CO: Does mandatory reporting of child abuse help or hurt? A Colorado task force is taking a second look.

Source: coloradosun.com 3/7/23

A newly launched state task force is only the second in the nation to look closely at reforming policies that have gone unchallenged for decades.

Every person with a conscience is against child abuse. But for the first time in decades, policymakers are giving the most widely used intervention in child abuse cases — mandatory reporting — a second look. 

In Colorado, a task force born of calls to strengthen mandatory reporting laws after a horrific abuse case has grown into something different: a look at whether these laws do what they are intended to do at all. 

“The way our mandatory reporting system exists right now — my opinion is that it does more harm than it does good,” Jerry Milner told the state’s Mandatory Reporting Task Force last  month. 

Milner is former head of the Children’s Bureau, a federal agency tasked with child abuse prevention. He said listening to families, including children, who have been negatively impacted by intrusive and damaging investigations by child protective services changed his mind about a policy he once endorsed. 

“There are things that warrant that intrusion, but it’s not the most typical situation, and the trauma that we inflict on families has given me quite a different perspective,” he said. 

Read the full article

 

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Abuse comes in many forms. Just because a body part is touched doesn’t always equate into abuse. Although when the DA’s office gets done with its twisted spin of events it’s always grave trauma. The vast majority of said trauma comes not from the event itself but in the courts reaction to it. Something to think about.

Calls for mandatory reporting are precisely what is expected of registered persons. In this cause such notion promotes errant investigations, indictments and a formal base of false positive convictions. In a world of justice system already known to produce wrongful convictions!
Wrongfulconvictionsblog https://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/

All the More social dogma aimed at promoting warrantless victim’s stance. The problem with pathological victim’s stance is that it is a dangerous mindset used to justify over reaction. It wasn’t enough in prewar Germany circa 1933 for the public rhetoric to disparage the Jews and Gypsies as inferior humans, they went so far as to lay claim to victim’s stance on behalf of the future of Germany’s children. The paranoia that resulted from the dogma had a spiraling effect that lead to fascist extremism. Then as now, many slaves were taken as a means of production.