Child Abuse Legislation Needs to Be Fixed

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, the House voted on H.R. 485, Stronger CAPTA, a reauthorization of the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act.

Abuse is obviously a horrible thing that no child should have to suffer. However, this legislation has multiple issues which I call on the Senate to fix. Notably, it would create a national registry of child abuse and neglect.

Now, this sounds good, but under current law, a person does not need to be convicted or even charged with a crime to be put on a State abuse registry, which leads to many parents being added due to misfiled paperwork or perhaps overzealous CPS workers.

Homeschooling parents in particular face this issue, and an appeal can take months or even years to get a name removed from the list. By nationalizing State registries, this problem will spread nationwide without a fix.

The legislation attempts to address this concern by creating a working group to study and make recommendations on due process concerns, but that is not a sufficient safeguard for Americans' due process rights.

A 2009 HHS report on the feasibility of a national child abuse registry noted that a national registry would be plagued by false positives, where an innocent person sharing a name with an abuser would be flagged in background searches.

I call on the Senate to fix this legislation.

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