Anonymous tips and child abuse investigations (Erin)

 

Friday June 5, 2009

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/06/anonymous-tips-and-child-abuse.html

Just about every person in America would agree with the statement: child abuse is a terrible crime, and we should do whatever we can to prevent it, or to stop it.

But Americans often disagree on the details of how to do that. In particular, battles have arisen over the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and whether this amendment applies to social workers investigating a claim of child abuse or neglect, even if this claim has come from an anonymous tipster and there has been no corroborating evidence that it might be true.

On the one hand, no one wants a child who is being abused to have to wait a long time for help to come. In cases where there is clearly immediate danger of harm to a child, we don’t want to tie up investigators’ hands with too much red tape.

On the other hand, heartbreaking stories of parents who are investigated, and children removed from their parents’ loving care overnight or even longer, on the strength of what turns out to be a malicious or completely fabricated report of abuse made by someone who wants to hurt the family (sometimes, sadly, a feuding relative) send chills up every loving parent’s spine. Sad statistics show that a child is much more likely to be a victim of some kinds of abuse while in foster care than in his own home (often at the hands of other children in the home, not the foster parents). The thought that a misunderstanding, or worse, an act of malice, could lead to one’s children being removed is terrifying to many parents.

That’s why I was interested in this blog post, written by the head of the Texas Home School Coalition, Tim Lambert:

SB 1064 by Senator Kirk Watson was filed early in the session, and it sought to allow CPS, in the course of an investigation of abuse or neglect, to get the medical or mental health records of children who are the focus of an investigation. In order for CPS to accomplish this, the person refusing to give the records and parents must be given notice and a court hearing and CPS must show “good cause” for the action before the court would order the release of said records to CPS.

However, the bill was substituted in committee for a very different SB 1064, which was passed out of the Senate and sent to the House. The new SB 1064 gave the court authority to force parents to give CPS access to the child and/or transport the child for “interview, examination and investigation,” without a court hearing or notice to the parent. Worst of all, the language in the current statute that requires CPS to prove “good cause shown” was stricken. Thus this bill would allow CPS, during an investigation in which the parents would not waive their 4th amendment rights, entrance into their home, access to medical or mental health records of their children or transportation of the child, on the simple filing of an affidavit by a CPS worker with no hearing or opportunity for the parents or their legal counsel to present their case.

The reason that the committee substitute was not filed as the original bill is clear. It would have caused a firestorm of opposition for the wholesale destruction of parental rights in the course of an investigation of child abuse by CPS. When the bill was scheduled for a hearing in the House Human Services Committee, officials of the Parent Guidance Center – a pro-parent group that helps families who are under investigation by CPS – presented written testimony and signed witness cards in opposition to the bill. Strangely, that testimony and those witness cards were not entered into the record of the hearing on the bill.

On the last day of the session, Representative Patrick Rose, chairman of the House Human Services Committee, offered a floor amendment to SB 1440 (another bill by Watson), which was on the Local and Consent Calendar. The amendment offered by Rose was the language of committee substitute SB 1064, and since SB 1440 was considered non-controversial and the sponsor of the bill (Rose) agreed to the amendment, it was adopted on a voice vote, and the final language of SB 1440 includes the committee substitute language of SB 1064.

More:

(UPDATE: be sure to read the lengthy comment in the comments thread by Richard Wexler, the Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.)

The bill, now SB 1440, has caught the attention of other concerned parents in Texas in addition to homeschooling parents; the issue isn’t really specific to homeschooling, but affects everyone who thinks that allowing CPS workers to show up at your front door and remove your children from your home without probable cause, without a warrant, without any evidence besides an anonymous tip that somebody heard a child yelling in the back yard (no, seriously, CPS investigations have been conducted for no more than that), isn’t really the best idea in the world.

I’ve read and seen some things from the CPS side, too. They’re often understaffed and overburdened, under-budgeted and overextended. They see heartbreaking stories unfold of children treated worse than most of us would ever like to imagine, and when they’re handed a stack of cases and told to investigate, they do.

But the anonymous tip system, while saving some children, is tearing apart the lives of others. How long does it take a four-year-old, say, to recover from being taken from his home and placed with strangers, even just overnight? What lasting fears of danger or of abandonment will cause him to suffer, especially when the case was without merit and his parents good, loving people who never harmed him at all? And from the CPS side of things, how many hours and how much time and effort is wasted investigating people for no reason other than that their neighbors don’t like that they let the kids play outside in the early evenings, or because an ex-husband or ex-wife wants to hurt the spouse who got custody?

SB 1440 should be opposed by Texans; I’ve already made my opposition to this bill known. But what I’d really like to see is an end of the anonymous tip system–yes, let the person reporting be anonymous to the family, so long as they’re willing to give their names and addresses to the CPS workers to be kept in a confidential file. That would decrease the number of false or malicious tips made, freeing up social workers to spend more time on the tips that have some merit or some evidence aside from a tipster’s word.

At the very least, I’d like to see language inserted into Section 4, subsection c-2 of SB 1440 that says something like this: “Neither the reasonable and prudent belief that a child’s physical or mental health or welfare has been or may be adversely affected by abuse or neglect, nor the fair probability that that allegations of abuse or neglect will be sustained if the requested order is issued and executed, may be based on an anonymous tip, on hearsay evidence whether anonymous or not, or on any single allegation which has been unsubstantiated by corroborating evidence or signed testimony by at least one other party.

Richard Wexlers Comment On this Post

 

Richard Wexler

June 5, 2009 10:38 AM

http://www.nccpr.org

Speaking as a lifelong-liberal-non-countercultural-lapsed-card-carrying-member-of-the-ACLU: Ms. Manning, you’re absolutely right.

But it’s not just the children needlessly interrogated, stripsearched and taken from everyone they know and love who suffer. All that time, money and effort wasted on false allegations and trivial cases is, in effect, stolen from children in real danger. That’s why CPS agencies are so overwhelmed, and that’s why, all over the country, it is only systems that have curbed excessive intervention and needless removal of children that actually have made children safer. Details are on our website, www.nccpr.org

And nothing wastes more time, and endangers more children, than anonymous reports. That’s why your recommendation – to replace anonymous reporting with confidential reporting – is exactly what we’ve proposed for years. It’s part of our Due Process Agenda available on our website here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/dueprocess.pdf Our answer to rjohnson’s question, “what do you folks have to offer that might help improve the system?” is called Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right and it’s available here: http://www.nccpr.org/index_files/Page410.htm Our comprehensive report on Texas child welfare is here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/texasreport2.pdf with updated data here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/statsupdate.pdf

The particular bill Ms. Manning writes about is intended to legalize Texas CPS’ illegal behavior in the FLDS case and another in which its actions were overturned by the courts. We have a detailed discussion of the bill on the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog. You can find it, and all of our FLDS commentary, by going to www.nccpr.blogspot.com and entering FLDS in the search box. There’s more about the bill on the website of an excellent Texas advocacy group, the Parent Guidance Center, www.parentguidancecenter.org

Three final points:

–This is an issue that crosses ideological lines in important ways and both left and right have a lot to answer for. Too many conservatives think “family values” are solely a middle-class entitlement – witness Newt Gingrich proposing to throw poor people’s children into orphanages. And too many of my fellow liberals will gladly discard everything they claim to believe about civil liberties and embrace a framework of law that only John Ashcroft could love as soon as soon as someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.

–The notion that cash-strapped localities “underinvestigate” is mistaken. It assumes a logical, rational system of screening calls to child abuse hotlines where none exists. On the contrary, child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. This can be seen in the enormous variations in rates of removal from state to state and, in California and elsewhere, county to county.

–rjohnson is mistaken in suggesting that caseworkers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t I’ve followed child welfare for more than 30 years, first as a reporter and now as an advocate. In all that time, I have never seen a caseworker fired, demoted, suspended, reprimanded or so much as slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children. All of these things have happened to workers who left even one child in her or his own home and had something go wrong. When it comes to taking away children workers are not damned if they do and damned if they don’t – they’re only damned if they don’t.

Richard Wexler

Executive Director

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

Alexandria Va.

www.nccpr.org