Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead. [propublica.org]

Ingrid Cockhren 10/14/229:00 AM

By Mike Hixenbaugh, Suzy Khimm, and Agnel Philip, Photo: Stephanie Mei-Ling, ProPublica, October 12, 2022

More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner?

In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.

Most notably, they expanded the list of professionals required to report it when they suspect a child might be in danger, broadened the definition for what constitutes abuse and increased the criminal penalties for those who fail to report.

[Please click here to read more.]

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Frank Sterle Jr.Member

But if we’re to proactively avoid the eventual dreadingly invasive conventional reactive means of intervention due to dysfunctional familial situations as a result of flawed rearing — that of the government forced removal of children from the latter environment — we then should be willing to try an unconventional means of proactively preventing future dysfunctional family situations: Teach our young people the science of how a child’s mind develops and therefor its susceptibilities to flawed parenting.

Don’t we owe our children and future generations this much?

10/14/223:59 PM

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