● You may think you know all about the horrors inflicted on children and families by some “child abuse pediatricians” – but these extraordinary stories from ProPublica add all sorts of insights, including how, in one state, a foster-care panic helped start the problems. And here’s the inevitable NCCPR Blog post discussing the implications.
● A remarkable story of bravery from The Imprint: Horribly abused in a notorious New York State institution, she worked up the courage to seek justice – in her 80s. She’s able to try thanks to the extension of the statute of limitations for such crimes. (Those are the same laws that have left private agencies trying to pressure states into either making them virtually immune or giving them taxpayer bailouts. Unfortunately, in California, they got their bailout.)
● The Reason Foundation is proposing model legislation concerning child welfare and substeance use. Provisions of their proposal include:
requiring informed consent for drug testing, prohibiting automatic reporting [to child protective services or law enforcement] based on positive tests alone, and ensuring that substance use during pregnancy is not treated as grounds for criminal charges or automatic family separation.
Here’s why:
This punitive approach to mothers struggling with substance use disorders has backfired spectacularly. States that criminalize maternal substance use see 41% higher rates of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome—where infants experience drug withdrawal—and worse health outcomes for both mothers and infants. Why? Because fear pushes pregnant people away from care and proper management of their substance use, putting both mother and child at extreme risk.
States that offer voluntary treatment without the threat of legal punishment, by contrast, see higher engagement in treatment, better recovery outcomes, and healthier births. ...
● Washington Post columnist Leana Wen writes about medical-legal partnerships – when the specialist a child needs most is a lawyer. Some examples:
In large multiunit apartments, a dozen or more children could be suffering asthma exacerbations from the same environmental trigger. “The answer isn’t to give more medications to one kid,” [Dr. Robert] Kahn said. “It’s to make sure that the property owner is addressing the fundamental issues of roof leakage and mold.”
He cited other cases: A child with multiple medical conditions was living in a home without a refrigerator or working air conditioner. So a legal advocate filed a complaint with the city that pressured the landlord to fix those problems.
Though the column cites multiple benefits from these
programs it doesn’t mention one of the most important: It helps doctors resist
the temptation to confuse the poverty with neglect and call the family police.
● Thanks, CBS12 West Palm Beach, for an unflinching look at child abuse horrors that delves into the real reasons such cases are missed, including NCCPR’s perspective, and offers real solutions. The story also illustrates how the horror stories go in all directions. Speaking of which …
In this week’s
edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions:
From The Boston Globe:
A New Hampshire
woman who sued her adoptive parents for abuse she suffered as a child was
granted $29.6 million in damages by a New Hampshire Superior Court judge on
Tuesday, an award her attorney called one of the largest ever in New Hampshire.
…
