Wade case stirs calls for more accountability in child-abuse probes

DANA WILKIE

The San Diego Union-Tribune

What could be more tormenting than being accused -- falsely -- of raping your child?

Jim Wade -- now well known to San Diegans as the father mistakenly charged five years ago with raping and sodomizing daughter Alicia -- lived this nightmare. Thanks to the law's arm, he and his family now have about $3.7 million for their suffering.

In some people's minds, there are other reparations to be made. One of them is shaping the law so social workers and other child-abuse investigators are more answerable for their accusations, as they probably should have been in the case of Jim Wade.

But here, where the pace of lawmaking plods, reparations are not as obvious as the Wades' $3.7 million court settlement, nor as immediately gratifying. Two lawmakers offer compelling arguments for bills that would hold social workers more accountable for their actions. Just as compelling are the arguments of children's advocates who oppose the bills.

It can be difficult for one who listens to the arguments to come down on either side.

Alicia Wade was 8 years old in 1989 when she was raped and sodomized while her family slept in their military housing apartment. Wade, a 20-year Navy man, was charged with the crime, and Alicia was placed in foster care.

After DNA tests on semen stains excluded Wade as a suspect, another man, Albert Carder Jr., pleaded guilty to the attack and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The story, however, is made more horrifying now that state regulators accuse Alicia's counselor, Kathleen King Goodfriend, of coercing the child into naming her father as her attacker.

For 13 months, in twice-weekly sessions with Goodfriend, Alicia stuck to her story that a stranger reached in through a bedroom window at the Serra Mesa housing complex and carried her outside. Regardless, says a complaint by the state Board of Behavioral Science Examiners, Goodfriend pressured Alicia -- isolating her from her family and promising her she could go home if she would blame her father for the attack.

Alicia finally did. Wade was arrested and faced 16 years in prison. He borrowed more than $100,000 from his parents to pay for his defense and other bills. Alicia's mother, Denise, attempted suicide.

All this happened even though records show that Goodfriend, along with a county counsel and a county social worker, knew from the start of the case that Carder, a convicted child molester and methamphetamine addict, was molesting young girls in the Wades' housing complex. In some of those cases, Carder entered the house through a bedroom window, as he had with Alicia.

Current law generally protects those who investigate child-abuse cases from being liable for the consequences of actions that require them to exercise discretion.

In other words, even if social workers abuse their discretion, even if they act maliciously or without probable cause, the nature of their job protects them from responsibility should their actions injure a child or family.

Worried that this immunity allows workers to falsely accuse parents and improperly take children from their homes, two Republican legislators introduced bills giving social and child-protection workers lessened protection from responsibility.

One, by Assemblyman David Knowles of Cameron Park, says social workers would enjoy only the immunity afforded peace officers, who are not liable for actions performed within the scope of their authority but can be held liable for actions beyond that. Though vague, it means social workers could be held liable if they did not follow Department of Social Services guidelines in child-abuse investigations.

Another bill, by Sen. Maurice Johannessen of Redding, would have held workers liable for actions that were intentionally reckless. Though this standard seems more clear than that in Knowles' bill, the senator's measure failed last week to get beyond a Senate committee. It may be amended to look like Knowles' legislation, or it may be dropped altogether.

While discussing his bill last week, Johannessen was joined by Carol Hopkins, a member of the 1992 San Diego County grand jury that criticized how various agencies handled the Wade case. Among the jury's determinations: The Department of Social Services sometimes removed children from their homes too quickly, and some social workers exerted too much power in determining the future of a family.

Children's advocates and lobbyists for the National Association of Social Workers argue that the bills would have a chilling effect on social workers, making them more likely to leave children in dangerous homes rather than risk lawsuits. After all, under the bills the only instance in which social workers would still enjoy complete immunity is if they did not take a child from a home and the child wound up being abused.

"The social worker is in a very delicate position already," said Robert Fellmeth, executive director of the Children's Advocacy Institute. All a parent would have to say to kick off a lawsuit, he insisted, is that the social worker acted outside the scope of his authority.

Hopkins' rejoinder is that a "chilling effect" isn't such a bad idea. Says she: "You want social workers to think prior to making a decision which can permanently affect a child's life."