More Mandated Child Abuse Reporting Would Be Worst Response to Penn State Scandal

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The worst response to the child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State University would be to rush to broaden laws requiring people to report their slightest suspicions of child maltreatment, according to a national non-profit child advocacy group.

"The calls to make anyone and everyone report anything and everything to child protective services (CPS) agencies are as harmful as they are predictable," said Richard Wexler, Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. "A massive expansion of mandatory reporting laws will harm the very children it is intended to help.

"More children will suffer at the hands of child abusers because CPS caseworkers will be even more overwhelmed with false allegations and have even less time to find children in real danger," Wexler said. "And more children will suffer at the hands of CPS agencies - because inflicting a child abuse investigation on a child who was never otherwise harmed is an act of child abuse in and of itself."

Wexler said the Penn State cases were not the result of the lack of laws. Rather, he said, if the allegations are true, "two people already required to report child maltreatment under existing law failed to do so."

Changing laws now would only result in "a deluge of false allegations called in by newly-minted 'mandated reporters' protecting not children but themselves - because they feared being punished for failure to report. The time wasted on these cases would be stolen from children in real danger."

In addition, Wexler said, "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 traumatize that child. The trauma is compounded if the child is stripsearched by caseworkers looking for bruises. The examination for sexual abuse is even more traumatic.

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

College or university reporting of crime statistics is frequently referred to as "Clery crime statistics" or "Clery reporting," named after the "Clery Act. This federal law mandates the disclosure of certain statistics regarding criminal incidents, that occur within the geographic boundaries of an institution of higher education.

The state of Pennsylvania also mandates similar requirements under the state law.

For more about the harm of expanding mandatory reporting, see NCCPR's Child Welfare Blog, www.nccprblog.org.

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

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