In the wake of a string of sexual abuse and misconduct allegations in Albemarle County Public Schools, community members are struggling to understand what went wrong. But are the state’s mandatory reporting guidelines clear? WMRA’s Christine Kueter reports.
School employees, healthcare professionals, law enforcement officers, and, in most cases, pastors and rabbis, understand their roles as “mandatory reporters” – professionals legally required to report known or suspected abuse or neglect of children or vulnerable adults.
But the way that suspected child abuse and neglect gets reported in Virginia can quickly get fuzzy.
A former Albemarle County elementary school counselor will be back in court Oct. 30 facing 20 counts of sexual abuse and indecent liberties with seven third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade girls. Three former school administrators were also charged with failing to report the suspected abuse. Following rebukes from Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, school board members will get a look this Thursday, Oct. 22, at the first report from the law firm hired to review the district’s handling of abuse allegations during a closed session.
But the question remains: are the state’s mandatory reporting guidelines clear?
In Virginia, school employees have 24 hours to report suspected child abuse or neglect directly to Child Protective Services or police. They can also tell their supervisors or principals.
DOUGLAS BURTCH: They have then shifted the burden to the head. And so all this legal weight of 24 hours to report now gets put on someone else’s shoulders. Well, a firm like ours will get a phone call from the head with the fact pattern, but now we have a whole other level of removal from what actually happened.
Attorney Douglas Burtch’s Richmond law firm provides general counsel to more than 70 private schools across the state.
BURTCH: When you’re on the clock, then, the question is, if there is a subjective element to when you suspect, did you hear this from the child? Did you hear this from the parent? Did a witness to seeing something happen to a child come in and tell the mandatory reporter, or are we talking about four levels of hearsay, where it came through a child to another child to their parent to a teacher to the head of school? And, so, that’s going to add some gray in the eyes of the mandatory reporter, in terms of, do they sincerely have a reason to suspect abuse or neglect took place?
Timing may also introduce ambiguity. School officials can be prosecuted if they delay reporting. What Burtch calls “cascading allegations” may also complicate things.
BURTCH: On one day it starts with, “oh they gave me a ride home, the teacher or adult gave me a ride home.” And then, on day two, it morphs into, “and they gave me a hug,” and on day three it might be a peck on the cheek, and on day four, we start getting some more heavier allegations that go toward abuse. So, in that fact pattern, I think it’s very difficult on the mandatory reporter to actually understand when does the 24 hours start that they have a reason to suspect the child was abused or neglected? Some of those earlier facts may not rise to abuse or neglect, but a couple days in, it would.
Mandatory reporters may fear confronting colleagues or mistakenly accusing someone, according to Charlé McCauley of the Children’s Advocacy Centers of Virginia.
CHARLÉ MCCAULEY: Sometimes grooming behaviors can look like a really nice person. Right? But again, we just have to continually stress to them that you don’t have to determine someone’s intention before you address their behavior. Sometimes, they also are trying to weigh out, like, the discomfort of protecting a child and questioning an adult. Even if they’ve had the mandated reporter training, it’s always really good to continually have conversations about, what are our boundaries? How are we reinforcing them through our behaviors? And just letting them know, again, making a report, or notifying somebody of a boundary violation is not deciding whether this person is a predator or an offender or not. It’s just, “this is what I noticed. I want the professionals to look into this.”
McCauley says plain talk is key to being an effective mandatory reporter.
MCCAULEY: When I do big trainings, I make everyone say penis and vagina. Because I need you to be comfortable saying it. Right? It is a body part just like an arm. If you’re hesitating to say the word, how are you going to react when a child says something to you? And if you’re showing any sort of hesitancy or embarrassment, that child could internalize that any sort of way, like, “should I not have said that to them?” So, there are so many layers we’re attacking when we are giving these presentations. Giving people scripts is the best way to empower them. It’s like a ready tool that they can just whip out and say, “oh! I can say it this way.”
Only about 5% of the nearly 1.4 million reports of suspected child abuse or neglect made to Virginia’s Department of Social Services since 2009 were “founded”—meaning they were investigated and there was enough evidence to affirm the abuse took place. In Albemarle County, during that same time frame, about 4% of the 13,760 reported cases were founded.
But both Burtch and McCauley say over reporting is better than the alternative.
About one in 10 children is a victim of sexual abuse before age 18, according to the National Children’s Alliance. The average age of abuse disclosure is 52, according to CHILDUSA.
