we’ve handled at this point a large
number of cases involving children who
have been
abused or neglected in the foster care
system or the dependency system
and we seem to see the same kind of
patterns repeating in all of these cases
one thing that we’ve noticed is that
oftentimes when
social workers get a call saying that a
child is at risk of having been abused
or neglected they show up at the house
and they’re just kind of checking off
boxes there’s things that they have to
do they have to interview the child they
have to
talk to the reporting party
but sometimes there’s not a lot of
common sense going into how the
investigation is being conducted so for
example uh they are required to
interview a child
and
you would assume that that would mean
that they interview the child by
themselves
but sometimes they’re interviewing the
child in front of the alleged
perpetrator
and then the child you know fails to
disclose abuse or doesn’t feel
comfortable talking about what’s going
on and the social worker says well they
didn’t say that they’re being abused so
i’m just gonna pack my bags up and go
home
and there just seems to be some sort of
disconnect in terms of
using common sense when investigating
child abuse
getting to the heart of the matter and
really determining what does this child
need what do we need to do to keep this
child safe