The evil of mandated reporting

Here is a CPS incident in the news:

She and her husband were suspected of child abuse. The daycare center had called CPS to report a bruise on the baby’s chest.

In a sane world, if a daycare attendant wondered about a mark on a child’s chest, she might pick up the phone and call the parent, but that’s not the world we live in. The person at the daycare center really had no option but to call CPS. After all, she didn’t want to lose her job. ...

“The sheriff told us that he thought the birthmark looked like a handprint.” ...

Meanwhile, Skenazy makes the obvious and responsible point that, the mere fact that we have mandatory reporting doesn’t mean the adults in charge of the situation must suspend their adult common sense or their ability to judge the reality of what’s been reported.

These stories illustrate the fact that we must kill off the notion that overreacting to nearly non-existent threats is prudent. Clearly, the daycare provider had been trained, just like the TSA, to treat anything the least bit suspicious as incredibly, overwhelmingly suspicious. Overkill is the government MO. It shouldn’t be. ...

“I would rather see 1 million reports that end up not being an issue than see even one go unreported and lead to serious injury or the death of a child.”

(I mixed up the quotes. Check the source to see who said what.)

The evil of mandatory reporting is understated here.

You may think that the day care worker should have just called the mom for an explanation of the birthmark, and then dropped the matter. Unfortunately, that is illegal.

I once heard of a physician who are was prosecuted for consulting an expert medical professor over whether a symptom was evidence of abuse.

The law requires child professionals to report all suspicions. If he was suspicious enuf to make a phone call, then reporting to CPS is required. The child care worker needs to look the other way and not have any suspicions, or keep calling CPS with accusations that are probably trivial or easily explained.

So these problems are not solved by ppl being reasonable. The only solution is to abolish mandatory reporting of suspicions.

No such fix is likely. The dopey women who work in this field say crazy things like a million false reports being better than some potential real problem going unreported. There is no reasoning with such ppl.