Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee on Children and Families Hearing on Child Protection: Balancing Diverging Interests May 25, 1995

Richard Wexler, Assistant Professor of Communications, Penn State University

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to testify before you this afternoon. My name is Richard Wexler. I am Assistant Professor of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University -- Beaver Campus. Before joining the Penn State faculty, I was a journalist for 16 years, and I spent much of that time covering child welfare issues, work which led me to write the book, Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse. (Prometheus Books: 1990, (1995). I am also Vice President of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an all-volunteer organization working to change the child welfare system.

More than a hundred years ago, citizens who hated and feared the immigrant poor branded them genetically inferior and took away their children, placing them in middle class and wealthy homes or institutions. These people proudly called themselves CHILD SAVERS. The term child saving has gone out of fashion, but the practice has not. today's child savers know it is no longer fashionable to label the poor genetically inferior -- at least I hope that is still unfashionable -- so they are labeled psychologically inferior instead. But the result is the same: their children are taken from their loving arms into the homes of middle class strangers.

It's the child savers who often can be heard from after testimony like that you just heard from Jim Wade. They are the ones who shed crocodile tears over a family's plight while defending the system that caused it. They are the ones who insist that, while it's too bad about poor Alicia, the case was just an aberration. Mr. Chairman, if nothing else comes out of this hearing, please understand this: The Wade Case is not an aberration. The Wade Case is what happens when well-meaning people turn the war against child abuse into a war against children.

We have created a system that destroys children in order to save them. as Kermit Wiltse, Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the University of California at Berkeley has put it: "We have a monster on our hands."

Two out of three reports alleging child abuse are false reports. America's children are victimized by false allegations of child abuse more than two million times every year. The child savers are, to use one of their own favorite phrases -- in denial -- about this. They'll say, in effect, those parents were probably guilty, but we just couldn't prove it. That is not true. Of course there are times when guilty parents will wrongly be labeled innocent. But, thanks to research commissioned by NCCAN, we know that workers are two to six times more likely to wrongly label innocent parents guilty. Indeed, according to the statistics gathered by the child savers, Jim Wade is a "substantiated," a "confirmed" child abuser. And it's really not hard to see why this happens.

When child savers claim that cases are wrongly labeled unfounded because abuse couldn't be proven, they know full well that no proof is required. In most cases, "substantiation" means only that an untrained, inexperienced caseworker checked a box on a form. It does not mean a court made a determination, it does not mean that the accused even got to make his or her case. And it does not mean that the accusation was proved beyond a reasonable doubt or even, in most states, by a preponderance of the evidence, the lowest standard any court will accept. It means only that the worker thought there was "some credible evidence" of guilt, even if there was more evidence of innocence.

Last year, in a case from New York brought by members of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that: "the 'some credible evidence' standard results in many individuals being (labeled child abusers and) placed in the state's central register who do not belong there."

It is only cases that cannot even meet this incredibly low standard that are labeled unfounded. So if anything, the estimate that two thirds of all reports are false is an underestimate. Next, we need to turn to the types of cases that are included in the child savers' definitions of maltreatment. Think of child abuse and what comes to mind? Probably a child brutally beaten, or tortured, or sexually assaulted, or killed. Substantiated cases of these kinds present, at most, eight percent of all reports of maltreatment. That does not make child abuse a minor problem. Even a small percentage is a big number, and child abuse is both overreported and underreported. Furthermore, even one case of abuse is a tragedy we should not be prepared to tolerate. (I only wish the child savers would say the same about even one case of needless foster care placement).

The problem of child abuse is serious and real -- it's the solutions that have been phony. And it's those phony solutions that have caused so much misery. Most of the other 92 percent of all reports are false reports or cases labeled deprivation of necessities. And what does that mean? It can include cases in which a parent deliberately starves a child to death -- but far more common are cases in which the foodstamps ran out at the end of the month and there wasn't enough to eat. It can include cases like the famous one in Chicago in which the parents jetted off to Acapulco and left their children unsupervised. But far more common is the single mother working two jobs to try to stay off welfare who loses her