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?

UPDATE, DEC. 13: Universal forced child abuse reporting too extreme even for hearing witnesses

This assessment of today’s Senate subcommittee hearing is based on watching the hearing online and on the witnesses prepared testimony

            The good news: The idea of forcing every American to report any suspicion of child abuse or risk jail is so extreme that even the most extreme of the hand-picked witnesses who testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing today couldn’t stomach it.

            Neither Frank Cervone of Philadelphia’s Support Center for Child Advocates nor Teresa Huizar of the National Children’s Alliance was willing to endorse the concept – though Cervone came depressingly close, and Huizar, who runs a trade association for child advocacy centers, seemed to indicate she’d be more receptive to the idea if it came with more money for child advocacy centers.  No other witness endorsed it in prepared testimony either, though one, Dr. Robert Block, seemed to waffle in response to a questions.

            The bad news:

            ● Cervone took a classic cheap shot in the classic child saver “just sayin’” way:  He said he didn’t actually know that “differential response” was the reason some advocates and doctors claim to have seen “some serious cases of physical abuse go by without intervention” but… 

            Cervone neglected to mention that there are now 23 separate studies showing that differential response does not compromise child safety.  Indeed, all 23 found that repeat reports of maltreatment declined for families using this option.

            And, of course, it’s not that Cervone is against differential response.  On the contrary, he’s all for it.  But…  (Because in child welfare, when you want to stifle innovation you never say no, you just “yes, but…” it to death.)

            ● Cervone also seemed to think he was testifying before the Pennsylvania Legislature – raising a series of Pennsylvania-specific issues in his written statement, and repeating grossly-misleading claims about the rate at which Pennsylvania investigates and substantiates child abuse.  NCCPR responded to those false claims in this op ed column for the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

            ● Huizar proposed the second most common all-propose child saver answer to everything, more “training.” (#1, of course, is “more money,” which she also proposed.) But training is no substitute for due process.  She also wants to “educate all adults on the signs of abuse.”  But given that, at some point, the list of such signs she touts could encompass almost every child in America any such program would need to be designed by someone other than Huizar and her allies.

          ● Huizar made some sound points concerning the annual survey of child abuse conducted by the federal government.  Responding to that survey is one kind of “reporting” that should be mandatory – right now it isn’t.  And there is a need to standardize many definitions, not just the ones Huizar mentions in her testimony.

STATISTICS ABUSE FROM DOCTOR BLOCK

         ● The award for statistics abuse goes to Dr. Robert Block of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  He’s the one who cited the study purporting to show that one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys is a victim of child sexual abuse – the study discussed in NCCPR’s Blog on Youth Today; the one with a definition of abuse that can include a 19-year-old kissing a 17-year-old goodnight after a date. 

Block mischaracterizes the study as asking about “abuse.”  In fact, part of the reason the numbers are so high is that the study didn’t ask about abuse, but about sexual experiences.  An earlier questionnaire, given to the same group, which did use the term “abuse” produced much lower figures.  (There are good reasons to ask both ways.  There are victims of genuine abuse who don’t realize or can’t face that the experience was abusive. But just as using the term abuse is likely to produce a figure that’s too low, not using it contributes to a figure that’s too high.) 

          ● Block also discusses official reports of child abuse in a way that leaves the impression that every report is true.  In fact, nearly four-fifths of reports are false. (Although child-savers love to claim the reports aren’t really false, they really are, for reasons explained here.)

          ● Block seems to view with alarm the large proportion of doctors who don’t report.  It never seems to occur to Block and others like him that what Prof. Gary Melton of Clemson University calls this “rampant civil disobedience” is because, as Melton writes  “professionals …  are convinced that children are worse off as a result of reports to CPS” – and they are right.   That would mean, of course, that mandatory reporting should be curbed, not expanded.

          ● Block even may have a problem with the fact that some states don’t define things like lack of adequate food, clothing and shelter as “neglect” if the parents can’t afford such things.  He doesn’t actually say this is bad, he just lists it among inconsistencies in state laws.  (But in any event, he needn’t worry – nobody pays attention to those provisions in the states that have them.)

Block’s solutions boil down to: Give doctors more money and give doctors more power.

WORDS IN NEED OF ACTION

Erin Sullivan Sutton, whose title at the Minnesota Department of Human Services is “assistant commissioner of Children and Family Services for Child Safety and Permanency,
Child Support Enforcement, Community Partnerships and Child Care Services, Management Operations, Transitional Support Quality Services, Office of Enterprise Technology-Transition Support Systems and Transition to Economic Stability” – said a lot of great things about how well Minnesota treats families who come to the attention of child protective services.

The comments would be more persuasive but for the fact that Minnesota tears apart families at a rate more than 75 percent above the national average, and has the worst record in the nation for taking away Native American children.  (The good news: Minnesota used to be even worse; they really have made good use of differential response, for example.  They might do even better, but Sullivan Sutton probably has to spend a lot of time memorizing her job title.)


POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 13, 2011 at about 2:00PM (post time below appears there only so that this post will appear on the blog below the post about the latest child abuse data from the federal government)

Child abuse at Penn State: The myth of one-in-four / one-in-six

In the weeks since Penn State, one statistic keeps turning up in the  media.  It’s scary, it’s ubiquitous, it’s meant to stampede people into things like universal mandatory reporting – and it’s wrong. 

It’s the one about how, supposedly, one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse. 

Ever wonder why, in all the scores of news stories, editorials and op ed columns where this stat turns up nobody seems to cite an actual study?  Maybe it’s because of what the study actually reveals.

Our full analysis is on NCCPR’s Monthly Blog at the trade journal Youth Today. 

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