When it’s hard to give praise, it should be worth more. This is going to be very hard for me to offer. It shouldn’t be. When ideas are the subject, not behavior or intentions, we should look squarely at the ideas and consider praise or rejection. That’s not hard, is it?
So, I want to praise a bill in the Idaho legislature offered up by Representative Heather Scott. I don’t want to praise Heather when she wraps herself in the Stars and Bars or her disruptive tendencies in the Idaho House. I just want to offer my support to a simple bill she has introduced.
House Bill 20 adds a misdemeanor criminal penalty to bad faith reporting of child abuse, neglect, or abandonment.
Why is such a penalty needed? Shouldn’t we protect anybody who is trying to prevent or report child abuse? Here’s where we get into the real world. The laws we write should have a clear awareness of the real world.
We see so many ideas floated in the swirling pot of the Idaho legislature that are just dog whistle attempts to protect us from the boogey man. I could list them, but I’m sure we would not agree on the real-world threats we face. Your fear of Sharia Law might be as great as my concern about ground water.
But I digress. I must move forward with the real-world reason this law makes sense.
For many years I served on my county Multidisciplinary Task Force for the Prevention of Child Abuse. Every county in the state is supposed to have one. I got chosen to participate because the law that established these groups called for a member of the healthcare community to serve. At the time, I was the county coroner. I was also a practicing family physician. So, I went to these monthly meetings on my lunch hour. They agreed to meet at that time so I wouldn’t have to miss clinic time. Every other person on this task force was a state, county, or city employee, not a private businessman. Doctors are businessmen. Time out of clinic is lost income.
We would start each meeting by reviewing the month’s list of Child Protective Services referrals. We, as a task force were charged to make sure proper handling of these cases was being done.
There were usually twenty or thirty, maybe up to forty referrals in our little county. They were graded by risk to the child, high to low. Each month there would be just one or two high risk situations. The vast majority of the referrals were found to be either low risk, unfounded, or even false.
It was not uncommon for there to be disputed custody, an acrimonious divorce and custody battle going on. One parent might make an allegation against the other and, through investigation CPS could determine the allegation was sometimes false, sometimes unfounded, and sometimes offered in bad faith to try to influence the court.
False claims take up time and effort. Bad faith claims are an attempt to use the power of the state for malicious purposes. It is quite fair that there should be consequences for such bad behavior. Thank you to Representative Scott for putting this forward.
I wish all people behaved with integrity. I want to believe most people do. But I live in the real world, so I know this is not always true. I take cash when I sell on Craigslist. I count the bills before the buyer leaves. And I give cash when I buy.
It is only fair that the laws we write express such expectation of integrity. And it is only fair that bad faith actions have consequences.