As part of creating a Child and Family Wellbeing system, Child Welfare is recognizing the need for a paradigm shift from Mandated Reporting to Community Supporting. This shift in thinking, specifically with matters of neglect, is helpful to reduce the threat, fear or mistrust families may feel when seeking help from Mandated Reporters.
This proposed paradigm shift requires revising the overall framing of our societal response. When there is concern that a child’s environmental and living conditions may have a negative impact on their health and wellbeing, how might we move from report to support? In the current frame of mandating reporting, the threshold for making a report to child welfare is knowing or reasonably suspecting that a child has been a victim of abuse or neglect. Failure to report even “reasonable suspicion” is a misdemeanor. This low threshold, particularly when linked to the overly broad and often poverty-linked category of neglect, casts an extremely wide net for mandated reporting, even when there is little question of risk for a child’s safety. In a reframing in which we prioritize the best outcomes for a child, we first ask whether there is truly a substantial risk of harm to the child, and if not, we turn to questions about supporting the child within their caregiving system to address the mandated reporter’s concerns about the child’s environment or living conditions. When we look at the caregiving system as a whole, the key assessment and decision-making questions are:
- “Does this family have the resources to provide the care and protection they want to provide?”
- “What strengths exist within this caregiving system?”
- “What are this family’s priorities for their child, and how can we support them in a culturally appropriate and humble way?”
This frame provides a different starting place than the historically fear-based approach, while leaving in place the possibility of referral to CWS in the case of an imminent threat to the child’s health and well-being.