MACA 2026 Annual Conference Overview
Massachusetts Children’s Alliance is excited to announce that our 16th Annual Statewide Conference, Healing, Hope, and Justice: An Advanced Conversation, will be held in person on May 7, 2026, at the Renaissance in Framingham, Massachusetts, from 8 AM – 4:30 PM. We expect that this year’s conference will attract over 300 attendees statewide and include the following professions: law enforcement officers (state and local), victim witness advocates, prosecutors, child forensic interviewers, mental health and medical providers, care and protection workers, probation, and Children’s Advocacy Center staff.
The conference is centered around a main goal: to bring accessible education on best practices and innovative methodologies for treating children who have experienced physical and sexual abuse to local law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates, Children’s Advocacy Centers, and multidisciplinary teams.
This year’s conference will feature keynote speaker Stephanie Block, Ph.D, a Professor in Applied Developmental Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She will summarize studies from an analysis of 500 child sexual abuse cases, including what impacts case trajectories from investigation through prosecution for both prosecutorial and non prosecutorial recommendations.
In addition to the keynote, the conference will offer workshop sessions on critical topics related to child abuse, including grooming, family-controlled and drug-facilitated trafficking, sentinel injuries in physical abuse cases, how to engage fathers in the CAC process, interviewing youth with problematic sexual behaviors, abusive head trauma, a collaborative approach to addressing sibling sexual abuse, and suicidality in CAC cases.
