Will more laws help children?

By Richard J. Gelles

High-profile crimes can generate watershed changes in policy and practice. The publicity surrounding the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson helped lead to passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The abduction of Adam Walsh prompted enactment of the Missing Children Act of 1982.

Today, the Penn State sexual-abuse case has lawmakers scurrying to pass legislation to protect children. The general sentiment is that state and federal laws requiring suspicions of child abuse to be reported should be expanded and strengthened.

I'm not sure, however, whether that kind of legislation will protect more children from abuse. While there is a possibility that the current debate will improve laws and close the cracks in the system, we should not rush to expand mandatory reporting laws without care and deliberation.

In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, government agencies throughout the country received 3.3 million reports of suspected child abuse and neglect, involving some five million children. The agencies investigated two million of these reports, leaving about a million uninvestigated, primarily because they didn't include necessary information (e.g., the name or address of the victim or offender) or because they didn't meet the state's definition of child abuse or neglect. These two million investigations found that 442,000 children were actually abused or neglected, leaving 1.6 million reports for which the investigators were unable to uncover sufficient evidence that abuse or neglect had occurred.

So, in the end, slightly more than one in five investigated reports of suspected child abuse and neglect are confirmed. This share, which is referred to as the "substantiation rate," hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

If the allegation that former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was sexually abusing boys had been reported and investigated, the substantiation rate suggests a 22 percent chance that an investigator would have determined that abuse probably took place. Had the report been made anonymously, the likelihood of substantiation would have been much lower; had it come from head coach Joe Paterno or a Penn State administrator, the likelihood of substantiation would have been greater.