I've reprinted this post almost every year since 2010. But for the past two years it's been especially relevant. You can be sure that this year, like last year, the Astroturf fill-in-the-blanks op-eds that various advocacy groups send to their local chapters will be filled with references to an "epidemic" or a "pandemic" of child abuse - as though the moment white middle-class professionals can't have their "eyes" on poor children of color, their parents will rush to torture them. This myth persists even though several national news organizations have challenged it. NCCPR has details here.
I hope that before pushing the send button on
these generic submissions, people will at least have the decency to pause and
think long and hard about just how racist that framing is. Precedent suggests,
however, that they won’t.
In fact, given that the child welfare establishment
has no shame, expect the usual op-eds to have token boilerplate statements
about racial justice – even as they propose making a profoundly racist family
policing system even bigger and more powerful.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , UPDATED
APRIL 1, 2018, MARCH 31, 2020, AND MARCH 31, 2021.
Back in 2003, one of the groups most responsible for fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse came remarkably close to admitting that they did just that – and that it had backfired.
Rather like Dr. Frankenstein admitting he’d created a monster, in a 2003 Request for Proposals concerning how to improve their messaging, Prevent Child Abuse America wrote:
While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities.
In 2020, PCAA went further. They actually
branded what they had done “health
terrorism” – but refused to apologize for it.
This is especially worth remembering as we begin “Child Abuse Awareness Month” – a month, which, appropriately starts on April Fools Day.
So
I’ve reprinted below our 2010 blog post on the topic – with some updates and
links to newer data – since, unfortunately, aside from those data, nothing has
changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under
control.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010:
Get ready for a seemingly endless stream of cookie-cutter news stories and Astroturf op ed columns (the kind written by national groups with blanks to fill in to make them sound home-grown) touting "Child Abuse Awareness Month" – based on the bizarre premise that the American people are blissfully unaware of child abuse.
There is something appropriate about the fact that "Child Abuse Awareness Month" starts on April Fool’s Day, since it involves fooling the public in order to push an agenda of hype and hysteria that obscures the real scope of the problem, and real solutions, in favor of approaches that only make a serious and real problem worse. Your typical Child Abuse Awareness month news story or op ed column follows a standard formula:
1. 1. Take the most horrifying case to
occur in your community over the past year, the more lurid the better.
2. 2. Jump immediately from that story
to a gigantic number which actually is only the number of "reports"
alleging any form of child maltreatment. Ignore the fact that the vast majority
of those reports are false and most of the rest are nothing like the horror
story. Rather, they often involve the confusion of poverty with
neglect. Or…
3. 3. Use only the total number of cases
that caseworkers guess might be true, but call them "confirmed"
giving the guesses, which are simply the opinion of a worker checking a box on
a form, far more credibility than they deserve. A major federal study found
that workers are two- to six-times more likely to wrongly label an innocent
family guilty than to wrongly label real child abusers innocent.
4. 4. Pile hype onto hype by
reasserting the racist, discredited COVID-19 “pandemic
of child abuse” myth.
5. 5. Throw in huge lists of
"symptoms" or "warning signs" that "might" be
"signs" of child abuse – and might as easily be signs of any number
of other things.
6. 6. Instruct us all that it is our duty to phone the local child abuse hotline with any suspicion of anything no matter how vague and how dubious – instead of advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" maltreatment, the same standard often used in law to guide "mandated reporters."
7. Remind us that we are welcome to call the hotline anonymously – thereby encouraging those who want to harass an ex-spouse, a neighbor or anyone else against whom they may have a grudge to go right ahead, secure in the knowledge that they'll never get caught because they can conceal their identity.
It all comes from the same ends-justify-the-means mentality behind, for example an egregiously-misleading report published by the group that calls itself Every Child Matters – the mentality that says: What's a little distortion and exaggeration in the name of a good cause?
In fact, such distortion and exaggeration can do enormous harm to children.
Hotlines wind up with more false reports and trivial cases; children are harassed and traumatized by needless child abuse investigations – often including stripsearches as caseworkers look for bruises - and some of those children are forced needlessly into foster care. The caseworkers wind up even more overloaded by these false allegations, so they have even less time to find children in real danger. And at this moment this year, it still. risks spreading a deadly virus.
Reality check
NCCPR has some resources on our website for any journalists and others interested in putting all this into context, countering the hype and hysteria and pressing for real solutions:
· -- Issue
papers on Understanding Child Abuse
Numbers and False Allegations: What the
Data Really Show
· -- Our Solutions pages, Doing Child Welfare Right and our Due Process Agenda.
· -- Our
presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health
approach.
If the people behind "Child Abuse Awareness Month" (also known as "Child Abuse Prevention Month") really want to prevent "child abuse" then how about campaigning to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.
Poverty increases the stress that can lead to actual abuse and, as noted above,
poverty itself often is confused with "neglect." This can be
seen by the fact that study after study shows even small increases in
income significantly reduce what child welfare systems call
"neglect."
The
problem of child abuse is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony.
The distortion and exaggeration that typify child abuse "awareness"
campaigns only promote phony solutions and make those serious, real problems
even worse.
If only there
were a Statistics Abuse Prevention Month.
