Social Workers Lambaste Child Abuse Bills Intent Is To Curb False Accusations, But Some Say Overall Effect Would Be To Put Children’s Lives At Risk

Physicians, social workers and child abuse prevention groups warned Monday that bills being debated in a Senate committee today would hurt efforts to stop child abuse more than they would help.

The package of six bills proposed by Sen. Grant Ipsen, R-Boise, would change rules regarding anonymous reports of child abuse and would remove immunity from people involved with child abuse cases. Ipsen’s intent is to curb malicious and false accusations of child abuse, thus protecting people whose reputations are damaged by those accusations.

One bill would prohibit investigations based on anonymous complaints and would require two corroborating medical opinions by physicians before a report of physical child abuse could be filed.

But Alice Koskela of the Idaho Women’s Network said that bill and others would have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to report abuse.

“We feel that the provisions in that bill would stifle the reporting of actual child abuse,” Koskela said. “In a lot of communities, finding two physicians would be a real hardship, so we think that rural children would be hurt by these bills.”

Another controversial bill proposed by Sen. Bruce Sweeney, D-Lewiston, would exempt members of the clergy from reporting incidents of abuse revealed to them in confession by abusers or victims.

Lorin Nielsen, Bannock County undersheriff and also a member of the clergy, said he thinks that would lead to more crimes being kept secret.

Social workers acting on their own intuition in investigating child abuse cases also would lose immunity under the bills. Ken Petersen of the National Association of Social Workers said several of the bills would make social work much more difficult in abuse cases, hindering some of the crucial intervention work social workers do in abuse cases.

One bill would change the waiting period before removing a child from a home to only eight hours from the current 24. But the one-day period allows social workers and the affected family to better prepare for the order, and any shorter time frame puts too much strain on all parties, Koskela said.

If passed, the bills might reduce the number of anonymous malicious reports, said Dr. Tom Cornwall of Boise, who chairs the Children at Risk task force. But the overall effect would raise too many privacy barriers for people who want to report incidents, thus putting the lives of children at risk, he said.

About 13,500 reports of child abuse were made in Idaho in 1994. About 1,100 of those were anonymous.

The Senate Health and Welfare Committee will begin examining the bills today.