e are saying that families have the right to privacy to protect helpless children. But in seeking to protect children, it's easy to ignore investigations of unfounded reports. This is a unjustified violation of parental rights.Few reports are made maliciously. Studies of sexual abuse reports, for example, suggest that, at most, from 4 to 10 percent of these reports are knowingly false. Many involve situations in which the person reporting, in a well-intentioned effort to protect a child overreacts to an often misleading possibility that the child may be mistreated. Others involve situations of poor childcare that, thought of legitimate concern, simply do not subject the child to abuse of neglect. In fact, substantial proportions of unfounded cases are referred to other agencies for them to provide services for the family.In fact, an unfounded report does not mean that the child was not actually abused or neglected. Evidence of child mistreatment is hard to obtain and might not be uncovered when agencies lack the time and resources to complete a thorough investigation or when inaccurate information is given to the investigator. Other cases are labeled unfounded when no services are available to help the family. Some cases must be closed because the child or family cannot be located.The current number of unfounded reports is overwhelming the limited resources of child protective agencies. For fear of missing even one abused child, workers perform extreme investigations of vague and apparently unsupported reports. Even when a home visit based on an anonymous report turns up no evidence of mistreatment; they usually interview neighbors, schoolteachers, and day-care personnel to make sure that the child is not abused. And even repeated anonymous and unfounded reports do not prevent a further investigation. But all this takes time.As a result, children in real danger are getting lost in the press of inappropriate cases. Forced...
