Failure to Protect Kids from Abuse Is Shameful (editorial)

York Daily Record
May 25, 2016

http://www.ydr.com/story/opinion/editorials/2016/05/25/failure-protect-kids-abuse-shameful-editorial/84917990/

We should be ashamed of ourselves for failing to protect innocent children from physical and sexual abuse.

In both the Catholic Church priest pedophilia scandal and in the Jerry Sandusky case, people knew about the abuse and failed to act.

In the wake of the Sandusky atrocities, Pennsylvania lawmakers finally bestirred themselves to change the laws. Child abuse was redefined to better protect children. The number of mandated reporters was increased – as was training.

The results were easily predictable: A dramatic increase in child abuse reports. But our leaders failed to provide adequate resources to field those calls and investigate suspected abuse.

Eugene DePasquale

A recent YDR story noted that our county Children Youth and Families agency struggles with the caseload and with chronic staffing shortages.

And now state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a York County resident, has waved a huge red flag warning that the state’s child abuse hotline is failing to protect children from monsters.

He released an interim report of an ongoing audit of the state’s ChildLine because the early results were so alarming that he felt the need to warn citizens and lawmakers.

The numbers tell the story:

42,000 calls to the hotline went unanswered in 2015. About half of those were abandoned, meaning callers were on hold so long that they hung up. The other half were deflected, meaning there were so many calls coming in that they were simply terminated without response. The calling queue can handle just 30 at a time. That is unacceptable – especially when you consider that there are an average of 20 calls per hour, per day, per year.

In 2015, just seven calls out of 146,367 were monitored by supervisors in 2015. That makes it nearly impossible to determine how effective the hotline is.

In 2014 and 2015, a total of 111,245 answered calls did not generate reports that were identified or tracked in any way.

ChildLine was not fully or adequately staffed at any point in 2015.

Mr. DePasquale says the ChildLine is desperately in need of more resources to properly do the job.

“While strengthening laws to combat child abuse was a critical achievement, not providing the funding to enforce those laws was a disturbing failure,” DePasquale said.

The response from legislative and executive branch leaders?

Gov. Tom Wolf’s spokesman blamed the governor’s predecessor, saying that Mr. Wolf inherited “an absolute mess” and that officials are working toward improvements.

He noted the administration “reduced the number of abandoned calls from 43 percent to 12 percent. The administration is currently working to reduce this percentage to 4 percent, but additional funding is necessary.”

Forty-three percent? Twelve percent? Four percent? How about 0 percent?

Sen. Scott Wagner’s response was even more aggravating.

He offered the cliche that throwing more money at the problem might not be the answer.

“This is the same old, same old, ‘Well, we need to ask for more,’” Wagner said. “There isn’t going to be anything left financially for the kids if we don’t get our spending problem under control.”

Really, senator?! Some of “the kids” won’t even be alive if we don’t get our child abuse problem under control.

That means providing adequate resources:

A hotline that doesn’t “deflect” calls.

Enough staffers to properly and effectively answer those reports.

And enough funding for county and state workers to investigate reports of abuse.

At a minimum, that’s worth the $1.8 million the administration has asked for to improve the system. Legislators should make an emergency allocation.

After the church, after Sandusky, shame on us and our leaders for cheaping out on our children’s safety.