Lawmakers Debate Child Sex Abuse Laws

By Steve Esack
The Morning Call
April 9, 2013

http://articles.mcall.com/2013-04-09/news/mc-pa-child-sex-abuse-pornography-20130409_1_child-abuse-child-protection-laws-pennsylvania-task-force

Task force urges panel to change reporting procedures among other improvements.

HARRISBURG — A computer system that does not track child abuse complaints among counties. Hospital lawyers who keep doctors from sharing medical information on children they suspect are abuse victims. Low pay and high burnout for young, inexperienced social workers.

Those are three main reasons the training and laws governing how and when child abuse claims are handled need to be overhauled, according to Senate testimony Tuesday by members of the Pennsylvania Task Force on Child Protection.



"Child abuse is an extremely real problem in this commonwealth as it apparently is in our society and our nation," said the panel's chairman, Bucks County District Attorney David W. Heckler.

The Legislature started the 11-member task force to examine the state's patchwork of child protection laws after Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach, was arrested in 2011 on charges of sexually abusing children. In November, the task force called for rewriting Pennsylvania's child protection laws to streamline the reporting process, create new statutes and increase penalties for crimes such as possession of child pornography.

Since then about 14 bills have been introduced in the Senate and at least four bills have been introduced in the House.

On Monday, the House voted unanimously for House Bill 90. It would allow the state attorney general or a local district attorney to use an administrative subpoena, which does not require judicial oversight, to obtain a computer IP address and the name and address of a computer owner suspected of viewing online child pornography. Law enforcement would then need a court-ordered search warrant to seize the computer.

On Tuesday, the House Children and Youth Committee signed off on two other bills. House Bill 431 would mandate periodic training on the signs and symptoms of child abuse and reporting requirements for professionals licensed under the Pennsylvania Department of State. A companion bill, HB432, would set time limits for when suspected abuse cases must be reported to county youth agencies or law enforcement.

The joint Senate hearing of the Aging and Youth, and Public Health and Welfare committees was meant to give lawmakers more information as they debate legislation in each chamber.

"The only good thing that can be said about Jerry Sandusky is he managed to make real for an awful lot of Pennsylvanians sexual abuse goes on," Heckler told the committees.

Dr. Cindy Christian, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told the committees that the state needs to improve its computerized data collection of suspected and confirmed child abuse reports. Under state law, she said, when a complaint is filed it is characterized in one of two ways, either as neglect under the heading "general protective services," or as abuse under "child protective services."

But state law does not require the Department of Public Welfare to keep track of general protective service cases at the county level, Christian said. If a family moves from Montgomery County to Bucks County, she said, there is no way authorities could know if the family had a file with Montgomery County Children & Youth.

"More than half of the entire system does not get counted at the state level," Christian said.

Jason P. Kutulakis, an attorney from Carlisle, Cumberland County, and a task force member, said the state's narrow definition of abuse also compounds the tracking problem. Some cases of suspected abuse may not be properly investigated because someone put the complaint in the general protective services category instead of child protective services, he said.



Sen. Shirley Kitchen, D-Philadelphia, said she hears complaints about privacy laws interfering with social workers' ability to extract information from the medical community.

Those complaints are valid, Heckler replied. The federal and state versions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which preclude the sharing of medical files, also interfere with doctors and hospitals reporting suspected cases of child abuse.

Christian said if a child comes into an emergency room with signs of abuse, doctors are required to alert law enforcement or Children and Youth. But if that child is sent to another floor for continued care, the medical personnel there are not required to report suspected abuse, and some hospitals' lawyers preclude secondary doctors from reporting to protect hospitals from lawsuits.

"HIPAA was not intended to minimize communication in child welfare ways," Christian said, "but it minimizes and freezes people from sharing information."

Sen. Bob Mensch, R-Montgomery, said a Senate bill would try to carve out an exception to the HIPAA requirement by protecting medical staff from legal ramifications for reporting suspected abuse cases.

Improved laws would help, acting Public Welfare Secretary Beverly Mackereth told the committees. But the state and counties need to increase funding, too, to improve computer systems and retain quality social workers.

Social work, Mackereth said, remains a field of predominantly young and female employees who are paid as little as $24,000 a year and are required to go into some of the worst home and social environments to assess whether a child is being neglected or abused.

"They are not police officers and we are asking them to assess if a child is safe," said Mackereth, a former York County social worker. "Without fixing that [funding] deficit within that system I'm not sure how we get the child protection."