The problem with trying to punish people for false complaints is that disincentives to reporting child abuse is probably not worth the annoyances. By the time it transitions from a mere annoyance (having to talk to someone from the CPS for an hour and that's it) to something much more impactful (someone producing enough fraudulent evidence that you are arrested and put on trial) they've moved away from merely abusing a reporting system and into full-blown felonious behavior that will not be ignored!
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Probably for the insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish false reporting because it will somehow disincentive reporting actual abuse. Initiating a CPS investigation can be incredibly traumatizing for both the parents and the children, and due process can take months or years in the event the initial investigation ends in an incorrect decision to remove the children. This story is proof that even if the police aren't involved (or drop their involvement) CPS is its own entity and their investigations are not just having a chat for an hour. Multiple meetings, interviews, over the course of weeks or months.
False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
You know what, re-reading what I wrote I can see why... honestly, I'm mainly parroting my wife's argument because she's the one who talked me off the ledge few weeks ago.
Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on the internet"):
The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was reporting false claims then you would have to make them present some form of identification. What if this is about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't want to realistically be murdered by said scary motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most problems with child abuse also have a higher number of people who do not want to interact with law enforcement for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any situation that requires anonymous reporting."
> insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish false reporting because it will somehow disincentive reporting [...] False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.
I'm pretty sure the bar for proving a report was made in bad faith would be much higher than the bar for proving there is abuse happening.
I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove lied in order to retaliate against people they don't like.
Not really. The bar (at least in the US) for convicting someone of false accusations is just the same as any other crime.
The difference is the police won't go after false reporting often, probably because they are worried it will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.
If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate would be equally high or higher.
It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But you have to accept a false positive rate.
Right but I don't want to risk someone thinking I'm lying, if it comes with such a cost to me, and ignoring the perceived problem has no cost to me whatsoever (just potentially to the observed child if, I'm right) - unless it was so shocking that it was both deeply affecting and also surely obviously not a lie anyway.
It shouldn't, but it will. What happens when you report the bare facts as you see them, you are accused of lying, a jury is convinced, and you go to jail? That's a foreseeable outcome, and an effective deterrent.
(Whether it's worth that deterrent is a question that I am not going to attempt to grapple with on a technology message board.)
Ok, so this is just a case of something that a primarily male demographic between 19-35 and a background in STEM agree with... which was also my initial, emotionally charged reaction!
Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.
> the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.
That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.
My son's elementary school is more like a prison now, after a huge transformation in the last two years, and I can't wait for him to move up to the middle school. Which thankfully isn't quite so authoritarian. Yet. I'm right on the edge of pulling both kids out of school and going online with it, and probably would have except my daughter really didn't fare well during the pandemic version of online school. My son would be quite happy though. Make it self-paced and he'd have his high school diploma at 12.
> That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.
maybe i'm confused. are you saying it's sad that staff members at an elementary school aren't for punishing false reports to cps? i don't know what's sad about that. if reports are anonymous, how could you punish a false reporter? and how could you prove the report was intentionally false? seems like you'd catch a tiny portion of malicious reporters that for whatever reson left undeniable evidence of that intention to falsely report, and to do that the reporting would have to no longer be anonymous, which would stop a lot of people from reporting.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that public schools are a local monopoly in many cases, and as a result they can swing into bad areas unchecked.
In our case the County Superintendent is supposed to monitor the local districts, but ours refuses to. He is just window dressing. Local superintendents know this and have carte blache.
We ended up pulling our kids and sent them 40 minutes away to private schools. When we pulled them both had B averages, but scored in the 20th percentile on State tests. Entering private school both had horrible first semesters as the learning deficit became clear. Luckily they are both smart (just ignorant, thanks to the prior school) and are catching up.
False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
I feel that what you are saying is true, but I know that this would result in a system where the wealthy and connected would then run amok while their honest accusers sat in prison.
How about if we instead simply make the investigation process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's insane that the investigator required that the mother return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the past for a bout of depression.
I get what you're saying. And what I don't mean is the proverbial domestic violence situation where as soon as the police are involved, somebody is getting arrested no matter what.
But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made a false report because they wanted to ruin someone's day (or life), that should follow them around. There is a large blurry area between reporting someone because their kid has a black eye every couple months and reporting someone because their kid is better at baseball than yours where you can't prove bad faith, and in that instance it doesn't make sense to ruin anyone's life.
1. There's a case to be made for anonymous reports which the current system allows and your system wouldn't allow. Abusive parents can also be violent parents, it's understandable that in some cases teachers or people who know about the abuse going on wouldn't want to report that abuse.
2. This also reverses the current issue with CPS where a report leads to an investigation that's traumatising for the family and the children that CPS is supposed to protect. If you investigate any report to prove that the report was made in bad faith, then anyone reporting will potentially have to go through a process that's traumatising even if they are not guilty.
I think instead snozolli's solution of making CPS' investigations less threatening and more humane with an expedited process when there was clearly a misunderstanding and creating laws that make it clear that certain behaviors are not negligence would go a long way toward solving all this.
> Initiating a CPS investigation can be incredibly traumatizing for both the parents and the children, and due process can take months or years in the event the initial investigation ends in an incorrect decision to remove the children.
The actual problem, with the responsibility being laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to trauma and misery.
It seems to me that you are being unfairly downvoted. At some point there has to be a balance between punishing provably false reports, punishing (or not) good-faith false reports, and not discouraging true reports. This kind of balance is something that folks in AI need to take into consideration when deciding model performance (ROC curves), but it gets a lot more complex in real life because now you need resources to distinguish between false-reports, good-faith-false-reports, true-reports etc which easily veer into territories of determining intent and downstream harm.
If those resources do get allocated, there's a good chance these same folks downvoting you would complain about wasted government resources because the nuance in allocating those resources doesn't shine through in obvious ways.
What's the solution to this? I don't know, unfortunately. AI scientists have to take every problem that involves this nuance on a per-case basis and work with their business partners (or whoever the "client" is) to decide what's a good point on the curve for the operational model. Similarly social scientists (and politicians) influencing government operations presumably have to determine where that balance lies. And likely the downvoters don't have those answers either. Maybe the real solution is to have a not-too-complex-or-lengthy redress mechanism for those caught unfairly in the "system", with the ease-of-redress driven by how far to one side or other the balance tips.
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Cue Will Ferrell yelling at kids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=junIx1T8A5I