See more of our coverage in your search results.
For years, New York state and local officials have made it harder to investigate child abuse, and harder to keep abusers on the registry that educational and child-care employers check before they hire.
Now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost: City daycare facilities are seeing skyrocketing cases of child abuse by employees.
Anyone wondering how this happened hasn’t been paying attention.
When Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law last year forbidding hotline callers from accepting anonymous reports of child abuse, it sealed the deal on a hands-off stance that was long in the making.
The city’s Administration for Children’s Services has made a concerted effort to tamp down calls about child maltreatment, actively discouraging teachers, for instance, from reporting child neglect.
When calls are accepted, more and more of them are deemed “low risk,” meaning families are offered services but the cases are never actually investigated.
Many such “low risk” cases are nothing of the sort: For instance, a case that ACS chalks up to poverty — such as a teacher’s report that a child showed up to school hungry, having not been fed all weekend — may actually be the result of substance abuse or mental illness on the part of a parent or caregiver.
Even if no assault occurs, that child can be in real danger; most child maltreatment fatalities are the result of neglect, not abuse.
And for a daycare, hiring a person suffering from untreated mental illness or addiction significant enough to impact their ability to care for their own children can be disastrous.
Even leaving aside the horrifying 2023 overdose death of a toddler in a Bronx daycare that doubled as a fentanyl factory, multiple cases across the country have seen young children harmed by ingesting small amounts of drugs carelessly left around a child-care center.
But let’s say a report actually is investigated.
In the past, New York officials added names to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment if investigators found any corroboration for an allegation of children at risk.
A 2022 law, though, raised the burden of proof — from “some credible evidence” to a “fair preponderance of the evidence.”
It also reduced the number of years that the name of an offender charged with neglect must remain on the registry, from up to 28 years down to only eight.
The law applied retroactively — meaning many names have recently been expunged.
To be clear, all this was done to serve the interests of adults.
Advocates at the time complained that accusations of maltreatment are disproportionately lodged against low-income parents and racial minorities.
Given that abuse and neglect (and fatalities resulting from abuse and neglect) are more common among low-income families and among black families, it’s hardly surprising that these groups would see a disproportionate number of the charges leveled.
But as Joyce McMillan, then-leader of the Parent Legislative Action Network, explained: “I was moved by the many parents living in poverty who came to me with letters saying they were on the state registry, and that another opportunity was gonna pass them by because of . . . something a judge had never had any oversight of.”
She was right that most child abuse and neglect cases don’t get adjudicated in criminal court.
Those that go to family court don’t determine parental guilt or innocence; they’re meant to determine whether children are safe at home — and if not, what steps are necessary to remedy that.
But mothers and fathers who are choosing a daycare facility for their kids aren’t concerned only about criminal convictions among the staff.
Would you hire a babysitter who’s been accused of neglect — for leaving a toddler alone all night, or allowing another adult to assault a child, or leaving some cocaine unattended on the coffee table — as long as the sitter didn’t have a criminal conviction? Of course not.
Would you be OK with such a sitter, as long as the last substantiated report was nine years ago? Again, no.
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration drops millions of dollars to expand the city’s daycare offerings, providers are looking to hire a lot of people quickly.
Maybe those providers are doing their due diligence — calling previous employers, for instance — but maybe they’re just depending on the state registry to take care of their background checks.
If state and local officials are turning a blind eye to accusations of maltreatment, while making it harder to put people on the state registry and keep them there, we shouldn’t be surprised when abusers turn up near our most vulnerable citizens.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.