Mandatory Reporting Laws Meant To Protect Children Get Another Look

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2 years ago

April 25, 2024

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More than 60 years ago, policymakers in Colorado embraced the idea that early intervention could prevent child abuse and save lives. The states requirement that certain professionals tell officials when they suspect a child has been abused or neglected was among the first mandatory reporting laws in the nation.

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Since then, mandatory reporting laws have expanded nationally to include more types of maltreatment including neglect, which now accounts for most reports and have increased the number of professions required to report. In some states, all adults are required to report what they suspect may be abuse or neglect.

But now there are efforts in Colorado and other states to roll back these laws, saying the result has been too many unfounded reports, and that they disproportionately harm families that are poor, Black, or Indigenous, or have members with disabilities.

Theres a long, depressing history based on the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting, said Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester in New York. Theres now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.

Stephanie Villafuerte, Colorados child protection ombudsman, oversees a task force to reexamine the states mandatory reporting laws. She said the group is seeking to balance a need to report legitimate cases of abuse and neglect with a desire to weed out inappropriate reports.

This is designed to help individuals who are disproportionately impacted, Villafuerte said. Im hoping its the combination of these efforts that could make a difference. Email Sign-Up

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Some critics worry that changes to the law could result in missed cases of abuse. Medical and child care workers on the task force have expressed concern about legal liability. While its rare for people to be criminally charged for failure to report, they can also face civil liability or professional repercussions, including threats to their licenses.

Being reported to child protective services is becoming increasingly common. More than 1 in 3 children in the United States will be the subject of a child abuse and neglect investigation by the time they turn 18, according to the most frequently cited estimate, a 2017 study funded by the Department of Health and Human Services Childrens Bureau.

Black and Native American families, poor families, and parents or children with disabilities experience even more oversight. Research has found that, among these groups, parents are more likely to lose parental rights and children are more likely to wind up in foster care.

In an overwhelming majority of investigations, no abuse or neglect is substantiated. Nonetheless, researchers who study how these investigations affect families describe them as terrifying and isolating.

In Colorado, the number of child abuse and neglect reports has increased 42% in the past decade and reached a record 117,762 last year, according to state data. Roughly 100,000 other calls to the hotline werent counted as reports because they were requests for information or were about matters like child support or adult protection, said officials from the Colorado Department of Human Services.

The increase in reports can be traced to a policy of encouraging a broad array of professionals including school and medical staff, therapists, coaches, clergy members, firefighters, veterinarians, dentists, and social workers to call a hotline whenever they have a concern.

These calls dont reflect a surge in mistreatment. More than two-thirds of the reports received by agencies in Colorado dont meet the threshold for investigation. Of the children whose cases are assessed, 21% are found to have experienced abuse or neglect. The actual number of substantiated cases has not risen over the past decade. More from the Mountain States

While studies do not demonstrate that mandatory reporting laws keep children safe, the Colorado task force reported in January, there is evidence of harm. Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse or neglect, the task force said.

The task force said it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting on under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities.

The task force pointed out that the only way to report concerns about a child is with a formal report to a hotline. Yet many of those calls are not to report abuse at all but rather attempts to connect children and families with resources like food or housing assistance.

Hotline callers may mean to help, but the families who are the subjects of mistaken reports of abuse and neglect rarely see it that way.

That includes Meighen Lovelace, a rural Colorado resident who asked KFF Health News not to disclose their hometown for fear of attracting unwanted attention from local officials. For Lovelaces daughter, who is neurodivergent and has physical disabilities, the reports started when she entered preschool at age 4 in 2015. The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelaces family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.

Our biggest looming fear is, Are you going to take our children away? said Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. Were afraid to ask for help. Its keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare.

State and county human services officials said they could not comment on specific cases.

The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the states mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not make a report solely due to a family/childs race, class or gender, nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income or clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely on the disability status of the minor, parent or guardian, according to the groups draft recommendation.

The task force plans to recommend additional training for mandatory reporters, help for professionals who are deciding whether to make a call, and an alternative phone number, or warmline, for cases in which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.

Critics say such changes could leave more children vulnerable to unreported abuse.

Im concerned about adding systems such as the warmline, that kids who are in real danger are going to slip through the cracks and not be helped, said Hollynd Hoskins, an attorney who represents victims of child abuse. Hoskins has sued professionals who fail to report their suspicions.

The Colorado task force includes health and education officials, prosecutors, victim advocates, county child welfare representatives and attorneys, as well as five people who have experience in the child welfare system. It intends to finalize its recommendations by early next year in the hope that state legislators will consider policy changes in 2025. Implementation of any new laws could take several years.

Colorado is one of several states including New York and California that have recently considered changes to restrain, rather than expand, reporting of abuse. In New York City, teachers are being trained to think twice before making a report, while New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care. In California, a state task force aimed at shifting mandated reporting to community supporting is planning recommendations similar to Colorados.

Among those advocating for cange are people with experience in the child welfare system. They include Maleeka Jihad, who leads the Denver-based MJCF Coalition, which advocates for the abolition of mandatory reporting along with the rest of the child welfare system, citing its damage to Black, Native American, and Latino communities.

Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness, said Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isnt enough, she said. We know what we need, and its usually funding and resources.

Some of these resources like affordable housing and child care dont exist at a level sufficient for all the Colorado families that need them, Jihad said.

Other services are out there, but its a matter of finding them. Lovelace said the reports ebbed after the family got the help it needed, in the form of a Medicaid waiver that paid for specialized care for their daughters disabilities. Their daughter is now in seventh grade and doing well.

None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace said. I really think they didnt know about it. Related Topics Mental Health Race and Health States Children's Health Colorado Disabilities Disparities Indigenous Health Contact Us Submit a Story Tip

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Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘very odd job’ – acting opposite an enormous bird in The Thing With Feathers

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2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch's 'very odd job' - acting opposite an enormous bird in The Thing With Feathers

He’s played Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Strange, and even voiced The Grinch but acting opposite a seven-foot (2.1m) crow may be one of the strangest roles Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on.

Speaking about his new film, The Thing With Feathers, he admits it’s “a very odd job, there’s no getting away from it”.

If the vision of Cumberbatch wrestling with a giant bird sounds like the sort of amusingly surreal movie you fancy taking a look at next week, it’s important to understand that this is no comedy.

While the film, based on Max Porter’s eclectic novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the film is at times disturbingly funny, but mostly it is an incredibly emotional take on the heartbreaking way we all process grief.

Cumberbatch plays a man whose wife has died suddenly, leaving him with their two young boys. The story itself is split into three parts – dad, boys and crow.

Crow – voiced by David Thewlis – is a figment of dad’s imagination, a sort of “unhinged Freudian therapist” for him, according to Porter.

Cumberbatch, a father of three, said this certainly wasn’t a role he wanted to think about when he returned to his own family each night.

“I didn’t take it home, I didn’t talk about it…You have to work fast when you’re a father of three with a busy home life, you know, it’s very immediate the need they have of you, so you don’t go in and talk about your day crying your eyes out on a sofa with a crow punching you in the face.”

Since Porter’s award-winning work was first published in 2015 it has built a cult following.

Using text, dialogue and poetry to explore grief from various characters’ perspectives, the author says the subject matter is universal.

“Most of us are deeply eccentric in one way or another, like my father-in-law, apparently a very rational, blokey bloke, who’s like ‘when my mum died, a wren landed on the window and I knew it was my mum’.

“Grief puts us into these states where we are more attuned to the natural world and particularly more attuned to symbols and signs. So, imagining a crow moving in with the family actually makes a lot of sense to people, whereas, weirdly, five steps to getting better or get well soon or a hallmark card or whatever doesn’t make much sense to the people when you’re in that storm of pain.”

While the film sees Cumberbatch portray a firestorm of emotions, he says he feels it’s important to tackle weighty issues on screen.

“It is a universal experience, in one way or another you’re ‘gonna lose someone that you love during your life.”

The film, he says, explores grief through a male prism.

“At a time when there’s a lot of very troubling influences on men without female presence in their lives, this thing of scapegoating and seeing the other as a threat, all of that comes into play within the allowance of grief to be a messy, scary, intimidating, chaotic, unruly and out of control place to exist as a man.

“This is a film that just leans into the idea that it’s alright to have feelings, you bury them or hide them at your peril.”

The Thing With Feathers is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 21 November.

World

Brazil ‘surprised’ UK not investing in new rainforest fund it helped design

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2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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Brazil 'surprised' UK not investing in new rainforest fund it helped design

Brazil was “a bit surprised” Britain hasn’t contributed to a new investment fund to protect tropical forests, despite having helped to design it, a senior official has told Sky News.

The Amazon nation has used its role as host of the COP30 climate talks to tout its new scheme, which it drew up with the help of countries including the UK and Indonesia.

With Britain’s budget day looming, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer decided against chipping in when he visited the Amazonian city of Belem this month.

The news came out the day before Brazil was about to launch it.

“The Brazilians were livid” about the timing, one source told Sky News.

Garo Batmanian, director-general of the Brazilian Forestry Service and coordinator of the new scheme, said: “We were expecting [Britain to pay in] because the UK was the very first one to support us.”

The so-called Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) was drawn up with the help of “very bright people from the UK”, according to Mr Batmanian.

“So we are a bit surprised, but we expect that once internal situations get better, hopefully they will come through,” he added.

The UK’s climate envoy, Rachel Kyte, told Sky News: “The PM agreed the decision was about not doing it now, as opposed to not ever.

“We will look at the TFFF after the budget and are carefully tracking how others are investing.”

The fund has been hailed as a breakthrough – if Brazil can get if off the ground.

Paul Polman, former Unilever boss and now co-vice chair of Planetary Guardians, said it could be the “first forest-finance plan big enough to change the game”.

Why do tropical forests need help?

At their best, tropical forests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin provide food, rainfall and clean air for millions of people around the world.

They soak up carbon dioxide – the main driver of climate change – providing a cooling effect on a heating planet.

But they are being nibbled away at by extractive industries like oil, logging, soy and gold.

Parts of the Amazon rainforest already emit more carbon dioxide than they store.

Other pockets are expected to collapse in the next few decades, meaning they’d no longer be rainforests at all.

Cristiane Mazzetti, senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace Brazil, said: “Science is saying we need to immediately stop deforestation and start restoring what was once lost.

“And in Brazil, we already have enough open land that could be better used for agricultural expansion… There is no need [to open up] new areas.”

Can Brazil’s new investment fund save the world’s rainforests?

For decades, forests have been worth more dead than alive.

Successive attempts to save them have fallen flat because they’ve not been able to flip the economics in favour of conservation, or ensure a long-term stream of cash.

Brazil hopes the TFFF, if it launches, would make forests worth more standing than cut down, and pay out to countries and communities making that happen.

“We don’t pay only for carbon, we are paying for a hectare of standing forest. The more forests you have, the more you are paid,” said Mr Batmanian.

The other “innovation” is to stop relying on aid donations, he said.

“There is a lot of demand for overseas development assistance. It’s normal to have that. We have a lot of crisis, pandemics, epidemics out there.”

Instead, the TFFF is an investment fund that would compete with other commercial propositions.

Mr Polman said: “This isn’t charity, it’s smart economic infrastructure to protect the Amazon and keep our planet safe.”

How does the TFFF raise money?

The idea is to raise a first tranche of cash from governments that can de-risk the fund for private investors.

Every $1 invested by governments could attract a further $4 of private cash.

The TFFF would then be able to take a higher amount of risk to raise above-market returns, Brazil hopes.

That means it could generate enough cash to pay competitive returns to investors and payments to the eligible countries and communities keeping their tropical trees upright.

At least 20% of the payments has been earmarked for indigenous communities, widely regarded as the best stewards of the land. Many, but not all, have welcomed the idea.

Will the TFFF work?

The proposal needs at least $10-25bn of government money to get off the ground.

So far it has raised $5.5bn from the likes of Norway, France, and Indonesia. And the World Bank has agreed to host it, signalling strong credibility.

But it’s a hard task to generate enough money to compete with lucrative industries like gold and oil, many of which governments already invest in.

Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, director of King’s College London’s Brazil Institute, said TFFF has the potential to make it “very financially viable to have a forest as a forest”.

“But the problem is that TFFF would need to compete with these very profitable industries… because you need to capture as much money from governments, from investors.

“And so far it’s not quite balancing the competitiveness of other sectors that are potentially harmful for forests.”

World

COP30: Climate protest in Brazil’s city of Belem aims to hold governments’ feet to the fire

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2 hours ago

November 16, 2025

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COP30: Climate protest in Brazil's city of Belem aims to hold governments' feet to the fire

Hot, humid, loud and proud: the climate protest in the city of Belem was the embodiment of the Amazonian rainforest that surrounds it.

Hawkers brought carts selling bananas, mangoes and coconuts – while demonstrators bore umbrellas, hats and fans to shelter from the scorching tropical sun.

After a week of dreary negotiations at the COP30 climate talks, the streets were alive with the drumming of maracatu music and dancing to local carimbo rhythms on Saturday.

It was a carnival atmosphere designed to elevate sober issues.

Among those out on the streets were Kayapo people, an indigenous community living across the states of Para and Mato Grosso – the latter at the frontier of soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon.

They are fighting local infrastructure projects like the new Ferrograo railway that will transport soy through their homeland.

The soy industry raises much-needed cash for Brazil’s economy – its second biggest export – but the kayapo say they do not get a slice of the benefit.

Uti, a Kayapo community leader, said: “We do not accept the construction of the Ferrograo and some other projects.

“We Kayapo do not accept any of this being built on indigenous land.”

Many Brazilian indigenous and community groups here want legal recognition of the rights to their land – and on Friday, the Brazilian government agreed to designate two more territories to the Mundurucu people.

It’s a Brazilian lens on global issues – indigenous peoples are widely regarded as the best stewards of the land, but rarely rewarded for their efforts.

In fact, it is often a terrible opposite: grandmother Julia Chunil Catricura had been fighting to stay on Mapuche land in southern Chile, but disappeared earlier this year when she went out for a walk.

Lefimilla Catalina, also Mapuche, said she’s travelled two days to be here in Belem to raise the case of Julia, and to forge alliances with other groups.

“At least [COP30] makes it visible” to the world that people are “facing conflicts” on their land, she said.

She added: “COP offers a tiny space [for indigenous people], and we want to be more involved.

“We want to have more influence, and that’s why we believe we have to take ownership of these spaces, we can’t stay out of it.”

They are joined by climate protesters from around the world in an effort to hold governments’ feet to the fire.

Louise Hutchins, convener of Make Polluters Pay Coalition International, said: “We’re here to say to governments they need to make the oil and gas companies pay up for the climate destruction – they’ve made billions in profits every day for the last 50 years.”

After three years of COPs with no protests – the UAE, Egypt, and Azerbaijan do not look kindly on people taking to the streets – this year demonstrators have defined the look, the tone and the soundtrack of the COP30 climate talks – and Saturday was no different.

Whether that will translate into anything more ambitious to come out of COP30 remains to be seen, with another week of negotiations still to go.

For now, the protests in Belem reflect the chaos, the mess and the beauty of Brazil, the COP process, and the rest of the world beyond.