Protecting parents from the child protection system

The parents I represented as a longtime legal services and civil rights lawyer never expected to find themselves on the wrong side of a child-abuse hotline call. Erroneous judgments, finding both guilt and innocence, issue at alarming rates, often without any court review.

The system has become a behemoth, with 7.4 million hotline calls in 2016 alone. Only a tiny fraction involves serious physical or sexual abuse — that's the good news in these staggering numbers. With nearly 74 million children in America, hotline investigations affect huge numbers of children — and not in a good way. One study found that 53 percent of African-American children experienced a child abuse or neglect investigation at some point in their lives. Child abuse registers list millions of perpetrators, most of whom never had a day in court before their names were listed.

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