Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 21, 2026.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately, starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools', it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fools' Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op-ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed," giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (Now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, and simply because memories of COVID are fading, that myth seems to pop up less often.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. (Fortunately, in most cases in Texas and New York, you can't do that anymore.)

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda, Doing Child Welfare Right and the NCCPR Good Bill Bank.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty?  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect." This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 29, 2025.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately, starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op-ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed," giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (One hopes that, now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, they will knock it off, but that may be too optimistic.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. 

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda and Doing Child Welfare Right.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty?  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect."  This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

UPDATE, 2024: given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, expect the usual op-eds to have token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system even bigger and more powerful. 

Indeed, this year, the leading group of one time "health terrorists" (that's their own term!) Prevent Child Abuse America will be proclaiming its supposed interest in racial justice while campaigning to expand the so-called Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  This horrible federal law laid the foundation for America's child welfare surveillance state, contributing to the trauma inflicted on millions of children.  You can read here about how awful this law, so beloved by PCAA really is.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , UPDATED APRIL 1, 2018, MARCH 31, 2020, AND MARCH 31, 2021, MARCH 27, 2024.

Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired. 

Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote: 

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities. 

In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually branded what they had done “health terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it. 

This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately starts on April Fools Day. 

So I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op-ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse. 

There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real nature of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op ed column follows a standard formula: 

1.  1. Take the most horrifying case to occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.

2.   2. Jump immediately from that story to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports" alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with neglect. Or…

3.   3.  Use only the total number of cases that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed" giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.

4.   4. Pile hype onto hype by reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic of child abuse” myth.  (One hopes that, now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, they will knock it off, but that may be too optimistic.)

5.    5. Throw in huge lists of "symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be "signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number of other things.

6.     6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically used in law to guide "mandated reporters."  

      7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity. 

All of this can do enormous harm to children.  

Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger.  

Reality check 

NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions: 

·        -- Issue papers on Understanding Child Abuse Numbers and False Allegations: What the Data Really Show

·        -- Our Solutions pages, Doing Child Welfare Right and our Due Process Agenda.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach.

If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month"  (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  

Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above, poverty itself often is confused with "neglect."  This can be seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call "neglect."

The problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony. The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness" campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems even worse.

If only there were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.

An ugly video illustrates that in “child welfare” health terrorism is still the go-to tactic

The seeds of Q-Anon and Pizzagate were planted at the McMartin preschool,
then unintentionally grown and nurtured by a lot of “professionals” in "child welfare"
 who should have known better.

Earlier this year, I did a series of posts about reputation laundering in family policing – the process by which mainstream “child welfare” organizations seek to co-opt the rhetoric of change while refusing to support any measures that would actually change anything.  (And see also this excellent analysis from Lexie Gruber-Perez in Family Integrity and Justice Quarterly.) The reputation laundering also is an effort to try to make us forget these organizations’ past behavior. 

Wait, did I say past?  

Actually, for the group that calls itself Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA), the behavior has never stopped. 

I discussed their ugly history in a presentation at the Kempe Center international conference last year.  I noted how PCAA itself described its past behavior as “health terrorism.” And in a post about their reputation laundering, I noted examples of how the health terrorism continues.  But it turns out I missed one of the most flagrant examples. 

PCAA was among the sponsors of a video, complete with lurid horror stories and a celebrity narrator, promoting the whole discredited myth about child abuse and COVID-19.  You know the one:  The myth suggesting that as soon as overwhelmingly middle-class disproportionately white “mandated reporters” didn’t have their “eyes” constantly on children who are neither, their parents would unleash upon them horrific child abuse on a massive scale. 

The video would have been bad enough at the start of the pandemic.  But it was released in March, 2022, long after what’s been called the “pandemic of child abuse” myth was discredited.  Nevertheless, the video predicted that as COVID restrictions ended and children returned to school, there would be “a surge in the number of abused children reaching out for help.” 

It didn’t happen – because there was no pandemic of child abuse. 

The people behind the video, including PCAA, undoubtedly meant well.  There really are cases of horrific child abuse.  But they also are extremely rare. That makes them no less important to address – but it requires a change in how we address them.  

The horror story cases are needles in a haystack.  Health terrorism makes the haystack bigger, so it’s even harder to find the needles.  So in addition to all the other harm done by messaging like that in the video, it also is likely to backfire. 

“It wasn’t like there was a reckoning.” 

I was led to this present-day example of health terrorism because of an excellent story about the health terrorism of the past. 

NBC News took an in-depth look at the recent rise in conspiracy theories about satanic ritual child abuse. The story cites a survey that found that 

One-third of respondents agreed with the statement, “members of Satanic cults secretly abuse thousands of children every year.” One quarter agreed that “Satanic ritual sex abuse is widespread in this country,” and 21% agreed that “numerous preschools and public schools secretly engage in Satanic practices.” 

But what sets this story apart is this: It draws a direct line from Q-Anon and Pizzagate back to the
“satanic panic” of the 1980s.  And in the 1980s the mainstream child welfare establishment actively promoted satanic panic.  If you’re not familiar with what happened then, just Google “McMartin Preschool” – or read this summary.  One group, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) was formed by some of those promoting the McMartin myths. But they didn’t think they were myths, they really believed it, and they really thought they were helping children.  (APSAC was another sponsor, indeed it appears to be one of the driving forces, behind the video.) 

Prevent Child Abuse America also stoked the fear.  As I noted in the Kempe Conference presentation: 

In a 1986 “fact sheet” PCAA wrote about the McMartin defendants as if they’d been convicted.  The fact sheet went on to say that “one ongoing federally-funded study is investigating over 30 cases of sexual abuse with multiple perpetrators and multiple victims in daycare settings.” 

The fact sheet goes on to cite an authority who had dealt with over 200 cases of adults allegedly abused as children.  “Their descriptions of abuse run from fondling to extreme sexual abuse which included ritualistic murder.”  The authority cited is Dr. Bennett Braun.  I have only two words to say about Dr. Braun: Google him. 

Among the allegations made by young children in these cases, after repeated interrogations: Cannibalism, being flown all over the country to be abused but returned in time to be picked up by their parents, having their eyes removed – and put back. 

But at the time PCAA’s New York affiliate said that should not encourage skepticism. They quoted an expert who explained that: “the more bizarre the story, the more reality there may be to it.” 

Imagine what Q-Anon would make of a statement like that today. 

Yes, they meant well.  But that’s not enough.  Somehow APSAC, PCAA and others never have been held accountable for the harm health terrorism did at the time – and the harm it still does today. Quoting  Prof. Joseph Uscinski, the expert who conducted the survey, the NBC story explains that satanic panic 

“… was a widespread belief back in the ʼ80s. And when the satanic panic disappeared, it just disappeared. It wasn’t like there was a reckoning.” 

Isn’t it time for that reckoning?  Isn’t it time every reporter who speaks to someone from APSAC and PCAA asks them about their role?  Isn’t it time someone asked why they haven’t apologized? And isn’t it time someone asked why they are engaging in similar behavior now? 

The seeds of Q-Anon and Pizzagate were planted at the McMartin preschool, then unintentionally grown and nurtured by a lot of “professionals” who should have known better.  If they refuse to apologize and refuse to stop engaging in health terrorism, then, at a minimum, the rest of us should consign these professionals and their organizations to well-deserved obscurity, instead of continuing to take their pronouncements about “child welfare” seriously.

PART FOUR OF FOUR: Reputation laundering in child welfare: “Prevent Child Abuse America”

They want you to think their days of “health terrorism” are over.   But look again.  They, too are trying to co-opt the rhetoric of reform to promote the same old family policing agenda

 The hearings about the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection have prompted a lot of talk about “reputation laundering” as former Trump Administration officials try to distance themselves from the president they served so faithfully – the most notable example: former Attorney General William Barr.

As America’s racial justice reckoning finally catches up with “child welfare” – or, as it should be called, family policing – the “child welfare establishment is engaged in its own campaign of reputation laundering.  Yet none of the recent trips to the reputation laundry from child welfare establishment groups includes support for any proposal that would reduce their power.  That’s how we know the real goal is to co-opt the rhetoric of change and put it to use maintaining the oppressive status quo.  Consider our final example. 

Prevent Child Abuse America 

Let us consider those masters of health terrorism at Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA).  Health terrorism means highlighting horror stories that are in no way representative of a problem in the name of “raising awareness.”   Decades of health terrorism conditioned much of America to believe that horror stories about beatings and torture of children are the norm, there’s a child abuser under every bed, and only an ever-bigger child welfare surveillance state can stop it.  

Health terrorism is not my term – I heard it at a presentation by Bart Klika, chief research officer for PCAA, who admitted that it was their m.o. for decades. PCAA denigrated any notion that poverty is confused with neglect. They even put out a special Spider-Man comic book in which a working mother is emotionally neglecting her child because she’s too busy “work[ing] with movie stars.” 

From the golden age of "health terrorism" at
Prevent child Abuse America

Yet after decades of health terrorism that inflicted very real terror on millions of children victimized by needless investigations and needless, abusive foster care, Klika refused to apologize. 

That alone should be reason enough to exclude PCAA from any serious discussion of how to deal with child abuse and neglect and to call out their current rhetoric for what it is: reputation laundering. 

But it’s actually worse. They’re still engaging in health terrorism. 

Thus, an op-ed column from Kylie Spies of one of Prevent Child Abuse America’s most influential chapters, the one in Iowa, tries to graft the language of reform onto the same old health terrorism.  It offers a token mention of the success of COVID stimulus funds in curbing “abuse” by curbing poverty.  But that comes only after suggesting that the most wonderful thing any Iowan could possibly do is to turn in a neighbor as a child abuser! 

More reporting of alleged child abuse is wonderful, Prevent Child Abuse Iowa says, because, while it reveals stress in a community 

it also measures the connectedness of a community.  The number of reports each year is a measure of time spent with caring helpers like teachers and pediatricians who are trained to spot signs of abuse. It’s the number of concerned coaches, neighbors, and relatives who noticed a problem. It’s the number of courageous children and youth who told a trusted adult the heavy secret they’ve been carrying. And the most common abuse type, “denial of critical care” (also known as neglect), contains an additional measure of a community — families’ ability to meet their basic needs. 

Yes, nothing says “connectedness” like turning in your neighbor to the family police – and explicitly declaring that poverty is the most common form of “abuse”!  No wonder, year after year, Iowa tears apart families at a rate far above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

Spies goes on to caution that 

The relationship between neglect and poverty is complex, and it’s important to understand that poverty is not child abuse. 

But apparently, Ms. Spies, Prevent Child Abuse Iowa thinks poverty is child neglect – because it sure sounds like you just said it was! 

Meanwhile, Klika himself sets up a straw man in a reputation-laundering article he and his PCAA colleagues co-authored.  On the surface, it’s a call for change. Klika and his coauthors bemoan the false “dominant narrative” blaming parents – without taking the slightest responsibility for the fact that their organization did more than almost anyone to build and maintain that narrative.  They acknowledge the ugly history of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) – but endorse it anyway.  Then they minimize the need for the only change they mention that would reduce the system’s power –narrowing definitions of “neglect.”  They even imply that it would be harmful to narrow the scope of family policing until a giant, alternative “child and family well-being system” is fully up and running. 

This is, again, just a laundering of the argument the child welfare establishment has made for decades: “Sure we’d like to eradicate poverty but until that happens we need to take away all those kids!”  In the new version, Klika & Co. write about their “child and family well-being system,” knowing full well that massive amounts of new funding are not forthcoming. 

While it would be wonderful if Americans could be persuaded to spend huge amounts to create such a system – provided it was voluntary, community-run and entirely separate from the family police -- one does not need to eliminate poverty, or create a giant parallel bureaucracy, or even spend huge amounts of additional funds wisely in order to safely reign in the family police.  

Impoverished families and families of color have shown amazing resilience.  It takes only a small
amount of additional cash assistance to lift families to the point where there is no need for the family police to even consider investigating them or tearing them apart.  The funds for that are readily available: All we have to do is transfer some of the billions now wasted on foster care.  

But not one of these huge organizations is willing to support changes in federal funding that would require that – or even allow states to do it voluntarily.  Not one has embraced any change that would actually diminish the police power of “child welfare.”  Not one has truly embraced reforms that would bolster due process for families.  

One more time: What real change looks like 

If Prevent Child Abuse America was serious about racial justice, if it was serious about ending the rampant confusion of poverty with neglect, if it was serious about ending a child welfare surveillance state that makes all vulnerable children less safe, they would endorse a due-process and finance reform agenda that includes at a minimum: 

● High-quality defense counsel for all families at risk of being caught in the family police net.

● Real child welfare finance reform – not the tokenism of Family First.

● Repeal of the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act – or at least strong backing for legislation proposed by Rep. Karen Bass that would curb its worst excesses.

● Repeal of CAPTA.

● Repeal of mandatory child abuse reporting. 

But Prevent Child Abuse America and the other groups we’ve spotlighted in this series will never go near an agenda like that. 

Because their real message is the same as it’s been for decades: Sure, fund “preventive services” as an add-on – that we get to run of course -- but we must continue to be judge, jury and sometimes family executioner for millions of children, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite.  We’ll just co-opt your rhetoric and hope you won’t notice. 

Read all the posts in this series as a single publication on our website here.

When the (self-proclaimed) “health terrorists” win, children lose

They say they’ve left that era long behind.  But they won’t do the hard work needed to help clean up the devastation. They won’t even say they’re sorry.

 

CHILD ABUSE!!!!

Quick, what came to mind when you read those words?  Probably brutal beatings, torture, rape, and murder.  Perhaps that image from so many stock photos flashed in your head – you know, the one with the scared child in the corner.

That’s understandable.  For decades you were bombarded with that kind of messaging and imagery.  Advocacy groups leapt from the horror stories to statistics claiming that millions of children are “abused” every year – even though almost none of that “abuse” was anything like the horror stories.

 

A lot of the people who did this did it on purpose because they thought their noble goals justified it.  We’ve known this for some time – at least since this paragraph in a 2003 request for proposals from the group that calls itself Prevent Child Abuse America (PCAA) became generally known:

 While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities.

What I didn’t know until last week is that PCAA has a term for what they and so many others did: “health terrorism.”

But PCAA refuses to take ownership of what health terrorism did to families or apologize for it – and that only prolongs the harm that's been done.

What is “health terrorism”?

 I learned the phrase “health terrorism” when Bart Klika, PCAA’s chief research and strategy officer, used it at a presentation last week during a virtual conference sponsored by the Kempe Center at the University of Colorado.  Though nominally about preventing child abuse, Klika’s presentation really was an infomercial for PCAA. It’s on tape, but available only to conference registrants.

Here’s what Klika said about PCAA’s early messaging:

 [I]t was sort of the strategy that my friend Dr. Jeff Linkenbach [of the University of Montana]  calls "health terrorism.”  We tried to scare the health into people by showing  them very graphic images of child abuse and neglect, the scared child in the corner.

They did more than that, of course. They combined the graphic images and horror stories with statistics that Time magazine, as far back as 1993, branded “flagrantly flimsy figures.”

Klika went on to explain that eventually they decided “health terrorism” might not be the best approach, so they put out that request for proposals and hired a PR firm called FrameWorks (they re-frame your message! Get it?)  to help them change their approach. 

But hey, so they engaged in “health terrorism” for a couple of decades and, after all, they meant well, and now they know better, so no problem, right?  

Wrong.

Because the terrorists won.

That original false impression – that millions and millions of children are beaten and tortured every year – remains baked into the public consciousness.

The result is what you always get with terrorism: A swath of mindless destruction, this time cut through the heart of millions of American families over the past several decades.  Consider:

 ● Health terrorism gave us the system in which nearly eight million children are reported to child protective services agencies every year, and almost all of those reports are false, or involve neglect; almost none are like the horror stories.

 ● Health terrorism created the system in which one-third of American children – and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure often traumatic, (and almost always needless) investigations and stripsearches before they turn 18.

● Health terrorism gave us the system that has, again, over decades, consigned millions of children needlessly to the chaos and trauma of foster care, and all the rotten outcomes that flow from it.  In short, though the motivation is different, the “health terrorism” messaging helped build a system that does to children across America the same thing Donald Trump did to children at the Mexican border, but on a massive scale.

The extent to which the health terrorists succeeded can be seen by how quickly and easily so many journalists accepted a “master narrative” about child abuse and COVID-19 that is, at its core, drenched in racial and class bias. It’s the narrative that goes like this:

 Now that fewer mostly white middle-class professionals who are “mandated reporters” of child abuse have their “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite children, their parents supposedly will unleash upon their children a “pandemic of child abuse.”

 

Yes, the pandemic is putting more stress on everyone.  But why do we rush to assume that, for poor people in general and poor Black people in particular, the only way they’ll cope with it is to beat up their children?

 The myth continues to spread, even after news organizations such as the Associated Press, The Marshall Project and Bloomberg CityLab debunked it. 

Why? Because for decades, it’s what the health terrorists have led us to believe. In fact, many of the COVID-19-and-child-abuse stories include that same stock photo – the one with the scared child in the corner.

 So given all that, during his presentation at the virtual conference, I asked Bart Klika if PCAA would at least work to expel this misimpression from the public mind by loudly and publicly apologizing for the way his organization used health terrorism all those years. 

He refused.

And no wonder.  In that 2003 request for proposals PCAA doesn’t even admit they were wrong. On the contrary, they say health terrorism “was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue…”

And, of course, it’s hard to apologize for creating a false, racially biased narrative about child abuse and COVID-19 when at least one state chapter of PCAA is pushing elements of that narrative right now – urging us all to spy on our neighbors while falsely claiming that reporting child abuse is only a way to get help to a family when, in fact, it’s the equivalent of calling the police. 

Honest messaging demands admitting that while such a call might get help to a family, it also can unleash anything from a traumatic investigation and stripsearch, inflicting enormous psychic wounds, to, even worse, the child being consigned to the chaos of foster care.  Honest messaging demands telling people that if you think a family needs help, call an agency that provides help, not the child abuse police.

Then there’s the matter of what we all supposedly should be looking for as we spy on families during a pandemic.  According to this chapter of PCAA: “Warning signs” include “unusual wariness of physical contact.” 

From health terrorism to QAnon

Other groups continue to practice health terrorism using the same excuse – it’s o.k. to distort in the name of “raising awareness” -- with horrible results.  As HuffPost reporter Michael Hobbes has written, health terrorism by anti sex-trafficking groups helped pave the way for Q-Anon. Says Hobbes: “You can’t just throw poison into the public consciousness.”  But that, of course, is the essence of health terrorism.

What does the current leadership at PCAA, and all the other groups that now or in the past practiced health terrorism – however well-intentioned - owe the children whose lives were destroyed by needless foster care?  What do they owe the children taken from safe homes, only to be abused in foster care?  What do they owe entire poor communities of color devastated by mass child welfare surveillance in the same way they are devastated by mass incarceration?  What do they owe the children who really did suffer severe abuse, because workers were so overwhelmed by false allegations, trivial cases and poverty-confused-with-neglect cases that they didn’t have time to find them?

They owe these children, families and communities vastly more than just saying “oops” and paying a PR firm to help them slink away from the damage.

What is needed is a massive counter-terrorism campaign – a giant PR campaign from PCAA that says: WE. WERE. WRONG.   What Prevent Child Abuse America should say is: There is no more justification for health terrorism than any other kind of terrorism. We should not have distorted the issue to get your attention.  We need you to understand that the impression you probably have of the nature and extent of “child abuse” is mistaken.  We need you to understand that it’s dangerously wrong – and racist – to assume that Black families are unleashing a pandemic of child abuse against their children just because fewer white professionals are watching.

They could start by contacting every reporter who blindly accepted that “pandemic of child abuse” narrative and explaining how they got it wrong because they, too, had been conditioned by health terrorism.

PCAA has gone back to FrameWorks for another dose of “reframing.”  So the people at FrameWorks have a moral obligation to demand more than money in exchange for their help this time. They should demand that PCAA own what they did, take responsibility for the consequences of “health terrorism,” and move heaven and earth to undo the damage.