四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

More 'abuse' reporting will hurt children

  If you ask me my dad was a f*cking asshole. Sadly you can't pick your parents. If I had grown up in today's world the government would label may dad as a "child abuser" and placed him in prison and placed me in a CPS run foster home.

Even if my dad was an *sshole I would rather have been raised in a dysfunctional home then in a government prison run by CPS, which is called a foster home, instead of it's real name as a prison for children.

As a child many times I though about running away. And if I had run away, I think I would have been much better off living on the street, then living in a government prison for children.

Source

Opposing view: More 'abuse' reporting will hurt children

By Suchat Pederson, AP

Requiring anyone and everyone to report anything and everything they think might be "child abuse" is the worst possible response to the Penn State horrors. It will harm the very children it's supposed to help.

More than three-quarters of reports alleging abuse and neglect are not substantiated after investigation — even though substantiation typically requires no more than a caseworker's guess that abuse is more likely than not.

Changing laws now will lead to a deluge of even more false allegations from newly minted "mandated reporters" protecting not children but themselves — because they fear being punished for failure to report. The time wasted on these cases will be stolen from children in real danger, so more such children will be missed.

Eighteen states already require everyone to report child abuse. There is no evidence children are safer in those states.

Children also will suffer at the hands of child protective services agencies themselves.

A child abuse investigation is not a benign act. When total strangers pull a small child aside to question him about the most intimate aspects of his life, that can inflict enormous trauma. The trauma is compounded if the child is strip-searched by caseworkers looking for bruises. The medical examination for sexual abuse is worse still.

Sometimes, children have to be put through all that because the risk of actual abuse is even greater. But the threshold for starting such a process should be higher than some guess by, say, a school secretary fearful for her own job.

As with so much else that supposedly involves "child protection," the call for more mandatory reporting really is about adult self-indulgence. It's a way for us to vent our rage at heinous crimes that, if the charges are true, went on for more than a decade. But allowing that self-indulgence to actually make children less safe would be, in itself, a crime against children.

 


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