Look At State Child Protection Covers Familiar Ground But Speakers Add National Context On Caseloads, Tensions With Parents

It was billed as a hard new look at how Washington protects children from abuse and neglect, but Monday’s state-sponsored symposium covered the same old ground: “Too little, too late, for too long,” as one speaker put it.

If anything new emerged in the first day of the two-day event organized by the governor and top lawmakers, it was that every state is struggling with the same problems Washington faces.

Among them are growing child abuse caseloads, declining resources, and growing tension between those who think the government intrudes into families too much and those who think government is too timid in combating abuse.

“Our entire country is wrestling with how do we best protect our children,” said Michael W. Weber, associate director of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect.

“There has not been a week lately that there hasn’t been some national story about mistreatment of children” in one state or another, Carol Williams, a top official in the Clinton administration, told the estimated 150 people gathered at the Sheraton Hotel here.

Williams, an associate commissioner in the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said the system is failing children, but solutions are elusive.

She noted that the public can’t even agree on just how much the government should be involved in protecting children from abuse.

Williams mentioned the so-called “parents rights movement” in Washington and other states that contends the government, among other things, tramples people’s rights by asserting abuse despite a lack of evidence that would stand up in court.

“But then when a child is injured, what we get from the public is ‘Why weren’t you in there? Why weren’t you protecting lives?’ ” she said.

Williams said child abuse and neglect are on the rise.

In 1994, the last year for which statistics are available, a million children in the country were found to be abused or neglected, a 27 percent increase since 1990. In 1994, Washington had 44,000 cases of abuse and neglect, a sharp rise from 1990, she said.

During 1994, 1,111 children were slain, most of them by their parents, she said, adding that in Washington, seven children died from abuse or neglect.

Across the country, she said, governments are doing “too little, too late, for too long.”

By “too long,” she meant that once an agency steps in to investigate a possible child abuse, it takes far too long to resolve the case.

Gov. Mike Lowry, who spoke briefly at the start of the symposium, said in an interview that he hoped the ideas expressed at the event would be carried back to Olympia by state officials and lawmakers and used in reshaping how the state cares for its children.

But some at the conference hoped for the opposite.

Roby Roberson, the unordained Wenatchee minister acquitted earlier this year of charges of child rape and molestation, said he had come hoping that government would acknowledge it was out of control in the way it investigates reports of child abuse. Roberson has contended that he was the victim of incompetent and irresponsible social workers and police who used flimsy and non-existent evidence to charge him.

“This conference is damage control,” he said. “It’s very obvious that they don’t want to talk about the real issues, such as their own accountability.”

But there was a third view.

“Of course the state will have errors,” said Darlene Flowers, the executive director of the Foster Parents Association of Washington. “But in my opinion, we are not being aggressive enough in protecting our children” from abuse and neglect.