Pound Pup Legacy

Child Abuse Reporting: Variety of Reports

www.liftingtheveil.org

In considering reports from all sources, social work professor Chris Mouzakitis concluded: "Much of what is reported is unworthy of followup."[1]

A surprising number of the over 3 million annual reports aren't even reports of abuse or neglect. What are these calls that so many of the states screen out, and from where do they originate?

MALICIOUS REPORTS

"It is disturbing that no one is able to say how many accusations of sexual and physical abuse of children are incorrect," wrote Third District Supervisor Susan Golding to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. "National authorities have estimated that erroneous diagnoses of child abuse are made in five to ten percent of cases."

Susan Golding also noted considerable evidence that false and malicious allegations are frequently used as a tool of harassment:

Over the past three months I have seen too much evidence that false accusations of child abuse and neglect may be being used as harassment. Often this is where the problem originates. Sometimes this occurs in custody disputes, through our concilitory process. Neighbor against neighbor. Foster parents against parents. The scenarios are numerous -- some quite complex. These false accusations are flooding the already overburdened hot-line system...

Golding suggested that anonymous reporting ought to be reviewed, lessening the chance of individuals using it anonymously "to harass and falsely accuse for personal reasons."[2]

Few unfounded reports are made maliciously, according to Douglas Besharov, original director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Notes Besharov: "Studies of sexual abuse reports, for example, suggest that, at most, from 4 to 10 percent of these reports are knowingly false."[3]

Assuming this to be an accurate estimate of the overall percentage of deliberately malicious reports, this small a percentage of the overall total would put the number of such reports in the range of 120,000 to over 300,000 per year.

Of the reports actually passed on for investigations, malicious or intentionally false reports constituted about 4 percent of the unsubstantiated investigations in 1995. But this figure is provided by only five states which endeavor to maintain this statistic.[4]

The New York State Registry may provide a more reliable estimate, with 85,000 of the 486,000 calls it received in 1994 having been determined to be prank calls, many of which had to be treated as genuine until proven otherwise.[5]

Extending the ratio of 17.5 percent to the national total, this would amount to 542,500 prank calls among the national estimate of 3.1 million calls.

There is some anecdotal evidence which would suggest the actual figure to be higher, and that those reports made with malicious intent are likely to involve the most serious allegations.

In a housing project in Massachusetts, for example, a teenager explained: "One thing people do here, if they don't like their neighbor, is to call the child protective."[6]

In Pennsylvania, out of eighteen reports made by landlords in 1988, none was indicated, suggesting that the child abuse hotlines may be used as a tool of harassment in landlord-tenant disputes.[7]

Harassment calls would appear to be quite common. For example, a Missouri committee determined that approximately 15 percent of all calls in the Springfield area were harassment calls.[8]

"The current flood of unfounded reports is overwhelming the limited resources of child protective agencies," argues Douglas Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.

"For fear of missing even one abused child, workers perform extensive investigations of vague and apparently unsupported reports," disrupting hundreds of thousands of innocent families each year.

Notes the former NCCAN director: "Even when a home visit based on an anonymous report turns up no evidence of maltreatment, they usually interview neighbors, school teachers, and day care personnel to make sure that the child is not abused." And, even repeated anonymous and unfounded reports do not necessarily prevent a further investigation.[9]

 "It's no secret that four to six of every ten cases are closed by CPS after initial investigation. The public knows that, the media know that, and so do the politicians," writes Larry Brown of the American Humane Association.

"If CPS is chasing windmills in up to half of the reported cases, something is very wrong."[10]

What is the impact of the deliberately malicious reports that are accepted for investigation? Former New York City caseworker and Turning Stones author Marc Parent explains:

Once in a while, cases generated by anonymous callers proved to be true, but not usually. Reported crack houses with children locked in small crates covered in bruises and urine often turned out to be buildings with doormen and well-cared-for children tucked tightly in bed. The toll of the false reports was exhausting. It was sickening to to visit families in the middle of the night, make parents wait outside, wake up children and strip them naked to look for bruises that were never there.

"More often than not," he adds, "victims of false reports turned out to be people in the midst of completely unrelated feuds with a neighbor or two. Strange coincidence."[11]

One such feud generated a call to the Buffalo, New York, child abuse hotline reporting that two children were being left alone all day, forced to forage for food in garbage cans.

When the caseworker arrived to investigate the allegations, she walked in on a wedding.

"The person who called the hotline was a spiteful neighbor," explained Karen Schimke, who ran the Erie County CPS unit at the time. "She was upset at not having been invited to the wedding."[12]

Anonymous reports would appear to be particularly troublesome, with only about 25 percent of them substantiated, as compared to 35 percent of reports from other nonprofessional sources.[13]

From the Los Angeles Times comes this account of caseworker Jennifer Garza, who is investigating a report of domestic violence reported by a 17-year-old runaway girl:

Garza finds an immaculate apartment, with wind chimes on the porch, a computer, embroidered house rules hung on the wall, an umbrella folder of medical records, a fat toddler in bed watching "Aladdin" on the VCR, a well-scrubbed 13-year-old boy and a 35-year-old mother from El Salvador who speaks halting English.

The mother asks for a Spanish-speaking social worker, but in the meantime gives Garza a synopsis. The daughter is incorrigible, Isabel Quezada says, and "wants to do what she wants to do." She has run away and filed false complaints before.

"We get a lot of these," Garza says. "Kids running wild and then reporting child abuse."[14]