Senate
sponsor of Florida’s sweeping new child-welfare law says she’ll be back
next year with a bill to expand its reporting requirements.
 |
| State. Sen. Eleanor Sobel |
Sen. Eleanor Sobel, chairwoman of the Senate Children, Families and
Elder Affairs Committee, said the new law doesn’t go far enough in
requiring all children’s deaths to be reported.
The law (SB 1666), approved this spring by lawmakers, overhauled
Florida’s troubled child-welfare system and went into effect July 1.
Among its many provisions, the law requires the state Child Abuse Death
Review Committee to “prepare an annual statistical report on the
incidence and causes of death resulting from reported child abuse in the
state during the prior calendar year.”
However, the number of deaths “from reported child abuse” is just a
fraction of the total number of child deaths, and critics say that means
crimes are slipping through the cracks.
“Even a car accident could be abuse and neglect, depending on the state of the driver,” Sobel, D-Hollywood, said Thursday.
During 2012, 2,111 children under the age of 18 died in Florida,
according to the Child Abuse Death Review Committee’s 2013 annual
report. Of those, 432 were reported to the state abuse hotline, which is
housed at the Department of Children and Families.
Of those, the department verified 122 deaths as being related to child abuse or neglect.
Depending on DCF’s definitions for abuse and neglect, the hotline counselors screen cases in or out.
“You see variations year to year in how many abuse deaths are reported,
depending on the criteria used by the hotline,” said Pam Graham,
associate professor of social work at Florida State University.
Sobel said the department is screening out too many cases that, with
additional scrutiny, could be determined to be child-abuse deaths.
“There’s been too much of a cover-up in this state,” she said. “The
Department of Children and Families should be required to report what
they find.”
Her criticisms echo a Miami-Dade grand jury report in June that blasted
DCF for its reporting of child deaths, noting, for instance, that the
department in 2010 changed its definition of “neglect” in a way that
made it apply to fewer children.
“The public does not have confidence in the accuracy of the number of
child deaths reported,” grand jurors concluded. “Reported reductions in
the total number of deaths may only be a consequence of changing the
definitions of abuse and neglect.”
One of the grand jury recommendations was that the department should
revert to its pre-2010 definition of neglect and eliminate other
inconsistencies in its reporting.
The training of those who classify the cases is crucial to whether or
not they’re reported, said Maj. Connie Shingledecker of the Manatee
County Sheriff’s Office.
For instance, the two biggest causes of child deaths in Florida are
drowning and what are called “co-sleeping” deaths, in which babies
suffocate while sleeping with adults.
Drowning and co-sleeping deaths are often accidental, but they can also
be the result of impairment due to substance abuse by a parent — and
Shingledecker said not all law-enforcement agencies are reporting them
that way.
“They haven’t been trained to recognize the death is a result of neglect, so they don’t call it in,” she said.
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