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being addressed, and the extent to which public investment should be made to address the problem. Since the landmark decision of Landeros v. Flood (1976), remarkably few cases of liability for failure to report have been litigated, and of those known, most resulted in settlements out of court, which do not lead to appeals and thus have not been documented in places easily accessible to non-lawyers (Bross, 1987). Cases for not reporting have been documented more often than cases of malicious reporting , and a legislative grant of “good faith immunity” from civil or criminal liability for child abuse reporting is universal in the United States (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2010). The exception to this effective shield from liability is found in litigation related to divorce, child custody , and visitation proceedings. “The American Psychological Association’s Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family found that batterers are twice as likely to seek custody as non-batterers” (Haralambie, 2010, citing the taskforce’s report of 1996). However, “When a parent attempts to obtain the protection of the child welfare and judicial system, but the courts do not believe that abuse has occurred, the would-be protector has no place else to turn. Each subsequent attempt to get help may be viewed as vindictiveness, paranoia, hypervigilance, or attempts to ‘alienate’ the child from the other parent. Parents may actually be ordered not to make further CPS [child protective services] reports or to first have a report screened by some other professional, even if such orders put parents who are mandated reporters at risk of violating mandatory reporting laws” (p. 408). Even in this contentious area, however, any lawsuits against professional participants tend to be filed under various claims of negligence—for example, related to evaluation or treatment—and are commonly filed against a professional reporter for the mere act of reporting. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS The topics of this chapter are the reporting and treatment of child abuse, information related to court reports and testimony , the contrast between civil and criminal proceedings, and a few of the special legal topics of child maltreatment. Since any of these topics might lend themselves individually to extensive legal analysis, the purpose here is to list and briefly describe the issues and direct the reader, when appropriate, to more extensive sources or examples. MANDATED CHILD ABUSE REPORTING AND HIPAA CONSIDERATIONS Against a limited backdrop of intellectual controversy on the value and consequences of mandatory reporting of child maltreatment (Mathews & Bross, 2008), reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect is the legally enforced practice in all U.S. states and many districts, territories, and possessions. Originally, all 50 states independently enacted child abuse reporting laws that focused on severe physical abuse (Paulsen, 1967). The original state laws were, to a degree, standardized by Pub. L. No. 93-247, which applied the federal spending power, using small grants to states as incentives to achieve relative compliance with national standards for reporting. Changes encouraged by federal granting authority included expansion of the reporting requirement to virtually every form of maltreatment, including neglect, as well as requirements for the appointment of legal representatives for maltreated children whose cases came to court. The inclusion of neglect as a requirement of reporting laws resulted in a vastly increased number of child maltreatment reports. The reporting system has been the basis for analyzing how important child maltreatment is to the United States, to what degree child maltreatment is Legal Issues Related to Child Maltreatment and Its Therapy DONALD C. BROSS, PH.D., J.D. 35 358 Legal Issues HIPAA is a modern example of highly developed laws on nondisclosure. HIPAA addresses PHI, or protected health information, and prescribes who may and may not have access to PHI without the patient’s express permission. Written into HIPAA is an exception to the prohibition of disclosure of PHI when a state law requires reporting of child abuse and neglect. As noted already, child maltreatment reporting is legislated as a legal duty in all 50 states. However , it is also true that states can vary as to disclosure or reporting of information to agencies other than child protective services. A committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics analyzed these statutes as follows (see also Davidson , 2003): All states have laws that mandate reporting of suspected child abuse or neglect, and HIPAA rules allow disclosure of protected health information without legal guardian authorization under these circumstances . In general, if a pediatrician suspects abuse or neglect, as defined within state...

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