Who Do We Believe When Child Abuse Is Alleged Against A Parent?

DALLAS, TX —Whose side will Texas take when it comes to child abuse?

Under provisions of a law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week, family courts and welfare workers in the Lone Star State must consider supplemental medical opinions before removing children from their legal custodians. The new law goes into effect Sept. 1.

Beyond that, the measure calls for the state commission study of state-funded physicians who determine child abuse. The commission's mandate: to recommend improvements to the process followed by Child Protective Services in weighing doctors' medical evaluations.

The new law is actually a direct result of an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and NBC News into a dire situation of parents who faced accusations of child abuse based on reports from doctors that were later judged as "mistaken."

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One of the bill's original sponsors, Republican State Rep. James Frank says the intended result is to prevent CPS from relying on incomplete or flawed information before kids are removed from their homes.

The Wichita Falls lawmaker says that removing children from their Moms and Dads is traumatic for both kids and their parents. "So," he's quoted as telling NBC, "we have to be more precise in the way we go through the removal process."

All true. And it's critically important to have checks and double-checks on those doctors, mental health practitioners and CPS case workers to try to remain objective and in pursuit of the truth.

But what happens when it's a he-said, she-said situation between parents and their kids. Who will the state trust?

This, for me, is personal. CPS didn't exist as it does when I was growing up in El Paso. There were no children's advocates back then. In the early '70s, if your parents beat you, you were being disciplined like most of the kids on your block.

And, if your parents called the cops on you, as mine did on more occasions than I can count, the police would show up and assume your parents were telling them truthfully that you were incorrigible. And if they wanted you locked up in juvenile detention, even though you were sporting a black eye, scratches and visible bruises everywhere, off you went. Even if your parents were obviously drunk.

My sisters were given coffee cans to urinate in at night in juvenile detention. I was once carted off and put in solitary confinement one of several weekends for not mowing the lawn soon enough. My sisters were incarcerated for three days because they returned an hour late from a school basketball game None of us was yet 15 years old.

Revisions in the '70s resulted in CPS becoming adult advocates for kids like me. They were too late to help me or my sisters, but finally the reign of terror that my parents and so many of their contemporaries put us through was over.

Now that one buffer between abused kids and their parents is under assault.

There's no question that CPS case workers can be overzealous. They have kids to protect, and parents who lie. They also have kids who lie in the belief that they can manipulate the system and punish their innocent parents in the process.

In the middle are the medical and mental health care workers who know that homes and lives remain in the balance. If they don't find abuse where it exists, they could enable a parent or custodian to cause irreparable harm or allow a child to die. And if they stake their reputations on claims of abuse that are later revealed to be baseless, that does damage of its own.

But shouldn't the benefit of the doubt be afforded to the most vulnerable? To hobble CPS or to put the onus on clinicians to prove conclusively what abusive parents strain to hide only compounds the nightmare.

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