The Government Accountability Office issued a report on Jan 30 regarding how vigilant schools needed to be in preventing and reporting child sexual abuse. The report also called on federal agencies to get information to school officials in order to help them prevent and report sexual abuse. Federal officials should also do a better job of tracking and analyzing incidents of sexual abuse committed by school personnel, the report advised.
… 46 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia surveyed by GAO required background checks of applicants—such as teachers or bus drivers—seeking public school employment; however, the methods and sources varied widely. Forty-two states established professional standards or codes of conduct for school personnel, and 22 of those included information on appropriate boundaries between personnel and students. Although experts view awareness and prevention training on sexual abuse and misconduct as another key prevention tool, only 18 states reported in the survey that they require school districts to provide this training. However, two of six districts GAO visited provided training to school personnel, volunteers, and students in response to prior allegations of sexual misconduct by school personnel. These trainings covered a variety of topics, including recognizing the signs of abuse and misconduct.
Because the laws vary from place to place, many school officials have not been properly trained in their reporting requirements under the laws of their states. This has led to confusion on the part of school officials, but courts have typically found the laws themselves relatively clear and unambiguous.
For example, the Indiana Supreme Court last month upheld the criminal conviction of a school principal who was found guilty of violating the state’s mandatory reporting laws when he didn’t report the suspected rape of one student by another. The principal, Christopher Smith, challenged the law on the basis of ambiguity, saying that it’s difficult to follow a law that’s hard to understand.
But the court ruled this wasn’t a valid line of defense:
And to say this approach would chill reporting of child abuse or neglect in Indiana would grossly understate its impact. It would tacitly encourage administrators and other professionals to simply not read the statutes in full because, to sum up Smith’s defense: if you just don’t learn what child abuse is, you’ll never get in trouble for not reporting it. It would reward systemic ignorance in entire school districts and corporations, to the obvious detriment of the very children the statutes are supposed to be protecting.
So, here’s our vote for standing up for children. The victim in the Indiana case was a special-needs student who really couldn’t stand up for herself. At around 12:30 PM on Nov 9, 2010, another student at Muncie Community High School brought her into Assistant Principal Kathy McCord’s office, where she said she was raped by another student in the high school bathroom. Ms McCord immediately informed Principal Christopher Smith of the rape allegation.
Mr Smith went about daily business and did conduct an informal investigation of the rape allegations, using school police officers, assistant principals, and the athletic director. For several hours, though, he told no one about the rape allegation, but when the district’s superintendent called him at about 4:30, he notified the Indiana Department of Child Services.
Indiana law requires any suspicion of child abuse to be reported “immediately” to IDCS or the police. The delay of about four hours was seen as crippling Mr Smith’s line of defense: although “immediately” doesn’t specify a time frame, it does put the reporting of the suspected abuse higher on the list of priorities than, say, interviewing candidates for an open administrator position at Muncie Community High School. Whenever a person has “reason to believe” a child is a victim of child abuse or neglect, he must make a report “immediately … to: (1) the department [IDCS]; or (2) the local law enforcement agency,” says Indiana law.
An individual has “reason to believe” a child is a victim of child abuse or neglect when the individual is presented with “evidence that, if presented to individuals of similar background and training, would cause the individuals to believe that a child was abused or neglected.”
We recently reported on a case of non-reporting in Maryland and a case in Illinois. Complete references to a page maintained by the US Department of Health and Human Services, which describes mandatory reporting laws in all 50 states, are available from links on those pages.
