Might Want To Look Elsewhere for Sunshine and Rainbows

My assistant pulls me aside. "When I pulled up P's sleeve to wash his hands, I saw a round mark. I didn't get a good look at it, but he's got something on there."

Swell. Circular owie? I'm thinking ringworm.

I go over to the three-year-old. "Hey, P, Carrie says you have an owie. Can I see?" I pull up his sleeve and see not the raised round rash I was expecting, but a small, perfect circle. It's about the diameter of a marker cap, but even thinner. In fact, I look closely, thinking that somehow he's stamped himself with a cap rimmed in ink, or something. But it's not ink. It's not a rash, either. It looks like a scab. "What happened, sweetie?"

"Mommy burned me."

"What?"

"Mommy burned me."

Well, shit.

Here's the thing. I know this family. I am 95% sure that this is one of three things: 1) that something happened where his mom accidentally burned him, like he came up behind her and she turned around too fast or something, 2) that he did this to himself somehow, but his mom was involved before or after and he's mixing that in, or 3) something else entirely happened. However. I don't get to make that call.

The call I get to make is to the child abuse hotline. I am, by law, a mandated reporter, which means that any time I see a suspicious or unusual mark or a child reports an injury or basically any time I suspect abuse or neglect, I am legally required to make a call, or risk license suspension, termination, and fines or even jail time. Even when I suspect, as I do here, that there is more to the story. Even worse, I'm not supposed to interrogate the child, so I can't ask many follow-up questions, lest I later be accused of "leading" the child. I ask again, "What happened?" and he repeats himself, but this time with more stuff that I can't understand and "ow" and "hot." The thing is, he's three. And in special ed. So his language skills are not so hot. So I don't get a lot more information.

Here's the other thing: I'm not allowed to call the family, either. It's one thing if they call me and say, hey, just so you know, xyz happened and that's why Petunia has that black eye. But I can't call them. I can't tell them that I have to call the hotline.

This might be the part of my job that I hate the most.

I understand the rationale behind all of these rules, and I respect it. Child abuse and neglect is especially prevalent among kids with special needs, because they are less likely to be able to defend themselves, to report it, and to get help. As a reporter, my job is only to repeat what I was told or what I saw, without making any judgment on it. But in a case like this, I feel like I'm totally screwed. I have to report it, and theoretically my call is kept anonymous. But if a caseworker investigates, it's not too hard for a family to figure out who made the call. After all, these are preschoolers. They don't go out on their own very much. So then the relationship, the trust that I've spent the past however many months building, is wrecked. Parents feel (rightly) betrayed and don't want to trust us anymore. They may even pull their kids from the program. That's a lot to risk for what, in this case, I think is a less than 5% chance of there actually being abuse.

However. That 95% certainty I mentioned? That's because I've been doing this for a while, and I'll never say I'm 100% sure. Because I can't be. Because kids that I've worked with have been hurt while I'm working with them, and I didn't know. Because kids that my agency has worked with have died at the hands of their caregivers. Thankfully and obviously, this is extremely rare, but it's happened. So I'm never 100% sure. So I have to make the call.

I called, and I did tell the intake worker that I was calling because I had to, that I've never had concerns about this family, that the child's reporting could be garbled or missing information. In all likelihood, this won't even become an active investigation, because it's (as far as I know) the first report. It'll probably just get filed away, and if other incidents occur, an investigation will be opened. (Which, of course, is tragic in other cases, where there is likely something horrible and ongoing happening, and it can take several incidents to get an investigation going.) Odds are that the family will never be contacted and the report will just languish somewhere, unless something happens in the future to warrant further examination.

But still, I won't sleep well tonight, knowing that somewhere I've put a likely perfectly innocent family's name on a list. I'm sick over it, and sick of it. I hate that this responsibility rests on me, and that they system that places this burden is the same one that regularly screws over the very people it's supposed to help. I never feel like a call to the hotline is "saving" a kid, even when I do suspect that the child's safety is in danger. I feel like I'm dooming them to a faulty process with failing resources, and that I'm covering my own ass and that of my employer.

It all sucks, and right now I wish I'd gotten that nice graphic design degree my mom wanted for me.