THE FIELD CENTER
for Children's Policy, Practice & Research

Field Center Editorials

Barriers to Keeping Children Safe

Lisa Lee, Field Center Student Intern, February 2007

Child abuse and/or neglect cases are everywhere. We see it on the news, hear it on the radio, and read it in the newspapers. Although it seems to surface everywhere, children are still falling through the cracks within the child welfare system. In situations where child abuse/neglect cases involve more than one state, there is no policy that ensures the interstate acceptance of a report or the referral, assessment, or completion of an investigation. There are children who are not adequately protected by the existing agencies because the child abuse report is not accepted in any jurisdiction for investigation. I am not sure why this is, but it is a problem that should be solvable.

Breaking down jurisdictional barriers is not impossible. In fact, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA) has rules for preventing both intrastate and interstate barriers for placing children in permanent adoption placements AFSA has mandated that states develop plans to ensure the use of cross-jurisdictional resources so that a child is not denied a permanent placement. What this tells me is that overcoming state barriers is possible for children, just not abused children. However, the optimistic, advocating side of me believes this to be untrue.

There is no policy for accepting and investigating interstate reports of child abuse and neglect; those in which the child and perpetrator are not living in the same state. In a country where we spend billions of dollars on our military, chat and email on Blackberries, and have even cloned animals, I continue to wonder how so many children are abused everyday and their protection is so inadequate. We need to come together to combat child abuse and not ignore a single abused child just because it happened in the wrong state at the wrong time.

Lisa Lee
University of Pennsylvania MSW candidate