“I need support.”
They said it straight. As if demanding some debt.
Alison Albright hears this often—too often—right after a child walks into a courtroom and names the people who harmed him. Working as a social worker in Toronto, she sits with victims as young as three as they endure the cold, procedural gaze of the legal system.
Most of the time she is in the Supreme Court and the Ontario Court of Justice, sitting shoulder to shoulder with them as they testify. But the overall image is always compelling: young people answering questions they are never asked, in rooms meant for adults, with rules that resemble tests. They are told to speak clearly. To be precise. Repeat the worst moments again. Sometimes the person they are talking about is sitting just a few feet away from them.
Albright knows how easily court questioning can twist the truth for a child. She witnesses young people freeze mid-sentence, appear inconsistent, or shut down under the weight of cross-examination. “When you are interrogated in such a way that you feel like the most intimate details of your life are being examined, it is excruciating,” she says. “You have trauma from the abuse you suffered, as well as trauma from the lawsuit.”
And often, after all these unflinching testimonies, the worst parts of her work are not the facts they convey, but the requests they often make afterwards, intertwined with the answer she is forced to give.
“I’m so sorry,” she had to say in those moments after testifying. There is no post-trial support for young people.
Albright's role was limited to providing support during the trial itself; ongoing therapeutic care or follow-up care after the end of the study is not part of her formal responsibilities.
Realizing this gap, Albright began looking for another program, but it all pointed to the same empty space. Responsibility for providing services to victims is shared among governments, and counseling options vary. Reports from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest non-profit anti-sexual violence organization in the United States, and Victim Services Ontario make it abundantly clear that the systems put in place to prepare children for criminal justice are designed to keep them in crisis. But for the long, quiet work of what comes next, the line is mostly silent.
To Albright's knowledge, no formal therapy program in Canada—or anywhere else in North America—has ever been specifically aimed at helping children and youth recover after the courtroom doors have closed. “There was never a moment when we all said together: Oh wait a second. Should we finish? Is there anything else to do?” says Albright. But now a new program is trying to answer that very question – and offer something that many children have been told doesn't exist.
Tthe justice system has always been know what to do with the accused. They track arrests, tally charges, and issue convictions. Concern for survivors has rarely been factored into this scheme – in Canada, thousands of children and young people take to courtrooms telling stories too difficult for their age. Even well-intentioned reforms tend to focus on due process, efficiency, and reducing prison populations rather than on restoration. “When the trial is over, everyone involved… that's no longer their role. So, the crown attorney, the police officers… once the trial is over, they've done their job,” Albright says.
In the 2021/22 fiscal year, 10,665 young Canadian victims sought help from child and youth advocacy centers—facilities like Luna in Calgary that provide trauma-informed forensic interviews and trial preparation. Across the border, in the United States, nearly 1,000 children's advocacy centers served more than 380,000 children in 2023. However, as in Canada, there are no dedicated post-testimony healing programs, leaving post-trial therapeutic services scattered and often inaccessible.
Governments have made significant investments in youth mental health. In early 2024, Ottawa pledged more than half a million dollars over five years to Halifax's SeaStar Centre, funding trauma-informed services for child victims of crime for more than five years, but when it comes to the quiet consequences of testifying, long-term support continues to lag.
The lack of support is proof of a deeper truth: There has always been a known gap between the way a decades-old institution focuses its resources on perpetrators rather than on survivors themselves.
“We're dealing with very large and complex systems that are built on some concept of justice that may not be consistent with what people actually go through as victims,” says Monique St. Germain, general counsel at the Canadian Center for Children's Advocacy. “Even if you get a conviction, it doesn't mean it's over. There may have been trauma in the courtroom.”
Her observation highlights a deeper flaw: Canada's justice system was developed before a trauma-informed approach, an approach that recognizes how trauma affects a person's ability to function or remember events, entered the lexicon. Its architecture still treats survivors primarily as witnesses—the focus is on the accused and the state. Nowhere does this seem more noticeable than the pressure of being considered by some to be the “ideal” survivor.
In one case, St. Germain recalls, a teenage girl was hesitant to file an impact statement—not because she had nothing to say, but because she didn't think her letter would be “good enough” for the judge. The case involved a sex crime and the girl had not attended school since primary school, making the process frightening. Survivors must write down their experiences, present them, and then face the scrutiny of the Crown and defense, who sometimes fight over what is said, forcing survivors to censor themselves. “That’s asking too much from a young man,” adds St. Germain.
“Even a seasoned adult professional under cross-examination is under enormous stress at this point,” says St. Germain. “Put yourself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old, trying to convey terrible, humiliating moments, and then being asked why you did this or didn’t do that.”
Robert Tom Muller, a professor and psychologist in the Department of Psychology at York University and an expert in childhood trauma therapy, warns that forensic testing is “distorting.” He describes what happens in the courtroom as “a kind of gaslighting.” “They are often told, ‘No, that didn’t happen,’ even though they physically experienced it.” He adds that memories triggered by coming face-to-face with an abuser can manifest as “strange” behavior – such as flat affect, fidgeting or an inability to make eye contact – which judges may misinterpret as evasive or untrustworthy, adding to the sense of betrayal children feel in court.
Muller goes further and explains that for many survivors, the trial “creates a sense of reality being taken away from them, a feeling of incredible despair about the world, a deep sense of injustice and disappointment.”
Tby the second half of 2024, Albright brought her concerns to the attention of Carly Kalish, CEO of Victim Services Toronto. The conversation was not so much a revelation as a confirmation.
“I just didn’t know there was nothing,” says Kalish, who has also long advocated for trauma-informed care through government advocacy, speaking before the Ontario Legislature in 2024 in support of Bill 188, the Supporting Children's Futures Act, legislation aimed at improving trauma-informed supports for vulnerable children and youth.
“When [Alison] I discovered a gap and was immediately sold.” Together they agreed that if such services did not already exist, they would create them themselves.
Their shared commitment led to the creation of Post Court Pathways, a new program specifically designed to support young people aged three to twenty-five after they have given evidence in court. Where traditional victim services end with referrals to other community agencies or mental health services, follow-up care is built on the serious trauma of testimony: the bruises that result from cross-examination, the quiet alienation that can subside after you've told a room full of strangers what happened to you. This is not a general consultation. It is a service that revolves around the legal process itself, changing shape as research deepens and young people identify what they still need.
With more than $525,000 in fundraising, Post Court Pathways now has a chance to become something lasting, although it will require ongoing funding to maintain the program. His initial project includes a literature review of best practices in childhood trauma care, consultation with legal and psychological experts, and an advisory group made up of young people who have experienced the system themselves. Although there is no fixed launch date yet, as the research and development phase is still ongoing, Post Court Pathways will be seeking additional support from private donors and potential government funding. Once completed, it will be one of the first of its kind: a model created by those who lived it and designed to grow with them.
Trauma-informed therapy certainly exists. But most models are designed for current or past wounds, not the sudden, high-stakes pressure of having to testify in court. Clinicians like Mueller consistently note that the courtroom comes with its own cocktail of stress—legal, emotional, social—that lingers long after the gavel has dropped. Just as victims of domestic violence rely on lawyers who sense the rhythms of a particular type of violence, young witnesses need professionals who truly understand the unique dangers in the courtroom and how those dangers reverberate just hours or days later.
“You can't just send someone to just any trauma surgeon,” Kalish adds, reflecting, among other things, recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics. “You have to send someone to an expert who has the expertise to understand this particular experience of testifying and going through this process.”
In other words, true healing is not about connecting someone to another system; it's about creating it with their interests in mind.
Julieta Caballero is the designer of The Walrus.
