She doesn’t wear a blue uniform. No badge. No belt with a Glock or a taser. No cuffs. No radio. No body camera. No bulletproof vest. No blue lights on her car or SUV. She’s not a law enforcement professional, but she works with many of them in Anderson County. Her job has one focus – to serve, protect and save children.
Dana Weaver
This woman is Dana Weaver, the Executive Director of the Child Advocacy Center (CAC) of Anderson County. She does not fit the profile of the term “emergency first responder.” But for the people of Anderson County, she’s front and center to protect their children from a laundry list of abuses. And there are many. One Anderson County officer calls her “the bell cow we follow.”
Her work was brought to our attention by Sheriff Russell Barker, who leads the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO). He is a major fan of Weaver’s work and the job, cooperation, and support she and her non-profit agency do for Anderson County. She’s a hero, he said, so today she is this week’s Our Town Hero. “Our partnership with the CAC is essential in the mission to protect children,” Barker says. “Dana Weaver and the team there are a great and dedicated organization to work with.”
CAC’s vision sounds so simple, but it’s a tough job. Here is that vision: “That all children in Anderson County will be safe, families strengthened, victims healed from trauma, and offenders held accountable.”
In addition to ACSO, the CAC also partners with these organizations and agencies:
- Clinton Police Dept.
- Norris Police Dept.
- Oliver Springs Police Dept.
- Oak Ridge Police Dept.
- Rocky Top Police Dept.
- Anderson County District Attorney General’s Office
- Tennessee Dept. of Children’s Services
- Anderson County Juvenile Court
- Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital (two doctors)
- Next Step Behavioral Health
- Brave Bloom Counseling
“It is a truly collaborative team effort and we all work well together to protect our children. Child abuse happens in many ways in our communities. My biggest commitment is strengthening the bonds between everyone on our team,” Weaver said.
On the second Wednesday morning of every month the Child Protective Investigative Team (CPIT) gathers at the CAC with Weaver running the meeting. They discuss the “docket” of cases. Each partnering agency has a representative there and they review the status of the cases.
To learn more about the CAC, here is the LINK to its website: https://www.childadvocacycenter.net
Let’s meet Weaver. She’s 48, a native New Yorker, born on Long Island. She moved here in 2013 from Rensselaer, NY, near Albany and east of the Hudson River. She earned a Bachelor’s in Social Work from Siena University. She joined CAC in 2014 as a Forensics Interviewer and has eventually moved up to become CAC’s leader. Before coming to East Tennessee, she worked for 12 years as Rensselaer County Probation Officer. Her experiences there have helped her here.
With no deep background in child abuse, she was surprised when she relocated to Anderson County. “When I interviewed at CAC, I didn’t realize there was so much child abuse and sex crimes involving children going on here, and I knew then I’d found my place,” she says. She began taking forensic classes, and the basic training was 40 hours. “Beyond that, I had online training, being observed during an interview with children, and monitored for a month. It was a three- to four-month process.”
Today, Kayla Robson is the agency’s full-time Forensic Interviewer, and Weaver backs her up based on the caseload. Lisa Nance is CAC’s Victims’ Advocate after working 20 years with Knox County in that role. The center averages between 180 and 225 interviews annually. To date in 2026, they have already done 70 interviews.
Summertime, she says, is their slowest time since schools are out with referrals from schools. “Schools are the eyes and ears about what’s going on with the kids. The teachers and others at the schools know the signs and report what they are told,” she said. “They can talk to school resource officers, therapists, and law enforcement.”
The victims they deal with and help are children from 3 years old to 18 who can be abused in many different ways. Take a look at how they can be abused:
- Physical abuses of varying degrees and methods
- Sexual abuse
- Shaken Baby Syndrome
- Child neglect/maltreatment (denial of basic needs)
- Bullying
- Emotional abuse
- Child trafficking
- Commercial sexual exploitation
- Institutional abuse (abuse or neglect in any facility for children, including, but not limited to, group homes, residential, public or private schools, hospitals, detention and treatment facilities, family foster care homes, group day care centers, churches and family day care homes).
- Online abuse
“Commercial sexual exploitation” caught my eye. When asked, “What exactly is that?”– she explained it.
“We have parents who struggle with money who pay rent to their landlords. Some of them let the landlords use their children for sex for a discount on their monthly rental payments. It happens, not a lot, but it happens. It’s known as familial trafficking.”
That last area of abuse listed is “Online Abuse,” and she says that’s a growing issue for everyone involved in working to protect children.
“Yes, kids are being abused on social media. So much happens online that parents have no idea about. We had a case where children 5 and 6 years old are taking naked pictures of themselves and actually sending them to people they don’t know,” she says. “On apps (applications) like Snapchat and Discord these unknown adults can use this to track them, where they live and their schools. The kids have access to phones and nobody’s paying attention. These people are manipulative and will even threaten the children with blackmail, as in if you don’t do this for me or I’ll put your pictures everywhere on the Internet. And once your image is out there, it’s there. The kids don’t understand the implications.”
The CAC team provides a wide spectrum of services. They interview the children, do forensic evaluations, provide medical examinations, handle counseling that may include a mental health workup, and work with DCS on housing needs if necessary.
Weaver says she works with the ACSO most of the time “because they cover the largest area of the county and handle the largest caseload too.”
Her primary ACSO contacts are Det. Lt. James Crowley and Det. Chris Luethge, a 10-year veteran who works full-time on child sexual abuse investigations. Crowley is a Clinton native with 31 years under his law enforcement belt. He’s 55 and says they have seen a real increase in these cases in the last five to 10 years, especially in sex trafficking. When the CAC interviews the child, an officer or detective from ASCO or the agency involved watches the interview as it is happening on closed-circuit TV.
Crowley makes no bones about the difficulty of working these cases. “It is hard. We are all human and have compassion for the kids.” He went on to describe an example of a tough case. “It’s hard to work cases like this one when the parents traffic their kids for drug money, and a mother takes a daughter to a truckstop here or in another county for sex. We have children, too. It’s hard on us at times.”
And he added this: “…These crimes are incomprehensible for most people. It’s happening right here in your backyard. But lots of people do not want to know about it.”
In her job, Weaver has to be the one to know about the cases that come their way. She works hard not to take it all home with her. “It’s a different world for sure, but I deal with it by getting outside with my boys, Wilson and Rigby (her two English Bulldogs). We play in the park and hike some. And I have to have a sense of humor, and I do, or this would kill me, and the stress would be major. I’d really struggle if I did take it home.”
Tom King has been the editor of newspapers in Texas and California, and also worked in Tennessee and Georgia. If you have someone you think we should consider featuring, please email Tom at the link with his name or text him at 865-659-3562.
Aubrey’s Restaurants sponsors Our Town Hero.
