As child care providers, we are sometimes put in difficult situations with families. You may have parents going through a nasty divorce, parents accusing each other of child abuse/neglect, parents who have court orders in relation to the care and supervision of their children or a child who you suspect is suffering at the hands of their parents. No matter the situation, you may feel like you are in a tough spot.
I am going to be covering these difficult issues in a series
of articles on this blog. The first
issue I am going to talk about is suspected child abuse or neglect. As a former CPS social worker, I have
visited child care providers who were trying to do the right thing, but often
were making mistakes – mistakes that could easily be life-threatening for the
children in their care.
- A child comes to your care with an unexplained injury – or the explanation given by the parent doesn’t seem to “add up”.
It is not your job to conduct an
investigation. It is your job to be a
reporter. As a child care provider (in
most states) you are considered a “mandated reporter”. What that means is that if you suspect child
abuse OR neglect, you are required by law to contact the child abuse reporting
hotline in your area. It is our general
instinct to confront the parent about the injuries and conduct our own
investigation into the matter. However,
you have not been trained to conduct an investigation. Most likely you don’t really know the laws
governing these types of cases or the local jurisdictional
responsibilities. As the provider you
can give valuable information to the CPS investigator when they call you to
inquire about the report. You are able
to identify any behavioral changes in the child or general physical
conditions. Often, you are the only
other person who sees the child’s body unclothed (in the case of infants or
toilet training young ones). It is
critical however, to provide factual information. Don’t make up “facts” because you are asked a
question that you think you should know the answer to. If you don’t know for a fact – state that you
do not know. It makes investigating
child abuse cases so much more difficult if the investigator has to disprove
supposition.
- A child tells you that they are being hurt at home.
Your job is to contact the child
abuse hotline and report exactly what the child has told you. The hotline worker will try to ascertain
details, but if you don’t know details – don’t make them up! Only report the facts, your direct
observations, what the child told you EXACTLY.
Sometimes we try to fill in between the lines, make the story seem more
accurate, determine what we think might have happened…. All of these things
make a thorough investigation more difficult.
- A teacher comes to you (as a Director, Lead Teacher, Assistant Director) since you are their supervisor and tells you that they suspect child abuse/neglect. They want you to make a call to the CPS hotline on their behalf.
What I would do in this situation
is make the phone call together. The
teacher is the one who has the suspicions based on something they have
observed. It is not appropriate for you
to take their report and then call the hotline.
The hotline intake worker will ask questions that you will not be able
to answer and they will need to speak to the teacher anyway. Being moral support to your employee is fine,
but influencing the call is not – other than to make sure that the call is
made.
- A teacher calls in a hotline report to CPS without your prior knowledge or “approval” as their supervisor or Director.
It is not a good idea to have a
program policy that all child abuse/neglect issues must be brought to the
Director (insert whatever title you want here) first. Being a mandated reporter does not mean that
the person must report to their supervisor FIRST. You can have a policy that states that the
administration of the program would appreciate being informed when a child
abuse hotline report is made. But it is
not OK for you to require them to inform your administrative people first. Really, they cannot even be required to
inform the program administration at all.
It is just generally accepted practice to make sure administrators know
about these situations so they know what is going on when the investigator
shows up at your door.
Remember, the most critical issue
here is to train your employees appropriately and make sure they know the
definitions of abuse and neglect and how to appropriately report these
situations to the authorities.
No comments:
Post a Comment