then walked into a centre and decided she was going to do something big with that place.
Full transcripts are linked below. The governing team should read them before any creative decisions are made.
Every person we spoke to described the same before-and-after without being prompted. The specific details changed depending on where they work. The picture did not.
Before CYACs: a child reports abuse and gets sent to the police station, then the hospital, then a social worker, then a counsellor. Each one in a different building, often weeks apart, sometimes without any way to get there. A lot of families give up. Some children carry the secret for years instead. The case falls apart. The child grows up with unresolved trauma and the system acts surprised.
After the CYAC model: everyone comes to the child. One building. One familiar space. The officer who will interview that child is already there in plain clothes. The nurse is there. The advocate who will walk beside that family for the full length of a court process is there on day one. The child shares their experience once, to people who were ready for them when they walked through the door.
It is unfair to ask a family to navigate a system that is not client-centred in any stretch of the imagination. So we realised: the family comes in, and we are all here waiting for them. The family does not know the police officer does not work here. They come in and all those people are right here.Katina Feggos, Kit's Place CYAC, Saint John NBView transcript
The before-and-after is not only about the buildings a family is sent between. It is also about what used to happen inside them. The one doctor we spoke to described the old way from the inside. A child brought to a busy emergency department in the middle of the night, examined while other children scream and codes go off, questioned by a physician who has no choice but to ask what happened. She does not compare the old system and the new one as apples to oranges. She calls it apples to horribly processed foods.
In the old system, that child would have a medical evaluation, often in the middle of the night, in a very busy emergency department where you can hear other children screaming and codes happening. It was a loud, un-trauma-safe environment that no one should ever have to be in after a sexual assault.Dr. Megan Cooney, Toba Centre, Winnipeg MBView transcript
The model is usually described as the kinder option. More families consent to a full forensic exam at her centre than ever did in the old system, because they are given control first. When a child is unsure, the centre simply invites them to look around with no expectations, this kindness-first approach actually leads to more consent for forensic examination than the traditional system.
This is evidence-informed best practice.
More people consent to full forensic exams at Toba Centre than in the old system. When you treat people with kindness and give them control, they engage more. It is not intuitive, but it is real.Dr. Megan Cooney, Toba Centre
Leah Zille put it plainly: children are being asked to fit into boxes that the government designed, and those boxes were not designed for children. The CYAC model does not just improve the experience. It inverts the assumption. The child is the fixed point. Everything else moves around them.
Leah has a board member who spent decades in policing. He ran the sex crimes unit at VPD and eventually became a police chief. For years he held one specific file as his greatest success. His team did everything right. They worked night and day to build the case. They convicted the man who had hurt a young girl. There was a cheer in the department the day it happened. Then a couple of years ago, during a homeless encampment clearance, he saw that same woman on a screen. She was living rough. She had never gotten the support she needed to heal. The conviction was a success. Her life was not.
We heard the same pattern from the other end. The clinician who described the emergency room also spent time as the doctor at Manitoba's youth detention centre while doing child-abuse work. Most of the young people she saw locked up had started as abused children no one reached in time. She says this is something the public needs to understand. The point is never that survivors become offenders, because most do not. The point is that a system that fails a hurt child keeps paying for it for decades.
Unresolved childhood trauma is at the root of the majority of the issues we are seeing in society today. We know more than we have ever known. We know what works. Yet things seem to be worse than they have ever been. We have the model. Why does not every child have access to it?Leah Zille, Treehouse CYAC, Vancouver BCView transcript
Nobody said this loudly. But almost everyone said it in some form. Manitoba makes the scale concrete. One centre serves the entire province, plus parts of Ontario and a region of Nunavut, and most of the children it sees are Indigenous. Families sometimes travel most of a day to reach it. The clinician there ties the urgency of the model directly to that history.
The film needs to put that question in front of the audience. Not as an accusation. As something Canadians have not been asked to sit with before.
One in three children in Canada will experience abuse. When you are sitting in a room full of girls, a lot of them went through something. And you would never know.Valeria Long, Barrie CYAC
It is not the stranger down the street. Most of the time it is someone that child is familiar with and loves. People say: that is not true. Yeah, it really is.Jacqueline Aitken Kish, Caribou Centre
Three themes came up across every conversation. The film should not state them. It should earn them.
Every choice that makes a CYAC different exists because someone asked: what would this look like if the child came first? The warm room. The plain-clothes officer. The dog at the door. One interview. A familiar room for testimony. An advocate who stays for the whole journey. The contrast with the old system is not just practical. It is a question about what we believe children deserve. That is the difference between a video about services and a film about values.
Leah articulated this most clearly and it came up in every conversation. The police officer who celebrated a conviction and then found the same woman in a homeless encampment twenty-five years later. The child who was abused and grew into a young person no one reached in time. The family who gave up navigating three different buildings. The child who carried a secret for eight years because the system made disclosure too hard. The CYAC model does not just help individuals. It interrupts a cycle that costs the country far more than the centres ever would.
Families leaving for ice cream after their first visit. A little boy in foster care who lit up when he heard his foster brother was going to Treehouse, because he hoped he would get to meet Detective Corey. A girl who called years later to say she still slept with the handmade quilt they gave her. Valeria being certain on her first visit that she was going to make a big impact there. The film needs hope in it as a documented fact.
When I walked in, I felt like it was not going to be the only time I walked in here. I knew I would come back. And I felt like I would do something really big with this place. I did not know what. And now here we are.Valeria Long, Barrie CYAC, Ontario
Several people flagged specific words that need to be handled carefully. They reflect how CYACs treat the children in their care and how they want the work represented. Every writer and editor on this project should have this list in front of them.
Leah Zille was very clear: “I try not to use the word story. Story implies it could be made up. We hold belief for every child when they are here. That is what we are here to do.” This applies to all copy, scripts, and text on screen.
Leah again: “Sometimes more information is needed. I always shy away from that language. You hear it all the time.” The point is that they share it in a supported way. Not that they only ever say it once.
Valeria uses both, but the frame of the film is forward-looking. Tamara talks about Alisa as having “turned out to be such a remarkable young woman.” The language should follow that lead.
Leah said this directly: “It is not about the criminal justice system. It is about the healing that happens for the kids who come through.” Success is a child who wants to come back or family leaving with hope on their face, not a conviction.
Jacqueline at Caribou flagged this. Most abuse is done by someone the child knows. Any image or language that implies otherwise will get the truth wrong and the audience wrong.
National data is still in early stages and is likely lower than reality. Use the one-in-three figure for abuse broadly, note that it probably does not capture the full picture, and keep the sexual-abuse figure (closer to one in ten) separate from it so the two are never conflated on screen.
Dr. Cooney was clear that returning control to the child is part of the healing, because control is what abuse takes away. Children who are not comfortable with a genital exam are never made to have one. Any image or framing that puts the medical exam at the centre of the model gets the values wrong. Keep it off screen.
We are putting forward three concepts. They speak in different tones to achieve the same goal of convincing viewers why CYACs are imperative to the Canadian healthcare system.
This is the tone we are aiming for. Intimate and unscripted. The subject carries the narration in their own voice. The camera witnesses rather than constructs. Music holds space rather than tells you how to feel. What made Claire work was that she talked about terrible things without self-pity. Valeria has the same quality.
A documentary short film, five to six minutes, built around Valeria Long. She is sixteen, a youth ambassador at the Barrie CYAC in Ontario. She was abused at six and told no one for eight years. She already presents at schools and government events, so the film documents something she does in real life.
It opens as a portrait of a normal teenager getting ready for a presentation at her school. It looks like your typical homework. A poster board on the bedroom floor, hand-cut graphics, a glue stick, photos spread around her. But as the camera catches glimpses of the board, we start to see that the subject is child abuse, and the centres that respond to it.
We hear her voice before we see her face. She is rehearsing quietly under her breath, and in between the lines of her speech we catch the details of her own experience. “I was six when it happened. I waited eight years before I told anybody.”
She pins images of centres from across the country onto the board, her own research, pulled from everywhere. As the camera moves closer to read them, we begin to understand the system she is describing.
We catch her again at the mirror, working a line until it feels right. As she does, she thinks back to the first time she walked into the Barrie centre, and for a moment the film leaves her bedroom and takes us there. We move through warm, quiet rooms. A dog asleep in the afternoon light. A handmade quilt folded over a chair. A jacket on a hook where you would expect a uniform. Her voice stays with us the whole way. “I thought it was going to be a big building, serious police everywhere. It turned out to be a little house. There was a dog at the door named Beacon.”
Back in her room the board is nearly finished, and she remembers the thing that set all of this in motion. “The first time I walked in, I knew I'd be back. I knew I'd do something big with this place. I just didn't know what yet.”
By the time she carries that board into her school gymnasium she has been doing this for two years, and it shows. She is calm in front of a room of her peers, and for the first time we hear her clearly, speaking in the present, to people her own age. She tells them what a CYAC actually is, in her own words. A place where the doctor, the police, and child protection are already in the building, waiting, before the child arrives.
Then she lands the line she gave us on our first call, without being asked. “Access to a CYAC should be as normal as calling 911.” She lets it sit for a second. “But it isn't. And we need to fix that.”
We hold on her, and the room, and then the film cuts to the CYACC logo and the website.
This is the film that makes the case with information. The visual language is motion graphics and infographics. Numbers, maps, kinetic type, simple shapes in the CYACC palette. Nobody is drawn and nothing is acted out. Everything is told through information design.
It opens on the size of the problem and keeps the viewer in front of it. One in three children. A map of Canada with fifty dots where the centres are, and the long dark stretches where there are none. Manitoba as a single dot covering a whole province. The count climbing from twenty centres seven years ago to fifty now, with the gap to what is actually needed sitting right there on screen.
The argument runs as before and after, built in graphics. The old way is drawn as a maze of separate buildings a family has to cross on their own. The model is drawn as one room everyone already shares. Then comes the part most people do not expect, that when families are given control, more of them go through with the full process rather than fewer. That this is evidence-informed best practice, in CYACC's own words, and that most people, including the doctors being trained today, have never heard of it.
A single narrator carries it, written and produced by us from everything we learned, so the numbers always have a voice underneath them instead of standing alone. It closes on the ask.
This is the film that makes the case with a story you can draw. The visual language is warm, hand-illustrated animation, and where the data film informs, this one is built to make you feel something.
It follows one child through one day. We keep them ambiguous, an age and a face that could belong to anyone, so they stand in for every child who walks through a door like this. We see the old way first. The long drive, the bright loud hospital in the middle of the night, the feeling of being handed from one stranger to the next. Then the door. And behind it, everyone is already there, the dog, the warm room, the person who will stay through the whole thing. The child arrives once and is met.
Because it is drawn, it can go where a camera cannot. It can show the centres we will never film and the moments that should never be filmed, and it can hold the entire country in one style, from a small northern setup to a busy city centre, without ever leaving the studio. What we learned lives inside the journey instead of on text cards. The little girl who comes in just to meet the dog and stays to tell what happened. The child as the fixed point, with everyone else arranging themselves around her. The long drive into the city for families in a province with only one centre.