Reduce False Abuse Reports

Re: the Dec. 23 Miami Herald front page article, "Florida child deaths resulting from neglect or abuse rising"

Childrens' deaths at the hands of adults are unacceptable to anyone. One guaranteed way to reduce these deaths is to reduce the false-abuse caseload of Department of Children & Families workers. Not only are caseworkers overburdened by false claims, which keep them from doing what they should be doing, but we are wasting vast sums of scarce tax dollars that could better be spent on a host of worthy needs.

One guaranteed way to reduce false-abuse claims is to prosecute those who file them. All fathers' advocacy groups list among their highest concerns the escalating rate of false-abuse allegations filed by mothers and mothers' lawyers against fathers before, during and after child-custody disputes as a means to win custody. This is a dirty little secret whose time for exposure has come.

Guilty also are state attorneys who virtually never prosecute mothers or lawyers for these crimes. The costs are paid by society (in taxes), fathers and children.

Children who go through the false-abuse inquisition are not the same afterward, nor is their relationship to their father the same. The emotional damage is severe and long lasting. To put this in perspective, 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce, another 17 percent end in permanent separation. It doesn't take a large percentage of malicious mothers and unscrupulous lawyers to generate a huge false-abuse complaint caseload and the deadly consequences outlined in the article.

Gordon E. Finley
Professor of Psychology
Florida International University
Miami