For years, New York state and local officials have made it harder to investigate child abuse, and harder to keep abusers on the registry that educational and child-care employers check before they hire.<\/p>\n
Now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost: City daycare facilities are seeing skyrocketing cases of child abuse by employees.<\/p>\n
Anyone wondering how this happened hasn\u2019t been paying attention.<\/p>\n
When Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law<\/a> last year forbidding hotline callers from accepting anonymous reports of child abuse, it sealed the deal on a hands-off stance that was long in the making.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s Administration for Children\u2019s Services has made a concerted effort to tamp down calls<\/a> about child maltreatment, actively discouraging teachers, for instance, from reporting child neglect.<\/p>\n When calls are accepted, more and more of them are deemed \u201clow risk,\u201d meaning families are offered services but the cases are never actually investigated.<\/p>\n Many such \u201clow risk\u201d cases are nothing of the sort: For instance, a case that ACS chalks up to poverty \u2014 such as a teacher\u2019s report that a child showed up to school hungry, having not been fed all weekend \u2014 may actually be the result of substance abuse or mental illness on the part of a parent or caregiver.<\/p>\n Even if no assault occurs, that child can be in real danger; most child maltreatment fatalities are the result of neglect, not abuse.<\/p>\n And for a daycare, hiring a person suffering from untreated mental illness or addiction significant enough to impact their ability to care for their own children can be disastrous.<\/p>\n