Even if the rules tell doctors that they need to make a report in a given scenario, they should not be following the rules when they know the bureaucracies that handle these reports are dysfunctional and prone to separating children without conclusive evidence. Imo they are responsible for protecting their patients from the system in these cases.
I've never encountered a state in which a medical doctor encountering evidence of abuse while seeing a patient is not required to report it, with the exception of some states exempting mental-health professionals told things in confidence (so a psychiatrist, which is also an MD, might not be required to report it depending on the state).
I don't think the line is at doctors reporting, and I'll tell you why.
There are many cases of MD's having patients where they know the whole family and can't believe that abuse would be going on, so they don't report things like spiral fractures and pattern bruising in a five year old. Those are markers of serious domestic violence and abuse, but since the doc knows the parent, and the parent has a sorta reasonable explanation, fine.
No. The doctor reports, then the parents get investigated. Sorry it sucks, but the point to fix is the people interacting with the family at the point of investigation, not the report by an MD, because unfortunately the MD is going to lean towards not reporting until it is too late.
In my book, a doctor doesn't get to absolve themselves of responsibility by saying "just following orders" and that it's the investigative system that needs to be fixed. If they know the system is broken, it's both immoral and a deep betrayal of trust for them to report people without strong evidence.
Almost any injury can be framed as possible evidence of abuse. Parents shouldn't have to be afraid that taking their kids to the hospital after an injury will get them taken away. The vast majority of injuries are not from abuse, so a system with a low bar for evidence is going to end up with more false positives than cases of abuse. This is exacerbated by the fact that abusers, for obvious reasons, are often going to avoid getting medical care for the kids they abuse.
If your reasoning were applied more broadly, we'd put anyone accused of a crime, or of even planning a crime, in prison immediately, since otherwise crimes will occur (with people hurt/killed) that could have been prevented. There's a reason the legal system doesn't work this way.
> These people are working in the shadows, in darkness," Lamanna said. "They can show up at your house in the middle of the night with no paperwork, no court order whatsoever, and say we’re removing under the B, we’ve decided an emergency exists."
> According to DCF’s 2022 quarterly report, about 60% of parents are reunited with their kids within a year after being removed by DCF.
Anyone who feels justified in stealing kids from parents in the middle of the night, without any due process, WITH A 60% MISS RATE, is completely and truly evil.
Seriously, more often than not DCF realizes they made a mistake and the kid goes back home. Insane.
Until we vote out of office the elected representatives who passed the laws that give government agencies such draconian powers, and insist on those laws being changed, we won't fix this problem.
That’s the law.
At the same time, reporting doesn’t guarantee or even suggest any outcome. Most reports end up as entries in a database and nothing more.
The ones you want to really examine are the kids who go home in less than a week. At one point I think I read that New Mexico had about 25% of children who entered care returning home within days. Those are very likely to be children who were not at risk of harm in the first place.