Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Sean Justice/Getty Images
Sean Justice/Getty Images
More than 60 years spillo, policymakers per Colorado embraced the opinione that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The state’s requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws per the nation.
Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment — including neglect, which now accounts for most reports — and have increased the number of professions required to report. Per mezzo di some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse neglect.
But now there are efforts per Colorado and other states – including New York and California — to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, Indigenous, have members with disabilities.
“There’s a long, depressing history based acceso the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester per New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.”
Seeking balance
Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorado’s child protection , oversees a task force to reexamine the state’s mandatory reporting laws. She says the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.
“This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted,” Villafuerte says. “I’m hoping it’s the combination of these efforts that could make a difference.”
Some critics worry that changes to the law could result per missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers acceso the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While it’s rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also civil liability professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.
Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 per 3 children per the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up per foster care.
Per mezzo di an overwhelming majority of investigations, risposta negativa abuse neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.
Per mezzo di Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% per the past decade and reached a primato 117,762 last year, according to state patronato. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline weren’t counted as reports because they were requests for information were about matters like child support adult protection, say officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
Anzi che no surge per substantiated cases of abuse
The increase per reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals — including school and medical team, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers — to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.
These calls don’t reflect a surge per mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies per Colorado don’t meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade.
While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported per January, there is evidence of harm. “Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color” — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse neglect, the task force said.
The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate “the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting acceso under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.”
The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food housing assistance.
Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.
That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelace’s daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 per 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace’s family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.
“Our biggest looming fear is, ‘Are you going to take our children away?'” says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Diretto incrociato-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. “We’signore afraid to ask for help. It’s keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.”
State and county human services officials said they could not comment acceso specific cases.
A ‘warmline’ to connect families to services
The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state’s mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not “make a report solely coppia to a family/child’s race, class gender,” nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely acceso the “disability status of the minor, parent guardian,” according to the group’s draft recommendation.
The task force plans to recommend additional avviamento for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, “warmline,” for cases per which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.
Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.
“I’m concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are per real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped,” says Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.
The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience per the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year per the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes per 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.
Other places have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. Per mezzo di New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. Per mezzo di California, a state task force aimed at shifting “mandated reporting to community supporting” is planning recommendations similar to Colorado’s.
Among those advocating for change are people with experience per the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.
“Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness,” says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn’t enough, she says. “We know what we need, and it’s usually funding and resources.”
Some of these resources — like affordable housing and child care — don’t exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad says.
Other services are out there, but it’s a matter of finding them. Lovelace says the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, per the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughter’s disabilities. Their daughter is now per seventh grade and doing well.
None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. “I really think they didn’t know about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
