Penalties for Falsely Reporting Child Abuse

The Jerry Sandusky criminal trial is over; the civil lawsuits are in active settlement mode. Undoubtedly, the entire country is more tuned into child abuse than it ever was. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that about 105 bills on the reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect have been introduced in 2012 legislative sessions in 30 states and the District of Columbia. 1 All of them include a penalty for failing to report suspected child abuse. Oregon is one of the states which recently enacted child abuse reporting legislation. It added to the list of mandated reporters any employee or volunteer of organization providing ...

Respite Care for Foster Parents Should Not Mean Inferior Care for Foster Children

Caring for a foster child, especially in a therapeutic setting, is a full-time undertaking. Because it can have severe emotional repercussions on the family, respite care by another trained foster parent or other professional is frequently made available.Respite care is an intervention that may reduce the risk of abuse or neglect to the foster child (Goldman, Salus, Wolcott, & Kennedy, 2003) while it simultaneously offers welcome benefits to the caregiver (MacDonald & Callery, 2004). Indeed, one study (Chan & Sigafoos, 2001) found that the more frequently families made use of respite care, the lower their scores were of perceived family conflict. Not ...

Child Abuse Investigations: have a healthy suspicion of multiple “unsubstantiated” findings

Following a child abuse/neglect investigation, a child protective services (CPS) investigator, usually in consultation with his or her supervisor, determines if the report should be substantiated or unsubstantiated. If the report is substantiated it means that the information gathered supports a finding of child abuse or neglect. If the report is unsubstantiated it means that the information gathered does not support a finding of child abuse or neglect. Each state has its own unique scheme governing the practical application of the term “unsubstantiated” or other similar term. The resultant legal sufficiency of this term is extraordinar...

Non-abused siblings who remain at home: a dangerous Child Protection Services intersection

A recent study identifies the nation's most dangerous traffic intersection. It’s at Flamingo Road and Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The insurance company’s engineer who compiled the report notes that the intersection meets appropriate design standards and is regulated by traffic lights. He said traffic volume and driver error were two important factors in the high number of crashes. One of the most dangerous intersections of every state’s child welfare system is the decision whether to remove or leave non-abused siblings in a home in which another sibling has been abused or neglected. Like the dangerous intersection ...

Standard of Care in Screening Adoptive, Foster and Kinship Parents

The lack of a clear legal “standard of care” for the evaluation and screening of prospective adoptive, foster, and kinship applicants directly undermines the child placement process, the physical and emotional development of children placed in adoptive and foster homes, and the adjudication of legal issues arising when children are harmed. Often, it is only when a lawsuit is filed that society is forced to take a hard look at its legal expectations, and it is then compelled to acknowledge that there may be a very real distinction between child welfare’s “best practice” standard and the legal standard of care. So begins ...

Homeschooling and Child Protection

Homeschooling is parent-directed education that meets the requirements for regular school attendance. The U.S. Department of Education in its 2007 National Household Education Survey estimated that “1.5 million students (1,508,000) were homeschooled in the United States.”[1] In that same study, parents were asked why they homeschooled their children. “The three reasons selected by parents of more than two-thirds of students were concern about the school environment, to provide religious or moral instruction, and dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools.”[2] Almost all states specifically list ...

Handling Lost/Destroyed Records in Child Welfare Tort Litigation

A recently published article in the American Bar Association's Child Law Practice examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare context. Best practices are offered from three perspectives—the plaintiff, the defending agency, and the court. Litigation involving public and private social services agencies should make administrators and attorneys keenly aware of the obligation to preserve evidence. Across the country, torts regarding individual children in the child welfare system are common. Professor Daniel Pollack and his co-author Associate Professor Dale Margolin explain that while lost records ...

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