Child welfare in Pennsylvania: They’re getting ready to dial up the crazy again, part 1

            Every few years since the scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, the convicted child rapist, former Penn State football coach, former foster parent and former group home operator, Pennsylvania legislators churn out a new set of bad laws so they can then churn out press releases about how they’ve “cracked down on child abuse.”

            At least one statewide official, State Auditor Eugene DePasquale, has been quick to exploit the tragedy surrounding this former foster parent and group home operator to promote policies that are only likely to lead to more children needlessly placed in foster homes and group homes.  He also comes frighteningly close to trafficking in conspiracy theories.

            Now it looks likely to happen again.  This time the target is the bare minimum amount of due process that exists for families in which someone is wrongly labeled a child abuser, sometimes based on little more than a caseworker’s guess.

            A new report, from researchers affiliated with a group set up by Penn State to do penance for its role in the Sandusky scandal, is attacking the same minimal due process protections that DePasquale went after last year.  I don't doubt that the researchers have the best of intentions. But their bias is, literally, visible in the report itself.

The background

            As in most states, in Pennsylvania all it may take to be labeled a child abuser is for a caseworker to check a box on a form based on her or his belief that it is slightly more likely than not that the accused abused or neglected a child. 

In cases of abuse and what authorities deem severe neglect, that puts you in a statewide central register and can bar you from all sorts of jobs that involve coming anywhere near children. (Pennsylvania is unusual in that the statewide register doesn’t apply to all neglect cases.)  Being on the blacklist bars you from jobs ranging from teacher, to crossing guard, to school lunch aide, to clerk in a children’s bookstore. It also bars those blacklisted from working in home health care.  And, though not required by law, some employers even bar the blacklisted form working with the elderly.

Many of these are low-wage jobs – first-step-out-of-poverty-jobs. So, as with everything else in child welfare, being wrongly blacklisted does the most harm to poor families. The stress of the listing and potential job loss itself increases the harm to children. The harm worsens if the parent on the blacklist can’t get a job, making it more likely the family will be plunged into poverty that is confused with neglect.

            And, of course, being listed in the registry means the next time the same person is accused, it is that much more likely the children’s suffering will increase exponentially because the worker will be more likely to place those children, needlessly, in foster care.  After all, they were accused before so they must be guilty, right?

            “All too often, indicated reports are based on faulty or incomplete investigations, or on actions or omissions by parents or caretakers that simply do not meet the statutory definitions of child abuse,” writes Janet Ginzburg, a lawyer for Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.  She cites this example:

A woman and her ex-husband shared custody of their 18-month-old daughter. After spending the weekend at her dad's house, the girl was returned to her mother's home with a case of diaper rash.

The dad notified the mom of the rash and gave her a tube of ointment that he had been applying. The mom watched the rash for several days, applying the ointment as directed by the medication's instructions. When the rash did not go away, she took her daughter to the doctor, who found that the rash had become infected and reported the mother to the local child-welfare agency for child neglect.

The mom had done what almost every parent would have under the circumstances - she had treated the rash, watched it closely, and ultimately made the decision that it required medical attention. However, she was placed on the civil statewide Childline Abuse Registry and lost her job as a home health aide. Until she was able to get a hearing and clear her name - a process that can take as long as a year - she was unable to get another job in the profession she had been trained in.

            Note that the mother did not get a hearing before she was blacklisted; she had to fight her way out afterwards.  As Ginzburg explains:

There is no hearing, no opportunity to present evidence. A caseworker checks off a box, and an individual is placed on the registry effectively for life - unless this person successfully appeals within a very short deadline.

            An appeal is the only way out.  That way already is foreclosed in many cases.  And in the latest example of ratcheting up the crazy, it looks like DePasquale and others are gearing up for an effort to make that one way even harder.

Pennsylvania’s weird system 

In Pennsylvania, the child abuse hotline and the central register are run by the state, but almost everything else is the responsibility of individual counties.  That’s unusual, but not unique. New York, for example, operates the same way.

            But here’s what is unique about Pennsylvania: Unlike every other state, Pennsylvania classifies abuse and what they deem the most serious cases of neglect as “child protective services” (CPS).  But other neglect cases are classified as “general protective services” (GPS).  In both types of case, a report can lead to an intrusive, coercive investigation and in both types of case that investigation can lead to consigning the children to the chaos of foster care. 

            The statewide central register applies only to CPS cases.  There is no statewide register for GPS cases – but counties still keep these records. They are not checked by employers, but they are used by county child welfare agencies in assessing future reports alleging abuse or neglect.  (This is especially dangerous in Allegheny County, where they’ve created an Orwellian automated predictive analytics algorithm that relies heavily on these data.)

            This makes it especially important that the accused have a chance to correct the record, since the record can be no more than a caseworker’s guess.

           

But in GPS cases, because there is no statewide central register, there is no appeals mechanism at all.  The caseworker’s word is – almost literally – law.  The family has no recourse against this stigmatizing and stereotyping – and in Pittsburgh, no recourse against such a false report raising an arbitrary risk score that can haunt not only the parents, but their children for life.

            Needless to say that’s not what has people like DePasquale upset.  Nope. They’re upset with the minimal due process protections that exist in CPS cases.

            In these cases, one can seek administrative review from the same state agency that runs the statewide child abuse hotline. But of the 982 such cases they reviewed for which they reached a decision in 2018 they overturned exactly zero.

            Clearly one’s only hope is to take the case to a neutral arbiter, still a state agency but one outside the human services bureaucracy. In Pennsylvania it’s the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals.  Only 955 cases reached the BHA in 2018. They ruled on 545 cases that year.

            If that name – Bureau of Hearings and Appeals -- is vaguely familiar, it’s because that agency was the subject of a bizarre rant last year by Auditor General DePasquale.  As I noted on this blog last year:

DePasquale … claims that in hearing appeals, BHA upholds [county children and youth services agency] caseworker findings only four percent of the time.  As a result, he claims, “the system is potentially sending hundreds of children back into the homes where CYS caseworkers found they were being abused.”  Then he ratchets up the fear rhetoric with this:  “No child should ever have to go back into an abusive situation because bureaucrats have their heads buried in the sand.”

There are two problems with this: The four percent figure is contradicted by readily available data, and BHA decisions have no bearing on whether children are removed from or returned to their homes.

            BHA decisions apply only to whether someone stays on the state’s child abuse blacklist, nothing more.  Whether children are removed from the home and where they wind up is decided exclusively by county child protective services agencies and courts.  DePasquale held a news conference and went on his rant apparently unaware of this basic fact.

            But DePasquale went further.  Veering toward conspiracy theory territory, he even suggested that there is something nefarious in the agency’s name: Bureau of Hearings and Appeals.  The more likely explanation: It’s called the Bureau of Hearings and Appeals because it holds hearings and listens to appeals.

            DePasquale made all these bizarre claims during a news conference announcing an “investigation” into the BHA -- as opposed to doing it the old-fashioned way, in which one conducts the investigation first and then draws the conclusions.

            As for that claim that BHA upholds caseworker claims only four percent of the time, nobody outside DePasquale’s office knows where they got it.  What we do know is, it’s wrong.

            The state Department of Human Services claims that BHA overrules county child welfare agency findings 46 percent of the time.  But I don’t know where they came up with that number either.  In fact, in the relatively few cases that make it to the BHA, it appears that BHA reverses caseworker decisions about 70 percent of the time.  (When you count all cases that are appealed, both to BHA and administratively – where nothing gets overturned – the percentage drops to under 25 percent.)

            The statistic concerning the BHA can lead to two possible conclusions: 

            1. The BHA is made up of a bunch of biased and / or ignorant administrative judges who love coddling child abusers and hurting innocent children!

            Or:

            2. As soon as the accused, at long last, reaches an independent tribunal, it turns out the case was so flimsy and / or the investigation so slipshod that it isn’t even slightly more likely than not that abuse occurred. 

            Here are some reasons why Option 2 is more likely.

            ● Pennsylvania is not unique. In Kentucky between 56 and 66 percent of cases are overturned in a typical year. In New York and Illinois class-action lawsuits revealed that when people finally make it through the slow, cumbersome appeals process they win 75 percent of the time. (NCCPR’s vice president brought the New York suit.) 

            ● In Pennsylvania, the most serious cases never get appealed at all.  If the case results in a criminal conviction it usually can’t be appealed.  Of the rest, only parents with extraordinary determination can be heard before the BHA. That’s because there’s no right to counsel if you can’t afford a private lawyer.  You have to file your own appeal within a tight timeframe, go to Harrisburg and then you’re all alone against the might of the state.  In fact, as Ginzburg notes, you can’t even see the case file with the evidence against you.

            As Pittsburgh attorney Amanda Green Hawkins put it: “It’s like David taking on Goliath.”

● In North Carolina and Missouri state Supreme Courts found that putting someone in a registry first and then holding a hearing so stacks the deck that it’s unconstitutional. Several judges in Pennsylvania have   expressed similar qualms, quoting the Missouri decision with approval.

            ● As we noted last year, DePasquale has himself expressed alarm at the inexperience, overload, and high turnover among frontline caseworkers. Since these are precisely the conditions most likely to lead to errors in all directions, it’s no wonder the independent BHA finds error so often.

            But somehow I have a feeling that, when DePasquale gets around to issuing the report on the investigation for which he’s already drawn his conclusions, something reportedly expected in the summer, he’ll go with Option 1.

            And he already seems to be getting some support in a report that is biased on its face – specifically on page 13, where you’ll find this flow chart that purports to describe the appeals process. Take a close look and see if you can spot the bias. (Hint: It’s in the lower left quadrant).

            This new report doesn’t just discuss the issue of appeals. It’s a multi-front assault on due process. There's more about that in part two.

The New York Times on foster care as the new “Jane Crow” and some alarming data on New York’s foster care panic

A post to this blog on Wednesday discussed the foster-care panic in New York City and how David Hansell, the new commissioner of the EACS (Embattled Administration for Children’s Services), is making things worse.

On Friday The New York Times brilliantly brought to life the harm this kind of foster-care panic does to children, under the apt headline: “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow.’”

If you haven’t read it yet, please don’t keep reading this. Click the link instead and read the Times story.  You’ll thank me for the suggestion.  Then come back here for a discussion of the implications of the story and another report that came out this week. 

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Welcome back – and you’re welcome.

The Times story shouldn’t overshadow some other good journalism about New York City child welfare published last week. On Thursday, the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, which publishes Child Welfare Watch, issued a brief report that adds important additional context.

The report zeros-in on all the harm that a foster-care panic does over and above additional entries into care.

During the seven months after the death of Zymere Perkins, the number of investigations conducted by ACS increased by 20 percent.  But the number of families hauled into court skyrocketed by 64 percent.

Hauled into court is not always the same thing as placed in foster care. Rather it can be a way of coercing a family in a case where previously they would have been offered voluntary help. Or it can put the family under a microscope while requiring that they jump through a long list of hoops.

In the Times story, Hansell suggests that somehow this is a good thing, saying:

With increasing frequency over the past six months or so, the outcome of our involvement with family court has not been removal of children but court-ordered supervision, under which families are required to participate in services to address the risks that we’ve identified.

But as the Center for New York City Affairs report explains, this clogs up the entire child welfare system and sets off a cascade of other harms. Court hearings are delayed, and it takes longer to actually set up the hoops through which the families must jump. Where families really do need help, the help is delayed, so family problems can worsen.  The court delays, as well as new CYA bureaucratic procedures also are delaying when children are allowed to leave foster care and return home.

And, of course, caseloads for investigators are increasing, giving them less time to find children in real danger.

As Chris Gottlieb, co-director (with NCCPR’s president Martin Guggenheim) of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic put it:

There appears to be a culture of fear driving decision-making … There’s every reason to think that flooding the system with new cases means you’re giving less attention to the ones who should be getting more attention.

The Sandusky Rule

The other problem, of course, is the increase in entries themselves – and this is the one place where the Center’s analysis is incomplete.

The Center’s analysis says entries into foster care have increased by 20 percent – the same rate as investigations. So of course, ACS will rush to say: “Panic, what panic? We’re just taking more children because we’re finding more abuse!” 

But there are several problems with this reasoning.

First, the 20 percent figure covers the seven months from October, 2016, the first month after the death of Zymere Perkins set off the foster-care panic, until May 2017. But the Times found that in the more recent part of this time period, things have gotten worse.

The Times reported that in the first quarter of 2017 requests to tear apart families jumped by 40 percent.  And ACS’ latest data show that in May 2017 the number of children consigned to foster care was more than double the number in May 2016.

Even a 20 percent increase in entries is a significant setback. Not only would that result in more children taken than in the city’s 2016 fiscal year, but more than FY 2015 as well and almost as many as in FY 2014.  It would reverse a steady, careful decline in entries that was accompanied by improvements in key measures of child safety. (Detailed stats are on Page 19 of our full report on New York City child welfare).

But even were it true that entries into care were increasing at “only” the same rate as investigations, that’s still a sign of big trouble. That’s because of what should be called the Sandusky Rule.

During a foster-care panic, there is a rise in the proportion of b------t reports.  That’s because anyone and everyone is constantly encouraged to report anything and everything, so they do just that.  And, of course, “mandated reporters,” such as school personnel, who can be punished for failing to report, are even more scared than usual, so they’re even more prone to report cases they know are ridiculous.

Therefore, during a foster-care panic, the percentage of investigations that lead to removal should decrease.  If that percentage isn’t going down, then it’s likely that an even greater proportion of removals than usual are unnecessary.

I call this the Sandusky Rule because of what happened in Pennsylvania, after the legislature in that state passed a wave of absurd laws encouraging more reporting in the wake of the sexual abuse conviction of former foster parent and group home operator (and former Penn State football coach) Jerry Sandusky.

As in New York, in Pennsylvania individual counties run child welfare systems.  Philadelphia responded as New York City is responding now: a surge in foster care placements and the “What do you expect? there are more reports” excuse.

In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), on the other hand, the longtime director of the human services agency knew that a lot of the new cases would be absurd and demanded that his staff not panic. So there was no increase in foster care in Allegheny County.

So the next time ACS or another child protective services agency offers up the standard excuse about why foster care numbers are increasing during a foster-care panic, I hope someone will finally call b------t on it. 

Child abuse: What happens when the "mandated reporter" is - a reporter?

Amid all of the calls to turn anyone and everyone into a “mandated reporter” of anything and everything that might conceivably be considered “child abuse” there is one thing that the reporters writing news stories about these bills and, especially, the editorial writers endorsing them may not have considered:

What happens when the mandated reporter is – a reporter?

It didn’t occur to me either, until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed an executive order turning every employee of the University of Wisconsin System into a "mandated reporter" of child abuse.

My first full-time job after journalism school, nearly 35 years ago, was with Wisconsin Public Radio.  That made me an employee of the University of Wisconsin System.  The same is true for reporters at WUWM – the call letters stand for University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  There’s nothing particularly unusual about this. Around the country many public radio and television stations are run by colleges and universities.

            “Child abuse” means far more than, say, seeing an adult rape a child in a shower, one of the allegations in the case against former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky.  Under Wisconsin law, for example, mandated reporters must report when they have “reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected.”  Wisconsin defines neglect as “failure, refusal, or inability on the part of a caregiver, for reasons other than poverty, to provide necessary care, food, clothing, medical or dental care, or shelter so as to seriously endanger the physical health of the child.”

So what happens now, if say a Wisconsin Public Radio or WUWM reporter is doing a story about families living in poverty? A single mother, speaking on condition that her name not be used, says things sometimes get so desperate that when the sitter doesn't show she has to leave her seven-year-old home alone to go to work, or she'll be fired.

Is the reporter supposed to shut off his or her tape recorder and say: "Excuse me, as an employee of the University of Wisconsin System, I’m not sure if you’re poor enough to fit the exception in the statutory definition, so my promise to you of confidentiality is null and void.  I am now required to call the child abuse hotline and turn you in"? 

It's unlikely, but it really could happen.  Twenty-five years ago, during my first months at the Albany Times Union, I covered this story about two families living in dangerous housing.

Given the conditions in the building, one could make a case that any mandatory reporter was required to call in this family.  Instead, when my editors put the story on the front page of the metro section on Thanksgiving Day, with a big photo, that got the families moved - but it took about three weeks. 

Technically, journalists already might face this issue in the 18 states in which everyone is a mandated reporter. I doubt that any actually has turned in a family due to the law.  But I think it's a problem of a different order of magnitude when a particular group that includes journalists is singled out as a category of reporter, and the governor is making a big deal about it at a time when mandated reporting is on everybody’s mind.

It’s hard enough to get news organizations to cover issues of poverty as it is.  (One reason I remember the Albany story after so many years is that it prompted by first argument with the worst editor I've ever encountered - she wanted me to drop the story and cover some political trivia instead.)  Impoverished families would have every reason to shy away from telling their stories if they knew that a mandated reporter law trumped any promise of confidentiality.  And journalists might become even more reluctant to report on the problems of poverty if it could pose this kind of dilemma.

It’s something editorial writers might want to think about before jumping on the make-everyone-a-mandated-reporter bandwagon.  Because none of the proposals says “except journalists.”

Child abuse at Penn State: Jerry Sandusky, foster parent

            Given the mad rush to tell anyone and everyone to report anything and everything as “child abuse” – or maybe even force us all to do it – this seemed like a good time to remember the ultimate consequence: foster care.

            With everyone running scared, there will be a lot more reporting of all kinds of “child abuse” – including “neglect,” which so often is confused with poverty.  In fact, calls to state child abuse hotlines already have spiked, not only in Pennsylvania but also New York and New Jersey.

            That means more children needlessly torn from everyone they know and love because they are poor, as in this case from Houston.  It also means more children needlessly consigned to foster care just because caseworkers are afraid to do anything else.

            The majority of foster parents do the best they can for the children in their care, like the overwhelming majority of parents, period.  Some foster parents are true heroes.  But one study after another has found abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, and the record of group homes and institutions is even worse.

            Oddly, however, in all the hundreds of stories written about Jerry Sandusky two facts rarely are mentioned, and almost never get much emphasis:

            ● Jerry Sandusky was a foster parent.

            ● Jerry Sandusky’s charity began as a group home.

            So if Jerry Sandusky is guilty that should give us all something to think about:

Before we support laws turning everyone into a mandated reporter who risks going to jail if we don’t call a hotline whenever we think someone just might be abusing or neglecting a child, do we really want to put more children at risk of being placed with the next Jerry Sandusky?

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part two:

Too little skepticism, and too much, both can hurt children.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 22: This example of child abuse hysteria occurred last year.  But there will be a lot more of it if we don't start curbing post-Penn State paranoia.

            In the previous post to this blog, I wrote about how the Penn State horrors threaten to spark a revival of the witchhunt mentality that dominated child welfare during the 1980s.  Today’s “child savers” to use the term their 19^th Century counterparts gave themselves, are reviving a series of myths about child abuse that hurt huge numbers of children more than two decades ago.

            Because so much time has passed, many people have forgotten the lessons of that era, or never knew them.  There was a time when I could use simple shorthand to remind reporters – I could just say “McMartin.”  But there are reporters on the job today who hadn’t been born when the lurid allegations about mass molestation at the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles first made headlines.  So it’s well worth reviewing the lessons from that era.

SORRY, WRONG NUMBERS

            One of those lessons has to do with phony numbers that nobody bothers to check – absurd claims about the prevalence of child sexual abuse that appear to have been pulled from thin air.

            By 1990, there were studies attempting to estimate the percentage of people sexually abused during childhood that had come up with results ranging from one percent to 62 percent.  The studies used widely varying definitions of abuse, some of them breathtakingly broad, and usually included abuse by anyone, not just cases subject to the jurisdiction of child protective services.

But because large numbers attract more attention than small numbers, all through the 80s it was claimed, repeatedly that "one out of three girls and one out of ten boys will be sexually abused" during childhood.

Most of those claims, at least for the girls, could be traced back to a single, highly-publicized study which used extremely broad, vague definitions.  But at least there was one study.

In the wake of Penn State, one news account after another claims that one out of four (or sometimes one out of three) girls and one out of six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse during their childhoods.

Typically the figure appears with no attribution at all, except some vague reference to “experts say” or  “most experts believe.”  I have yet to find a news account that cites an actual study of any kind, let alone a valid one.  Instead there are quotes about how these crimes are so awful that we desperately want to “turn away” and refuse to face up to how widespread they are.  In other words: if you try to check facts, you’re “in denial.”

Then, a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More last week, Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children’s Hospital took things a step further, declaring:

I think you have to remember that one in three girls under the age of 18 do get sexually abused. And it's no different, it's the same number of boys under, before puberty. So when someone says that they have been abused you have to assume that it happened immediately … One in three people have been abused …”

Could we stop and think about that for a second?  Most of us have at least one sibling.  So if Walker’s number is correct, at least two-thirds of American adults either were sexually abused as children, or are siblings of a child sexual abuse victim.

If there are that many victims the number of perpetrators must be astronomical as well.  Then you must add all the parents and others who are guilty of “neglect” because they should have known it was happening and “failed to protect” their children.

So if nothing else, if these claims were true the entire American child welfare system would have to be dismantled immediately – because if there are that many child molesters out there, the odds that children taken from their parents and placed in foster care will be molested are so staggering that foster care is way too dangerous an option.  (As it happens, there is solid research indicating that there is child abuse in one-quarter to one third of foster homes, with an even worse record for group homes and institutions.  Jerry Sandusky, who stands accused in the Penn State cases, was a foster parent and his charity began as a group home.)

THE REAL NUMBERS ARE BAD ENOUGH

The best evidence we have concerning the true prevalence of child sexual abuse comes from two comprehensive reviews of the scholarly literature.

The first is a review of 20 different studies conducted by seven Canadian researchers, published in 1991. They found that the studies with the best methodology consistently indicated that between 10 and 12 percent of girls under age 14 are sexually abused by someone during their childhoods. The 1980s study that produced the "one out of three" claim was singled out for criticism by these researchers.

A decade later, another comprehensive review of the literature put the actual figure at 9 to 11 percent for girls and 5 to 6 percent for boys.  The review found that studies which met  two fundamental tenets of good research, high response rates and large sample size, tended to find lower rates of abuse than the smaller, less representative studies.

Odds are the figure is lower today, since, as the Associated Press reports, there is strong evidence that the rate of child sexual abuse has declined significantly in recent years.

Those figures, like all of the best evidence concerning the true extent of child abuse in America, are cause for concern and action. The real numbers are bad enough. Exaggeration serves only to panic us into seeking "solutions" that hurt the children they are intended to help.

Right now, this kind of exaggeration and fear mongering can do even more harm.

HOW IT HURTS CHILDREN

In the 1980s, the rhetoric about “children don’t lie,” discussed in the previous post to this blog, and the absurd numbers made it easy for people to suspend reasonable skepticism when “child savers” started talking about satanic cults operating out of day care centers. 

All those claims in the previous post about secret tunnels and child molesters with wings grew out of the way children were interrogated about allegations of sexual  abuse in their day care centers or at the hands of their own parents.  The result was a series of witchhunts across the country lasting all the way into the 1990s.  The McMartin Preschool was only the most notorious.  There were witchhunts that tore apart communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey, San Diego, Kern County, California, Jodan, Minnesota, and Wenatchee Washington, among others.

Hundreds of innocent people had their lives ruined, many were jailed.  In the end, in almost every case, almost everyone accused was exonerated.

But they were not the ones who suffered most.  As usual, the best efforts of the child savers backfired against the children.  There were the children who suffered when they were separated from their jailed parents.  There were the children who suffered when, at a very young age, they actually were persuaded by caseworkers and therapists that they’d been abused when they hadn’t.  Some believe it to this day.

But children also suffered as a result of the climate and fear and paranoia spread by the child savers.  Teachers and day care workers became afraid to hug their students – sometimes actually telling them to “give yourselves a pat on the back.”  (Among the potential side effects: Children denied normal affection are easier prey for actual child molesters.)  Men were largely driven out of pre-school teaching.  Children were taught not simply to be prudent in dealings with adults but to be constantly fearful and on guard.

That seems to be making a comeback, too.  One post-Penn State news story after another warns parents to never, ever let their children be alone with any other adult.  (That’s going to make it rather difficult for teachers to meet with students having trouble with their homework or for guidance counselors to help them with personal problems, or for mentors to help kids with school projects.)

A Washington Times columnist warns that “sports are the perfect hunting ground for perverts, pedophiles and other assorted monsters.”

Some go further.  One Huffington Post blogger raged against  “how we encourage our kids to abandon their sense of self-trust -- their instinct and intuition -- in order to be polite through showing physical affection to adults.”  He is referring to parents who, at holiday gatherings “pressure” the kids to “give your uncle a hug and kiss."

This blogger seems to suggest a child reluctant to do this, knows by “instinct and intuition” that uncle is a child molester.  The possibility that uncle may just have bad breath or a scratchy beard does not seem to occur to him.

There was plenty of paranoia before Penn State (check out this list of absurdities, which I first discovered thanks to Lenore Skenazy at her Free-Range Kids blog. This one is my favorite).  So it would be understandable if adults now hesitated to so much as smile at a child for fear of being accused of “grooming” that child into a sexual abuse victim.  In fact, if this story from Florida is any indication, the paranoia is back, with a vengeance.

But there’s another way all this hurts children.

After the hysteria of the 80s came the skepticism of the 90s.  There are children who almost certainly suffered because some people may have become too skeptical.  In the wake of the collapse of the mass molestation cases there are bound to have been children who really were abused, but were not believed.  Given how far back the allegations go, some of the Penn State victims may even be among them.  As I wrote in my book, Wounded Innocents, in 1990: If so, the blame rests squarely with the child savers.  They have managed to find one more way to destroy children in order to save them.

Ultimately, the Los Angeles Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for some of its writing about the McMartin case.  But not for coverage of the case itself.  Rather, the late David Shaw, the paper’s media critic, won it for a series asking why the media accepted all the wild claims from the child savers so easily.  The headline in the first installment summed it up: “Where was skepticism in media?” it said.

Is it too much to ask for a little more skepticism this time, before it’s too late.

Child abuse at Penn State: The ugly road from Happy Valley, part one

UPDATE 1: CHECK OUT THIS TIMELY REMINDER OF THE PITFALLS OF FORCED CHILD ABUSE REPORTING FROM PHILADELPHIA CITYPAPER


UPDATE 2: IN CASE ANYONE STILL BELIEVES THE HYSTERIA OVER REPORTING CHILD ABUSE WON'T CAUSE PEOPLE TO DO SOME REALLY STUPID THINGS: APPARENTLY, IT ALREADY HAS


UPDATE 3: IN THE CASE DISCUSSED IN THIS STORY, THE CHILD REALLY WAS ABUSED.  IMAGINE WHAT IT'S LIKE FOR A CHILD WHO WAS NOT.


                ● The myth that “children don’t lie” is back

            ● The hype is back: One “expert” suggests that two-thirds of Americans either were victims of child sexual abuse – or have a sibling who was.

            ● The 1980s witchhunt mentality may be making a comeback, too – and it’s children who really have been abused who are going to suffer most.

            As I listened to the end of a segment of NPR’s Tell Me More on Tuesday, I felt as though I’d been transported back in time.  Suddenly it was the 1980s again, when a bizarre, hyperbolic, myth-fueled reaction to the serious and real problem of child sexual abuse led to a whole series of tragedies of its own.  In the wake of the Penn State horrors, it looks like those myths are making a comeback.

            Anchor Michel Norris was leading a discussion of  “how to teach children to be alert to potentially abusive behavior and how to get them to speak up …”

            At the very end, Norris raised an issue that, as far as I know, no other journalist has had the courage even to mention since the Penn State story broke:

            There is an awful other side to this and there have been examples of false accusations … a group of girls were angry at a gym teacher because he had punished them for passing notes or talking and so they made up an accusation which turned out to be false. So how do you recommend that parents navigate such a thing?

            This is where the trip through time began, led by Dr. Leslie Walker of Seattle Children's Hospital.  It was 1980s mythology all over again as Walker declared:

I think you have to remember that one in three girls under the age of 18 do get sexually abused. And it's no different, it's the same number of boys under, before puberty. So when someone says that they have been abused you have to assume that it happened immediately … One in three people have been abused …”

The one-in-three number is utter nonsense, and I’ll deal with it in a post on Monday. 

For now, consider the fact that, though she didn’t use the exact words, Walker was leading us back to the era of those 1980s catchphrases “children don’t lie” and “believe the children.”

It’s been such a long time since those phrases were all the rage, and such a long time since the hyped numbers were in vogue, that I had to go back to the book I wrote in 1990, Wounded Innocents (Prometheus Books, 1990, 1995) to review what happened and how much harm was done to children.

“CHILDREN DON’T LIE”

            The issue of the truth of claims attributed to children wasn’t simple then, and it’s not simple now.

            Of course, it is extremely unlikely that a very young child would make up out of whole cloth a story of being sexually assaulted. 

            In other cases, there is strong evidence that the children are not only telling the truth, but showing extraordinary courage in coming forward – courage for which they deserve wholehearted support.  I would put the Penn State cases in that category.

            But many allegations of sexual abuse involve situations that are far less clear-cut.  So, for example, in Upstate New York, authorities concluded that children who had heard one of the now-ubiquitous “good touch / bad touch” lectures that supposedly prevent sexual abuse wound up falsely accusing their substitute teacher.  But the children weren’t lying.  They had confused normal affection with “bad touching.”

            In addition, young children aren’t the ones who pick up the phone and call child abuse hotlines.  Adults do that.  And by that time the child might have been questioned repeatedly by a concerned parent or a therapist, or someone else who asked so many leading questions that what gets phoned into the hotline may bear little resemblance to what the child actually said.

            Or the children are rewarded with praise for “disclosing” abuse and badgered if they don’t – a common problem in the “mass molestation” nightmare cases of the 1980s – cases that produced some remarkable allegations.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, then Bakersfield California was a hotbed of cannibalism.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse there was a secret underground amusement park near Fort Bragg, California.  You got in from the ocean by submarine.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, then they were being flown from day care centers all over the country in planes to be molested, then returned in time to be picked up by their parents.  Some of the molesters didn’t need a plane.  They could fly through the air all by themselves.

            ● If children don’t lie about abuse, some children in El Paso Texas had their eyes removed – and then put back,

            Or the allegation may not come from a child at all.  Consider this actual report to a child abuse hotline in Rochester, New York, about a young girl in the 1980s:

            The victim and the suspect have been seen holding hands and walking while the suspect had his arm around the victim.  The source also stated suspect used to live with the victim’s mother and the victim.  He had moved out in the recent past but visits the home every day.  The source also stated the victim goes away with the suspect for long periods of time.  Source stated victim wears dresses, tights, and shoes.  Source said it is rumored by children that the victim may be sleeping with suspect.  No other information is available…

            That was enough to prompt both Child Protective Services and the police to investigate.  Here’s what they found out:

           

            ● A doctor found no evidence of sexual abuse.

            ● The man was a friend of the family.

            ● According to both  mother and child, when he slept over he slept on the couch.

            Why was the little girl so nicely dressed when the man took her out?  Because he was taking her to church.

            And of course, older children may, in fact, have all sorts of reasons to lie, as in the case cited by Michel Norris (and notice how Walker simply ignored the case in her “answer.”)

            Another key element of the “children don’t lie” myth was the claim, made with equal certainly, that in one situation children are always lying: when they recant.  Any notion that a child could recant because the allegation was not, in fact, true – perhaps it had been the result of a coercive interrogation – is dismissed out of hand.  Children only recant, it was said, to cover up for the abuser.

            And sure enough, Walker revived that claim as well.  Walker claimed she never, ever had a child claim abuse when it wasn’t true.  But, she said,

I have seen kids recant, though. And kids back down from what really happened a lot of times because they feel like they're breaking up the family. They feel guilty. They feel that it's overwhelming and the community and people are all coming against them and they recant, but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. I would always err on the idea that it did happen.

Too bad it’s the children themselves who often pay for that kind of error.

On Monday: Phony claims bolstered by phony numbers, and how it all hurts children

Update: Child abuse and the Penn State horrors: Casey strikes out

            Taking knee-jerk idiocy to the ultimate level, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has introduced legislation to coerce every state into passing a law to require anyone and everyone to report any and every suspicion of child maltreatment to child protective services or the police.  It’s co-sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.).

            The federal government can’t force the states to do this directly.  But Casey’s bill would withhold federal aid under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act from states that refuse.

            For all of the reasons described in the post below, the best title for this bill would be the Helping Child Abusers Get Away With It Act of 2011.

Child abuse in America: Learning the wrong lessons from the Penn State scandal

The fact that it’s so predictable makes it no less depressing: In the wake of a scandal over the alleged rape of children by a former Penn State football coach, there are calls to require even more people to report their slightest suspicions of child abuse to child protective services agencies and/or law enforcement.

The near-certain result: More people will get away with child abuse.  More children will suffer at the hands of child abusers because CPS caseworkers will be even more overwhelmed with false allegations and have even less time to find the children in real danger.  And more children will suffer at the hands of CPS agencies – because inflicting a child abuse investigation on a child who was never otherwise harmed is an act of child abuse in and of itself.  That is particularly true in cases of physical and sexual abuse.

THE PENN STATE CASES

For starters, consider the Penn State cases themselves.  If he is guilty of the charges against him, former coach Jerry Sandusky didn’t get away with it until now because of the lack of a mandatory reporting law; he got away with it because people already required to report the abuse failed to do so.

The Penn State case is unusual in another way as well: In this case, Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant in the football program, says he actually caught Sandusky in the act of raping a ten-year-old boy.  Very few cases are so clear and unambiguous.  As Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights persuasively argues at The Daily Beast, what stopped McQueary from immediately calling 911 had nothing to do with child abuse reporting laws.  Rather, Bissenger writes:

What happened, or more accurately did not happen, goes to the core of evil that major college sports programs in this country have become, equivalent to Mafia families in which the code of omertà rules and coaches and staff always close ranks around their own, even if it means letting someone who was first accused of inappropriate sexual conduct in 1998 continue to roam. … Except that the even the Mafia has higher moral standards.

To leap from this extreme – and extremely unambiguous case – to requiring everybody who works in a school or college, from the janitor to the secretaries to the school bus drivers – to phone in their slightest suspicion about everything or risk jail time is to court disaster.

Remember, we’re talking about the slightest suspicion of everything that now comes under the heading of “child abuse” and “child neglect” – including all those breathtakingly-broad statutes that define poverty itself as neglect.

OVERLOADING CPS AGENCIES

The most obvious problem with all this, of course,  is that it will further overload child welfare agencies with CYA referrals from mandated reporters terrified of what will happen to them if they actually exercise some common sense.  Even now, more than 75 percent of all reports alleging "child abuse" are false.  That is, they fail to meet the minimal standard for declaring the report "substantiated."  No hearing is required to "substantiate" a case; it's simply the guess of a caseworker checking a box on a form.  Turning everyone into a mandatory reporter will make the proportion of false allegations even bigger.

Even David Finkelhor, of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and someone with impeccable “child saver” credentials, told the Associated Press:

Maybe it's better that people use discretion ... If everybody obeyed the letter of the law and reported a suspicion of abuse, the agencies would be completely overwhelmed with reports.

Finkelhor is not alone.  As early as the 1980s, some former proponents of massive mandatory reporting began to have second thoughts.  In a 1983 article, Dr. Eli Newberger of Children’s Hospital in Boston, again, someone with gold-plated “child saver” credentials, wrote that

had professionals, like me, known then what we know now, we would never have urged on Congress, federal officials and state broadened concepts of child abuse as the basis for reporting legislation.

Newberger’s article was called “The Helping Hand Strikes Again.”

Of course, not everyone thinks this is all that much of a problem.  A former prosecutor named Victor Veith, best known for coming up with a master plan to end all child abuse – in 120 years, thereby assuring that no one who implements it will be around to see if it actually worked - told AP:

I'd be in favor of as broad a mandated reporting law as possible.  But it needs to be accompanied by required training.

The broadest possible law, of course, would make everyone a mandated reporter.  Eighteen states actually do that.  I can’t wait to find out Veith’s master plan for training more than 200 million Americans in how to detect child abuse.

Actually, “training” could make things even worse if it’s done by the same organizations that put out broad, vague lists of symptoms we’re all supposed to watch out for to determine if a child might be abused, lists which tell us to suspect abuse if a child is too shy or too aggressive or acts too much like an adult or too much like a child or has nightmares or doesn’t have warm clothing in winter and on and on and on.  Here's a classic example.

But system overload is only one of the harms that broadening reporting laws will cause.

THE TRAUMA TO CHILDREN

Almost forgotten is the fact that a child abuse investigation is not a benign act.  Having a stranger come to the door – or your school – pull you aside and ask questions about the most intimate aspects of your life can be an enormously traumatic experience for a child; and the younger the child the greater the trauma.  It can leave lifelong emotional scars.

Three of the nation’s leading scholars of child welfare in the 20^th Century – scholars who opposed mandatory reporting, by the way - the late Anna Freud, Joseph Goldstein and Albert J. Solnit wrote that children

react even to temporary infringement of parental autonomy with anxiety, diminishing trust, loosening of emotional ties, or an increasing tendency to be out of control.  The younger the child and the greater his own helplessness and dependence, the stronger is his need to experience his parents as his lawgivers --  safe, reliable, all-powerful and independent . When family integrity is broken or weakened by state intrusion [the child's] needs are thwarted and his belief that his parents are omniscient and all-powerful is shaken prematurely.

It’s not just young children who are harmed.  For a particularly-insightful take on the dilemma of mandatory reporting check out this essay from a pediatrician that ran in The Washington Post.

STRIPSEARCHES – AND WORSE

Even worse, when the allegation is physical abuse – and, sometimes, even when it’s not - the investigation often is accompanied by a stripsearch by a caseworker or a doctor looking for bruises.  If anyone else did that it would be sexual abuse.  And if the allegation is sexual abuse, the medical exam can be a lot more traumatic.

Indeed, try to imagine the terror for a young child, suddenly taken from family by strangers, often including police.  She goes to a strange hospital, where doctors and nurses she’s never met before perform the most intimate possible examination.

It’s already far too easy to inflict this kind of harm on a child, as can be seen in this case, part of a class-action suit in New York City. (NCCPR’s Vice President represented the family).

Surely we should not make it even more likely that this kind of abuse will be inflicted on children by setting the process in motion based on nothing more than a school janitor’s hunch.

All this is before we even reach the harm of panicky workers using these kinds of  flimsy allegations to throw children needlessly into foster care – where the rate of actual abuse is far higher than in the general population.  (Though the majority of foster parents try to do the best they can for the children in their care, as it happens, Jerry Sandusky was a foster parent, and his charity ran a group home.)

ADULT SELF-INDULGENCE

But as with so much else that supposedly involves “child protection” the call for more reporting laws really is about adult self-indulgence.  This can be seen in what Jim Hmurovich told the AP.  Hmurovich now runs Prevent Child Abuse America – that’s the group that publishes the Spider Man comic book that effectively encourages children to turn in their parents if they get a spanking.

Before that he ran the child welfare system in Indiana, where he turned it into a paragon of mediocrity, from which it still hasn’t recovered.  Indiana is best known for horrifying cases of deaths of children “known to the system” and for tearing apart families at a rate more than 50 percent above the national average.

When people in child welfare are asked to cite states that do a particularly good job of keeping children safe, I’ve never heard anyone outside Indiana cite Indiana.  (And it’s hard to believe those in Indiana are doing it with straight faces.)

But Indiana is one of those states where everyone is a mandated reporter, and  Jim Hmurovich thinks that’s just dandy.  According to AP, Hmurovich “supports the state's broad reporting requirement, even though he said its impact is hard to quantify.”

“Hard to quantify” means there is not a shred of evidence that making everyone a mandated reporter makes children safer, in Indiana or anywhere else.  But that doesn’t seem to be Hmurovich’s main concern.

"It gave everyone some comfort that they were doing the right thing legally if they report suspicions of abuse," he told the AP. "If children are so important to us, shouldn't it be all our responsibility to make sure they're safe?"

In other words, Jim Hmurovich has just given new meaning to one of the less noble catchphrases of the 1960s: "If it feels good, do it."