Weapon of family destruction: Child abuse hotline becomes a tool of harassment through false and malicious reports – according to the people who run it!

But, of course, actually doing something about it is another matter

 

Image by cbsperna from Pixabay

Every state has some sort of child abuse “hotline” that people can call to report alleged abuse and neglect.  Every state allows such calls to be made anonymously.  And many professionals are “mandated reporters” required to report their slightest suspicion of alleged abuse or neglect. 

There is no enforceable penalty for a false report and plenty of penalty for failure to report – even though in the half century since the first mandatory reporting laws passed there has not been a single study documenting their effectiveness, and some one-time supporters of such laws have had second thoughts.

Indeed, according to the National Research Council:

“Mandatory reporting requirements were adopted without evidence of their effectiveness; no reliable study has yet demonstrated their positive or negative effects on the health and well-being of children at risk of maltreatment, their parents and caregivers and service providers.”

The result is predictable: False allegations inundate the hotlines. Some are malicious – often from schools striking back at parents demanding better education for their children. Others are CYA referrals from mandated reporters terrified not to report.

HuffPost and the Hechinger Report documented the nationwide problem last year.

The first step is admitting you have a problem

But there is something new in New Mexico.  For the first time that I know of, a state child protective services agency actually admits there is a problem.

The admission comes in an excellent story by Ed Williams of the nonprofit New Mexico news site Searchlight New Mexico.  That state only centralized its hotline in 2011.  But, Williams reports that officials at the state Children Youth and Families Department

… have been raising concerns over malicious use of the abuse and neglect reporting system ever since … As soon as the phones started ringing at the Statewide Central Intake call center in 2011 … [r]eports started coming in that were clearly false, and often malicious or retaliatory in nature.

"Every hour we spend sorting out false and malicious allegations is an hour taken from a frightened child who truly needs our help," said then-Secretary Yolanda Deines, during a press conference shortly after the hotline’s launch.

"Please find a healthier way to express your anger, and don't take time away from a child who might be in danger," Deines said.

Eight years later, CYFD employees say that the Statewide Central Intake office, or SCI, continues to receive malicious reports on an almost daily basis, most commonly from school staff and divorced couples in the midst of custody battles. A lack of data, however, has led to questions within CYFD about the frequency of such calls.

 “We don’t want our agency to be used as a mean guard dog” to bully parents, said SCI manager Paul Williams. “But I see it all day long.”

It isn’t just parents who are bullied, however.  In the case at the center of Williams’ story, from the small town of Carrizozo, a child was being bullied.  Other children in the family allegedly were denied their rights to special education.  Their mother, Christy Cartwright, did what any good mother would do: She raised hell.

The school allegedly did what any lousy school would do: They weaponized child protective services and used it to bully the entire family.

The school principal denies that the calls were retaliation. But he also denies that bullying even exists in his school!  Here’s what he said during a taped meeting with Cartwright:

“Everything’s ‘bully, bully, bully,’ that’s all you ever hear about.  I’m telling you for a fact, there is no bullying at this school.”

Indeed, Williams reports, in one of their calls to the hotline, the school alleged that Cartwright was “brain washing the children to say they are bullied at school.”

(Oddly, this principal has yet to be recognized by national education leaders for having the only school in America in which there is absolutely no bullying.)

This case is not isolated.  As Williams writes:

 Searchlight New Mexico has spoken with 28 parents who shared personal stories of retaliation by school employees. Almost invariably, those instances of alleged retaliation followed arguments with the school over special education programs or student behavior problems in class.

Huffpost and The Hechinger Report found much the same.

But while CYFD is willing to admit the problem, they’re not actually willing to do anything about it.

“There is a potential for the system to be abused, and CYFD could take a proactive role,” said CYFD Deputy Secretary Terry Locke. “But the tradeoff is that we might dissuade people from making [valid] calls. The question I have is, have these calls been enough of an issue for us that we would consider an action like that?” [Emphasis added.]

This is worth examining in detail.

First, a child abuse investigation is not a benign act.  At a minimum, children endure the trauma of strangers coming to their home, asking about the most intimate aspects of their lives, turning the house upside down, and leaving everyone in fear. If the allegation is physical or sexual abuse, the children may be subjected to a strip search and an intrusive medical examination. If anyone else did that, it would be sexual abuse. 

So even one needless hotline call such call should be “enough of an issue” to prompt action, just as even one case of child abuse should be “enough of an issue” to warrant action.

Second, as CYFD comes close to admitting, the bigger risk when it comes to missing real abuse is all that time wasted on false reports.

There are solutions

Whether the harm to children is inflicted by a small public school in rural New Mexico or an elite private school in New York City, if child protective services agencies really wanted to stop the institutionalized bullying of children and families by schools and others who abuse their hotlines there are several steps they could persuade state legislatures to take:

● Replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting.  If a teacher or principal or anyone else who may have a grudge or someone who simply may be clueless wants to claim that a parent is abusing a child, that person should be required to give the hotline operator his or her name and verifiable contact information.  That information still should be kept secret from the accused in almost all cases, but the hotline needs to know. 

That will immediately discourage false and trivial reports.  It also will allow hotlines to detect patterns of false or malicious reporting, screen out such reports – and bring charges when necessary.  The law also should allow the accused to go to a judge and explain why s/he feels the family is being harassed by false reports, and by whom.  The judge should check the record and, if the accused is right, and if the judge is persuaded that the reports are an act of harassment, the name should be released to the accused, who should have the right to sue for damages.

● Eliminate mandatory reporting.  Let professionals use their professional judgment concerning when to report alleged child abuse.  As noted above, there is not a shred of evidence that mandatory reporting laws actually have made children safer.  And the fact that more than 80 percent of reports nationwide are false suggests strong evidence that mandatory reporting is inundating the system, stealing time from finding children in real danger.

● Eliminate the category of “educational neglect.” A majority of states actually don’t have such a category in their child abuse statutes – they treat the failure of children to make it to school as exactly what it is, an educational problem for which school districts should be responsible.  A decade ago the highly-regarded Vera Institute of Justice found that overwhelmingly, these are low-risk cases, and it's idiotic to waste the time of child protective services dealing with them. In addition to wasting the time of CPS workers, sending a CPS worker to the door only makes the family defensive and makes it harder to solve whatever problem may be causing absenteeism. Details on the findings are in this post.

● If you don’t have the guts to do the first three, at least change the messaging.  Training for mandated reporters should include not just what to report but also what not to report.  And instead of constantly telling anyone and everyone to report anything and everything, no matter how absurd, urge people to report only when they have reasonable cause to suspect abuse or neglect.

Read the full story about the Cartwright family in Searchlight New Mexico

NCCPR in Youth Today on the Pennsylvania county where almost every impoverished child may be "seen" by CPS

It is child welfare’s equivalent of stop-and-frisk. It happens over and over again, it’s traumatic, it’s usually baseless and unnecessary, and it’s racially biased. It is a child abuse investigation.

Increasingly, across America, this kind of state-inflicted trauma is becoming a routine part of growing up. Nationwide, a study suggests it happens to a majority of black children. And in one Pennsylvania county, there may be no child, or at least no impoverished child, who is spared.

Read the full column in Youth Today

Child abuse in America: True stories of false reports

From the Family Defense Center in Chicago, a reminder of just how much harm can be done by false allegations of child abuse.  Sixteen specific cases, some of them called in by “mandated reporters.”  They are a reminder of the enormous harm that comes from urging – or even requiring - anyone and everyone to report anything and everything.

Here are four of the cases.  As you read them consider not only the harm to the families falsely accused but also the fact that all the time, money and effort spent on these cases was stolen from finding children in real danger:

● A day care teacher followed the practice of other teachers in the center of giving back rubs to help the children fall asleep. The mother of a four-year-old told the day care center director that her daughter told her that the teacher had “touched” her daughter’s booty. The teacher was fired and forced out of his home for 11 months. A hearing eventually found the investigation to be “sloppy at best” for failing to interview other teachers to determine that abuse could not have occurred in the open classroom with 16 children and for failing to discover that the touching was a back rub.

● A school nurse called the Hotline on a mother because the 10-year-old child reported that she was required to clean up after the family cat and was being forced to go into a dark basement that was locked. During the investigation, the child protection investigator failed to observe that the basement the child referred to was where the cat’s food and litter box were kept, and that there were no locks on its doors. The indicated finding was dropped after the mother filed her appeal and retained legal counsel.

 ● A toddler who was learning to walk fell and was then found to have a wrist fracture. An emergency room doctor, without consulting any orthopedist, made a Hotline call. Later, several orthopedists opined that abuse was an implausible explanation because the only way to the wrist fracture could have occurred was through a commonplace fall. The child was taken from both parents involuntarily and placed in temporary custody of DCFS. After a nearly four-month separation, the State’s Attorney voluntarily dismissed the case after child abuse experts agreed with the orthopedists that abuse was not a plausible explanation for the fracture.

● A mother went to the police after her ex-boyfriend made a verbal threat while the mother was holding their 9-month-old daughter. The police called the Hotline and though the mother obtained an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend and kicked him out of her home, DCFS indicated a finding of neglect against the mother. When the ex-boyfriend later came to the home intimidating the mother, she was scared to call the police for fear that she would again be reported to DCFS.  After a full hearing, the indicated finding against the mother was reversed.

The full list of sixteen cases is on the Family Defense Center website here. FDC also has a complete analysis of one of the bills introduced in Congress to make everyone a "mandated reporter."

Child abuse allegations and Tiger Woods: If only this one could have been screened out

The number of children victimized by false allegations of child abuse is staggering – more than two million per year. Of course the overwhelming majority of these child victims don't wind up taken from their parents, but there is plenty of trauma nonetheless when children are interrogated about the most personal aspects of their lives and, sometimes, stripsearched by caseworkers or medical personnel looking for bruises. (If the allegation is sexual abuse, the medical exam is likely to be a lot worse.)

Mostly, these false reports are well-intentioned blunders by people who sincerely suspected maltreatment. Or they may have had the suspicion planted in their heads by those incessant campaigns to report anyone and everyone for anything and everything based on the slightest suspicion. Or they may have read one of those idiotic lists of "symptoms" of child maltreatment, most of which also can be signs of any number of other things. Often the lists are so broad that there is hardly a child in America who couldn't be considered a possible victim of child abuse or neglect at some point.

The malicious false allegation of maltreatment is relatively rare. But it can be among the most devastating, since a malicious caller can make that call over and over and over again. And since hotlines tend to be far too reluctant to screen out calls that means the investigation, the interrogation, and the stripsearch may be repeated over and over and over again.

HE'S A CELEBRITY – GET HIM OUT OF THIS!

When this happens to the children who usually are victimized, children whose families are poor and powerless, few in authority seem to care. But now, something new has been added: Some children victimized by a false allegation who have a high profile – make that extremely high profile – celebrity father: Tiger Woods.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported yesterday that the child abuse allegation that brought the Florida Department of Children and Families to Woods' home last month not only was false, it may well have been a malicious call. So now, all of a sudden, the state senator who chairs the relevant committee is shocked – shocked! – that children sometimes are victimized by malicious false allegations.

"To use the resources of the state for some grand celebrity theater is completely unacceptable," Sen. Ronda Storms, told the Sun-Sentinel. "It robs children who are legitimately in danger."

She's right, of course.

Storms also told the Sun-Sentinel she fears that if whoever made the false report in this case can get away with it, it might encourage others.

Right again.

But instead of actually moving to do anything about the problem, all she did was write to DCF Secretary George Sheldon to demand that he do something about it – in this particular case.

Odds are there is very little Sheldon can do, in the Woods case and in most of the other cases of alleged malicious false reports, for one simple reason: The people making such reports don't have to leave their names. Not only is such anonymity permitted, it's often encouraged. Campaigns to get people to report their most feeble suspicions often include a reminder that "you can remain anonymous."

THE NEED TO BAN ANONYMOUS REPORTS

That needs to change. Here's how we discuss the issue in our Due Process Agenda:

Of all the sources of child abuse reports, anonymous reports consistently are the least reliable. They're almost always wrong. A study of every anonymous report received in the Bronx, New York, over a two year period found that only 12.4 percent met the incredibly low criteria for "substantiating" reports – and not one of those cases involved death or serious injury. The researchers found that "one case was indicated for 'diaper rash' one case for welfare fraud, and two cases because the apartment was 'dirty.'"

Anonymous reporting should be replaced by confidential reporting. If someone who may have a grudge or someone who simply may be clueless wants to claim that, say, a neighbor is abusing a child, that person should be required to give the hotline worker his or her name and phone number. That information still should be kept secret from the accused in almost all cases, but the hotline needs to know. That will immediately discourage false and trivial reports.

In cases of alleged malicious reports, the law should allow the accused to go to a judge and explain why he feels he is being harassed by false reports, and by whom. The judge should check the record and, if the accused is right, and if the judge is persuaded that the reports are an act of harassment, the name should be released to the accused, who should have the right to sue for damages.

Of course, the objection to banning anonymous reports, and the objection to any kind of serious screening mechanism, is that some anonymous calls may be legitimate.

That's true.

If you ban anonymous reports, some real cases might be missed – though anyone who is sincere and has genuine reason to suspect maltreatment should be comfortable with confidential reporting.

But more real cases are missed now by overloading the system with false reports – just as Sen. Storms suggests. There always will be screening in child welfare. The choice is not between screening and no screening. The choice is between rational screening and irrational screening. The more cases that cascade down upon investigators the less time they get for each one. So some get short shrift. It is far safer for children if cases are screened rationally by eliminating anonymous reports, rather than irrationally based on which file floats to the top of the pile on a caseworker's desk.

As the authors of the Bronx study put it, in recommending that anonymous reports be rejected: "The resources of child protective agencies are not limitless. The time and energy spent investigating false reports could better be given to more serious cases, and children may suffer less as a result."

So Sen. Storms, if you are serious about wanting to protect children from harassment, and maybe save some children's lives, by directing resources where they'll do the most good, you know what you have to do: Introduce legislation to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting.

I'm not holding my breath. It would take a great deal of political courage to introduce such legislation. But if she fails to act, I hope reporters will remember what she said. You know, the part about: "To use the resources of the state for some grand celebrity theater is completely unacceptable," the next time Ronda Storms holds a news conference in a state office building.

A PROXIMITY TO SOME FLAWED JOURNALISM

In the particular case of the Tiger Woods case, the Woods children also may be victims of bad timing. The call about their father came in less than a month after the Miami Herald ran those misleading stories about the hotline, suggesting, wrongly, that it was screening out too many cases. Those were the stories which included suggestions that DCF should investigate absolutely every report, no matter how absurd.

I don't know what actually was in the report concerning the Woods family. Perhaps the caller did, in fact, leave his or her name. Perhaps there was enough credible information to merit the investigation. Even if there wasn't, under current Florida law, if the caller alleged something that fits the legal definition of maltreatment, it must be screened in, even if the source was anonymous and could provide no basis for the allegations. But screening out a report about Tiger Woods would have been tough in any event in light of his high profile marital problems. It would have been even harder in the wake of the Herald's reporting.

But there also is some good news about Florida. That story tomorrow.