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  • Child Abuse Registries Harm Families and Exacerbate Child Poverty

     

    While child abuse registries across the country are designed with the laudable goal of protecting children, due to inconsistent definitions and unaccountable practices, registries inflict lifelong harm on parents and caregivers with minimal oversight or due process.  The harm to children and families of our current child abuse registry approach has been described in two recent reports by Texas Public Policy Foundation and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia. Families living in poverty and families of color are disproportionately likely to experience the harms of the registry, and because child abuse registries severely limit employment opportunities for parents and caregivers, registries drive and exacerbate child and family poverty. A few common problems with child abuse registries include:

     

    • Vague, inconsistent definitions that mistake poverty for abuse or neglect. Minor forms of neglect have resulted in lifetime registry in some states, including, for example, brief lack of supervision while a parent runs an errand or substance use such as cannabis that had no demonstrated harm. 

    • A lack of neutral fact-finding. A person doesn’t have to be convicted or even charged with a crime to get listed. A name can be added to the registry for years, or even for life, simply on the word of a child welfare investigator.

    • Limited to nonexistent due process. Few states offer parents and caregivers the opportunity for a hearing before a neutral arbiter prior to being placed on the registry. Even when these listings can be appealed, it can take months or even years for a name to be removed from a registry, and parents and caregivers are left to navigate confusing appellate processes, often without access to counsel. 

    • Driving families deeper into poverty. Registries are used by employers to screen applicants for a broad and growing number of employment opportunities, including health care, home health care, education and childcare. Critically, the caregiving jobs that low-income women and women of color rely on to stabilize their families and rise out of poverty are the very jobs from which they are most likely to be barred once they are placed on the registry. Worse, in many states, the consequences are lifelong. In others, the consequences last decades.

    Model Child Abuse Registry Legislation

    United Family Advocates has created model state legislation to ensure due process and limit unintended harms caused by child abuse and neglect registries. The model legislation is available here.

  • News and information about Child Abuse Registries

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    Across the country, child abuse registries inflict lifelong harm on parents and caregivers with minimal oversight or due process. Families living in poverty and families of color are disproportionately likely to experience the harms of the registry, and because child abuse registries severely limit employment opportunities for parents and caregivers, registries drive and exacerbate child and family poverty. Should a national registry be included in CAPTA, UFA proposes several changes to mitigate the harm to children and families.

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    By Saadiqa Kumanyika and Jamie Gullen, The Imprint, January 21, 2021

    "Blocking off the ability of parents and caregivers to access employment in high-growth fields only serves to hurt the very children the child abuse registry is supposed to protect in the first place. The child abuse registry thus exacerbates child poverty and places vulnerable families in even more precarious circumstances."

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    Community Legal Services of Philadelphia releases a report on the child abuse registry in Pennsylvania with four major recommendations for reform. They note that "while the goal of protecting children from abuse is laudable, the child abuse registry has gone too far in serving as an employment screening tool that prevents loving parents and caregivers from being able to financially support their children. As we look toward economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more urgent than ever to reform the child abuse registry system in Pennsylvania to ensure that low-wage workers are not unnecessarily excluded from desperately needed employment."

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    "While the intent to track maltreatment and protect children is noble, the implementation of central registries has caused undue harm to many individuals. Parents can find their names listed in an official government database of child abusers prior to or even without a court ruling that they actually committed the alleged maltreatment. Individuals in Texas who have been wrongly identified in the registry and want to challenge their inclusion face an uphill battle navigating a complex bureaucratic process that rarely pro­vides them with the opportunity to have their case reviewed by a neutral arbiter. These flaws are far from benign conse­quences and create long­term social and economic hard­ships for those wrongfully listed, as well as for those whose contact with the child welfare system was a result of condi­tions of poverty."

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    Colleen Henry, Laina Sonterblum, Vicki Lens, Social Work, Volume 64, Issue 4, October 2019

    "Virtually every social worker knows about the core role of state central registries in the child welfare system. Less well known is how the very registries that protect children can also threaten the economic security of their families and, in so doing, undermine child safety."

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