In 1974 the federal government enacted the child abuse prevention and treatment act known as CAPTA. While the intentions of this legislation were honorable the outcome, in the past twenty years has become a disaster for many American families.
A key point of this law is that each state could create its own definition of child abuse and its own procedure for placing people on the child abuser database. An example is that in the state in Kentucky all its takes to make you a state designated child abuser; is the signature of a social worker and a supervisor. There is no jury trial and worse, in many cases no notice that Kentucky holds you to be a child abuser.
This was the finding of Office of Inspector General Robert Benvenuti in 2007. “When DCBS ( which is child protection services in Kentucky) completed investigations in some cases, the letters of findings (Substantiated/Not Substantiated) were not sent to clients at the end of their investigations. This meant the 30-day period established to permit parents to appeal the finding before they are included in the Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN) database elapsed without the parents even knowing about the findings. Once parents realized they had been included in the database, often when they were denied employment, they were required to prove they did not receive the notice before they were permitted to appeal the finding. In one case, this caused a biological parent to lose employment as a teacher for an entire school year.”
For more on this national problem watch the video.
Thank you for raising the issue of false reporting and false data on child abuse and neglect.
It is important that the public is made aware that suspect databases and biased research are being used to make law and solicit money from the public to keep the organizations fraudulently operating.
A lack of accountability and transparency in child welfare needs to be addressed, and that is exactly what this video does.
Beverly Tran
An Original Source
http://www.beverlytran.com
Comment by Beverly Tran — February 27, 2010 @ 1:29 am
no goverment ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will
Comment by Anonymous — March 4, 2010 @ 5:29 pm
I cannot believe that a person can be labeled as a child abuser and have no idea about it. It is absolutely unfair and our government should step in and do something to change the way DCBS handles their cases. There are probablly many people out there in this database with no clue. How sad and unfortunate, my question is: Where does the government feel that this is correct and how do they find it to be fair to the “american” public?
Comment by jennifer — June 30, 2010 @ 9:01 pm