NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 1, 2025

● Gotta give the Oregon family police agency credit for chutzpah. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting,  Disability Rights Oregon (DRO) charges that after a foster youth forced to live in a hotel committed suicide the Department of Human Services made false statements about key details and covered up its own culpability.  

● But that isn’t even the worst of the chutzpah: The Salem Statesman Journal reports that DHS actually is using the death as a reason to push legislation to make it far easier to resume shipping Oregon foster youth to sometimes hellacious out-of-state institutions, make it easier for institutions to make abusive use of “restraints,” and give lawmakers and the public less information about what they’re doing. DRO calls the bill “a kitchen sink full of known bad practices.” A foster youth asked: “Why would we open more possibilities for maltreatment when it’s already occurring in the system that we have now?” 

The answer is that DHS wants the legislature to believe the only options are parking children in hotels or warehousing them in institutions.  The bill – and that false premise – are discussed here. 

● To the extent that there is any good news out of Oregon, it’s that, as OPB reports, the legislature may extend a pathetically small program to allow some parents convicted of non-violent crimes to stay out of prison so their families can stay together. 

● Speaking of the harm of institutionalization, the Concord Monitor continues its series on that state’s obscene rate of institutionalization with a look at desperate families who voluntarily send their children to faraway institutions because New Hampshire has nothing to offer. At least New Hampshire doesn’t require the parents to surrender custody – but one reason for the lack of options is that beds are filled with foster youth who don’t need to be there in a state that tears apart families at a rate nearly double the national average. 

Referring generally to the shortage of options, one expert told the Monitor, in the newspaper’s words: “The state’s reliance on institutional care is a self-inflicted crisis.” 

● Still speaking of the harm of institutionalization, (where the problem I’m getting to now is worst) one of the greatest harms is the misuse and overuse of psychiatric medication. The Imprint continues its series on the topic – most notably in an installment called “Zombies No More: Former Foster Youth Reflect on Their Medicated Childhoods — and New Ways They Heal.” One striking example, a young woman who remembers: 

stumbling into the kitchen, barely able to walk, on one sunny Los Angeles County morning. Too tired to dish out a bowl of oatmeal from the stove, she brought the whole pot back to a La-Z-Boy recliner. Even then, her limbs leadened, it took several minutes of straining to lift the serving spoon to her mouth. Exhausted, she fell asleep after only a few bites.

● A good bill has made it through one house in Iowa. Iowa Public Radio reports that the bill would require that children in the system get actual lawyers who provide “expressed wishes representation” – that is, they fight for what their child client actually wants, not what they may happen to think is “best.” 

● And a bad bill has so far failed to make it through both houses in Washington State: a bill that would send the family police barging into the confessional.  It would have made clergy mandated reporters, forced to report even what they heard in confession.  As I explain in the Washington State Standard: Of course, it’s not a crime for lawmakers to rush into endorsing bad policy that doesn’t have a prayer of stopping actual child abuse because it sounds good in a press release. But it sure seems like a sin. 

The State Senate passed the bill, but passage in the state House of Representatives is now very unlikely this year. 

● The racism that permeates child welfare doesn’t stop at the northern border. Though Canada’s approach to many social policies is a lot better than ours, that does not apply to family policing. Now scholars at Canada’s most prestigious university, the University of Toronto, have issued a report on the causes of the problem in Ontario, and possible solutions. 

● Back in the United States, The Imprint reports, prosecutors have withdrawn charges of excessive, uh, handshaking, brought as a result of a complaint by a Member of Congress against a foster youth advocate 

● And finally: Our annual reminder on this Blog: If it’s April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month.

Our annual reminder: If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2010 , MOST RECENT UPDATE:  MARCH 29, 2025.

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, little has changed. Because it's a lot easier to create a monster than to bring it under control.

If it's April Fools, it must be Child Abuse Hype and Hysteria Month

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 nature 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.  (One hopes that, now that we know child abuse actually went down when COVID forced the family police to step back, they will knock it off, but that may be too optimistic.)

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 cautioning us about the harm of even well-meaning false reports and advising us to report when we have "reasonable cause to suspect" actual maltreatment - not poverty -- the same standard theoretically 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. 

Of course, given that the child welfare establishment has no shame, in recent years the usual op-eds have included token boilerplate statements about racial justice – even as these establishment groups propose making a profoundly racist family policing system, one that will, at some point investigate the families of more than half of America's Black children, even bigger and more powerful.  But watch what they do, not what they say.  Are they proposing anything that would actually curb the power of the family police, or just tacking on the usual “prevention” programs and blathering about “more training."

All of this 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.  

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, False Allegations: What the Data Really Show. The Failure of Mandatory Reporting,  and many more.

·        -- Solutions pages: Our Due Process Agenda and Doing Child Welfare Right.

·        -- Our presentation on how to really prevent child abuse: take a social justice approach instead of a public health approach. And our warning to be cautious when you hear the phrase "child and family well-being system."

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.