This Arizona child advocate says we need to be mandated supporters, not just mandated reporters

Arizona law specifies who is considered a mandatory reporter — a person who is required to notify the Department of Child Safety or law enforcement if they suspect child abuse or neglect. Those mandatory reporters include teachers, doctors and others who are responsible for the care or treatment of a child.

But Claire Louge argues that we should also be talking about mandated supporters, in addition to reporters.

Louge is executive director of the statewide nonprofit Prevent Child Abuse Arizona. She joined The Show to talk more.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: And Claire, when we’re talking about the concept of mandated supporting, what are we referring to?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Mandated supporting is this idea that people who work with children and families are not just mandated reporters, they’re also mandated supporters, or rather can consider themselves to be mandated supporters. It’s really that people who have relationships with children and families are in the best position to be able to connect them to what they need to actually prevent child abuse and neglect and other kinds of adversity.

MARK BRODIE: So, is this sort of a preventive kind of thing as you see it?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Yes, absolutely. And it really is based on this national movement towards this idea that the system that we have in place to protect children from child abuse and neglect is not the be-all end-all of how we facilitate or ensure child well-being. In fact, it is the last stop, and a lot needs to happen before that to prevent the need for the child protection system.

MARK BRODIE: So, we’re talking about people like teachers, doctors, people like that, healthcare providers who are mandatory reporters. What kinds of things should they or maybe can they be doing on the front end to try to make it so there’s nothing that they have to report later on?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Yes. So, first of all, I need to say that we are not discouraging people from reporting suspected child abuse or neglect. But let me give you some numbers here, because in Arizona, the Department of Child Safety, which is our CPS system, our child protection system, receives around 80,000 calls a year alleging child abuse or neglect. About half of those calls are screened out, meaning that they don’t meet the definition of child abuse or neglect that is in the purview of DCS to take care of or investigate. So, already half these calls are getting screened out.

MARK BRODIE: Whether or not there’s anything there that like the kids need help with.

CLAIRE LOUGE: Well, and it’s important to kind of bust a few myths around DCS, because sometimes people will misunderstand the function of DCS. The main function of DCS is to protect children from their parents. In fact, if there’s abuse perpetrated by someone else, whether it’s a coach or a neighbor, that’s actually not in the purview of DCS to investigate, that is the police.

And there’s often this misunderstanding that DCS is the place to call if you are concerned about a family. It is not the place to call for any family concern. It is the place to call if you suspect abuse or neglect. And already half the calls that go in there don’t meet the criteria for investigation. In our state, those calls don’t go anywhere.

So, the mandated reporter who’s calling that hotline is not given information on how to connect that family to other support. There is no other line that people have access to to find what families need. We don’t have anything else. So, we’re essentially waiting for families to get worse. It’s either we report or nothing.

MARK BRODIE: Obviously, this is a very broad question with a lot of answers, but what are some of the things that tend to be going on that maybe don’t meet the criteria for DCS to look into it — that a mandatory reporter might be trying to call in?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Gosh, well, I am not particularly equipped to answer that question because I don’t have all the data in front of me and I don’t work with DCS. But we partner with them a lot, so they are one of our strongest partners because they have an interest in making sure that families are never in contact with them.

But I think people misunderstand what the meaning of prevention is. The root cause of child abuse and neglect is not bad parents. The root cause of child abuse and neglect is overwhelmed families. And it’s also worth saying that 70% of the calls that go into the hotline are about neglect and not about abuse.

Neglect is certainly preventable. And we can prevent neglect particularly by connecting families to who or what they need to relieve that stress, to relieve that need, to meet that need. So, the job of prevention is getting families what they need when they need it in their own communities before crisis happens.

MARK BRODIE: Do those services exist?

CLAIRE LOUGE: So, the services do exist, but unfortunately, we don’t have this interconnected system of family support where families can get what they need. And one of the things that Prevent Child Abuse Arizona is doing is we are working to create that interconnected system of family support. And we are focusing on these hubs of support and connection that already exist in Arizona. They’re called Family Resource Centers. And they are for any person raising a child, so your family, my family, any family.

And that’s important that they are for everyone because all families need support sometimes. And they are there for families both in times of need and in times of crisis. So, they are the front door of support. Families need the front door of support, not just to be reported.

MARK BRODIE: So, I guess how big of a shift in thinking for, I guess, the entire community, it’s not just educators, physicians, other, you know, mandatory reporters, it sounds like it’s a pretty significant shift in thinking for all of us to make this happen?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Yes, it is absolutely about mindset shift, because I think one of the consequences of mandated reporting, what it has done, is that it gives this impression that there is an authority that knows how to deal with problems for families that are in your community.

But because you are in that community and you know that family or that child, you’re actually the better messenger of trusted support for that family. And what we’re doing is by referring more and more families to a system that is actually not designed to help them in their case, we are creating a system that focuses on surveillance, and we are making it dangerous for families to ask for help.

So, this is really about ensuring that the families that need support get support, and that families that truly need an investigation get an investigation. It’s very challenging. This is a wicked problem. But if we focus on investigation and do not focus on prevention, we are guaranteed to need to have more investigation.

MARK BRODIE: What kind of resources do you think you and others who are doing the kind of work you’re doing need to get really get this up and running in Arizona and have it as robust as it needs to be?

CLAIRE LOUGE: Wow. So, the mandated supporter concept is really a mindset shift concept that helps people understand their role in connecting families to support as a powerful role for preventing child abuse and neglect. So, the training itself needs to be in front of more people.

In fact, one of our goals is to pair the standard mandated reporting training that all mandated reporters receive and to provide an optional add-on of the mandated supporting training to help them understand their role in connecting families to support. But further than that, we actually need to create this system.

MARK BRODIE: You need the support?

CLAIRE LOUGE: We need the support, exactly, because at the end of this training, we say, "OK, good luck. Here is a about a dozen resources that you can start with. Good luck finding resources for families. And if it’s hard for you, it’s definitely hard for them," right?

So, what we are doing at Prevent Child Abuse Arizona with our partners is we are focusing on these hubs of support and connection called Family Resource Centers. And these are front doors of support for any person raising a child. We want to seed them all over Arizona and to make sure that people know about them, because what these hubs do is they provide parenting support and education, maybe it’s a positive discipline class or whatever kind of parenting support parents might need.

They connect families to one another, so there’s opportunities for families to form their own social connections, which is the most protective thing that we can do for families. Social isolation is actually the number one predictor of child abuse and neglect. Third, they also connect families to other resources in their area. If we have these all over Arizona and they know about every other thing that’s out there to support families, then we create an interconnected system of family support that is a trusted way for families to get access to who or what they need to raise their children.

MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Claire Louge, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Arizona. Claire, thanks so much.

CLAIRE LOUGE: It’s such a pleasure. Thank you, Mark.