Only two professionally painted pictures hang in Dwight Scroggins’ office, but the Buchanan County prosecutor’s walls hardly lack for artistic flair.

More than 40 children’s drawings cover the east wall. In one picture, Luigi navigates a veritable minefield of mushrooms, while in another, a yellow, orange and blue tugboat chugs along under partly cloudy skies as a shark tags along for the ride. Sheriffs, dragons, leprechauns, chickens, puppies, kittens and even Jesus vie for face time on the whimsical wall.

“There is a story with every drawing that’s up there,” Mr. Scroggins says.

But the stories behind the bright crayon strokes betray a much darker, and less innocent, picture of childhood. Each artist is a sexual abuse victim, coloring his or her way though counseling. It’s a therapeutic exercise meant to help children open up to prosecutors during the disclosure process that Mr. Scroggins adopted about 15 years ago.

And these days, there is no shortage of artwork.

In 1999, the Northwest Missouri Children’s Advocacy Center, which serves nine counties, interviewed 108 children who said they were sexually abused. Last year, that number was 226, and through Sept. 24 of this year, the center interviewed 173 kids, on pace for about 230 to 235 in 2009.

Those figures mark some measure of success for the people who fight against and deal with sexual abuse every day in Northwest Missouri. But they’re also a grim reminder that the problem is outpacing the resources to combat it.

National studies estimate that one in four women and one in six men are sexually abused at some point in their lives. The advocacy center and prosecutor’s office, along with local law enforcement, spent the past decade and a half educating themselves and the public about sex abuse and increasing their efforts to track down and report the crimes.

Put another way, they always knew far more people suffered abuse than disclosed or reported it. It was a matter of educating the community to recognize abuse and then respond.

As the St. Joseph Police Department, Buchanan County Sheriff’s Department and prosecutor’s office started training people to specialize in this area, advocates expected the number of reports to increase.

“There is more reporting because people are more aware of it than they used to be 10 years ago,” says Joyce Estes, the director of the advocacy center.

But local observers believe the spike in numbers during the middle-to-late part of the current decade also reflects an increase in the actual abuse as well.

In the Internet age, it’s easy to place the blame on Web predators prowling social networking sites such as Facebook and the proliferation of child pornography. And that’s certainly a small part of the spike, local experts say.

Ms. Estes notes that people who view child porn are more likely to abuse children as well. The images can be a sort of gateway drug. And the online pedophiles highlighted by Dateline’s show “To Catch A Predator” certainly lurk in society.

But the fact remains that most children are abused by someone they know. Mr. Scroggins and Ms. Estes attribute much of the increase to a breakdown of the nuclear family.

“There are more single mothers. There are more in-and-out boyfriends,” Ms. Estes said. “There are more relationships, and they seem to get into these relationships sooner.”

Essentially, it’s just a matter of probability. The more people that parents expose their children to, the greater chance one of those individuals will be a potential abuser. And with a higher percentage of single, working mothers entrusting their children’s care to others, the trend shows little sign of abating.

“It’s simply that children are exposed to more people who have the potential to be an abuser than they were ever exposed in the first 200 years of our country’s history,” Mr. Scroggins said. “That has continued to increase. There is no reason to think that one of the negative outcomes of that won’t be an ever-increasing number of children (being abused).”

To this point, Buchanan County’s efforts to prevent and treat child abuse have grown with the problem. The advocacy center opened its doors in 1993 in the basement of the Noyes Home, then moved into its own facility on Woodbine Road in 2006. The center steadily added services during the past decade and now offers free, in-house counseling to children for as long as they need it, thanks to a full-time advocate and a full-time counselor.

And law enforcement, the prosecutor’s office, the juvenile system, the Children’s Division and the advocacy center also took on a more proactive approach as the resources become available. Beyond educating parents about the dangers their kids face, those groups also help sexual abuse victims cope. Abusers are more likely to have been abused themselves. So extensive counseling and other approaches can pay dividends in the long run by breaking the cycle of abuse.

“All of the easy things that can be done have been done,” said Mr. Scroggins, noting the improvement in training and communication among the various groups working on the issue. “All of the second-level things that can be done have been done. We’re into third-level things, trying to get them done. That’s really where we hit the resource issue.”

They need additional resources from the national, state and local levels, but there’s not exactly extra money lying around. The county faces cutting $600,000 to $700,000 from its budget, while cuts are expected at the state level, as well. Mr. Scroggins said he feels fine about the county’s investment in protecting against and treating sexual abuse. Beyond that, he’s not so sure.

Even as Missouri trimmed its budget the past couple of years, it increased funding for its 17 advocacy centers. That probably won’t happen this year.

“To hold that (funding) current would probably be a victory at this point,” state Sen. Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, said. “It’s probably going to be very difficult to put more resources into those areas. That’s not to discount the need, by any stretch.”

Northwest Missouri’s advocacy center currently operates on a $198,000 annual budget. Ms. Estes, who estimates she spends 25 percent of her time searching and asking for money and grants, wants to add another counselor and advocate to deal with the increasing volume of victims.

She estimates it would cost another $70,000 annually. But Ms. Estes also is bracing for the possibility that cuts in funding would not only eliminate that goal, but force the center to cut its counseling to Northwest Missouri counties that don’t support the center.

The county’s final hope, then, lies with the community. Local unions and businesses donated materials and labor for the first advocacy center at the Noyes Home. The new center out of Woodbine received (and continues to) generous donations of goods and services. Annual fundraisers help cover for the areas where government funding falls short.

However, as generous as the community’s support has been thus far, sexual abuse also is not an issue the general public feels comfortable acknowledging or addressing.

“It’s a hard thing to think about,” Ms. Estes said. “It’s just horrible for people to think that someone is raping a 5-year-old.”

So how do you reconcile the need for community support amid a government funding crisis with the fact these are the types of crimes many people would just as soon not know about?

“Education,” said Ms. Estes, referring to the center’s outreach to parents. “Telling them what it is, telling them that none of us like it, but we have to deal with it and try to prevent it.

“Bottom line, there is no 5-year-old who can stop an adult male from doing whatever he wants. We need to educate the adults.”

R.J. Cooper can be reached

at rjcooper@npgco.com.