Physical Child Abuse Cases & False Accusations

Nothing is more heart wrenching than photographs of a young child who has been severely physically abused.  He or she most often shows large bruises, burns, welts, or scalding that bring tears and the urge stop this torture to the even most hardened of investigators.  Such disturbing photos are also shown to legislators to help pass new laws or to secure additional funding for social agencies.  When the public hears of physical child abuse, these are the very images that come to mind.

In actuality, there are very few allegations of this type of serious abuse.  In those rare cases of severe physical abuse, the physical evidence is often overwhelming and proves that physical child abuse has occurred.  The only time that a false allegation might arise is if the true perpetrator falsely accuses someone else to avoid punishment.

So, from where are all the allegations of physical abuse coming?

Dr. Benjamin Spock v. Conservative Judeo-Christian Beliefs

For centuries in Judeo-Christian communities, parents have used physical discipline or corporal punishment as a means of teaching their children right from wrong.  The Bible refers to such physical discipline in its warning "spare the rod and spoil the child."

However, shortly after World War Two, this means of molding a child’s moral character was challenged by well known pediatrician Benjamin Spock, when he proposed forms of positive re-enforcement and non-physical discipline as the more enlightened method of child rearing. Spock’s methods were popular in more liberal circles and became the philosophical underpinning for the training of social workers child therapists, and child advocates.  It still remains today as the foundation of any training done by state agencies.

More conservative parents, however, particularly those with fundamentalist religious beliefs, have long opposed Spock’s ideas.  That is why the fierce conflict between these two perspectives of handling children is still not resolved in the courts.  In response to the horrors of physical child abuse, many state legislatures wrestled to define what constituted such abuse in the early 1990s.  Representatives were heavily lobbied both by social workers who wanted corporal punishment outlawed, and by various Judeo-Christian groups who believed it was their religious right to use corporal punishment.  The end result was ambiguous statutes.

• Is it physical abuse, if you spank your child on the back of the leg?
• What is "age appropriate" discipline?
• How does one define "serious physical injury?"
• Can a red bottom caused by hand spanking be a "serious physical injury?"

These are the terms found in many state statutes, but none are properly defined.  Therefore, the manner in which these statutes are being interpreted depends on the child-rearing perspective of the people reading it.  For example, we have found that Child Protective Service officials in California generally interpret the use of any instrument on a child as physical abuse.  For decades, however, mothers spanked their children with a wooden spoon in order that the mother’s hand was not associated with inflicting pain.  Does the spoon used with the same force as one might use a hand to spank a child constitute an "instrument of abuse?"  In many states, Child Protective Service workers have taken children away from their parents for such disciplinary conduct.

Our office has counseled many Judeo-Christian-oriented parents who have raised their children with love tempered with physical discipline, only to be terrified by allegations made by Child Protective Services or the police against them of child abuse.  Since Child Protective Services as a group is against corporal punishment in any form, they are very liberal in interpreting corporal punishment as child abuse.  They can then use their power to seize children and can request the police to make an arrest for child abuse.

The police and prosecutors are not so uniform in their interpretation:  Each officer, each department, and each DA’s office has a different view of what is legal corporal punishment and what is not.

However, police and prosecutors tend to ignore the perspective of some Judeo-Christian-oriented families who feel it is their right to use corporal punishment for discipline.  That is why some officers will arrest a parent and the DA’s office will prosecute him or her for spanking a child.

The freedom given to Child Protective Service workers, police officers, and prosecutors in defining corporal punishment is what most often leads to false allegations of physical child abuse.  Their freedom turns into unchecked power when combined with the unlimited resources of the DA’s office, an often misinformed or biased staff, and a judicial system that relies on information from people in the employ of the state.  Even though the ultimate authority, the jury, will decide on what is reasonable treatment of child, it is unfair to expect families to bear cost and trauma of a jury trial in order to establish that what they are doing is reasonable and legal.

Many state laws, as they currently stand, make it possible for agents of the state to control parents’ actions, even if the parents are acting in the best interest of their children.  And while Judeo-Christian groups can influence what laws are written and passed, they have little power in influencing how social workers or officers in the legal and justice systems interpret child abuse standards.  And that may mean arrest, jail, and the seizure of your children should you believe that you have the right to physically punish your child in order to reinforce moral training and education.

Science v. Advocacy

As we have said, the training that most social workers, the police and officers of the legal system receive predisposes them to believe that signs of physical contact with a child, like bruising or red marks, can be the signs of child abuse, merely because of their concept of corporal punishment.  The odds are even higher that parents will face criminal charges of child physical abuse should their child be very young, non-verbal and display a severe bruise, injury, or fracture that cannot be accounted for by the parent.

Unfortunately, our office knows this too well from experience.  One of our cases involved a child who was being carried in the mother’s arms as she walked through an airport.  She tripped and fell to the floor on top of the child.  The little girl child hit her head, began crying but then stopped.  The mother believed the she was uninjured and they continued home.  The mother then left the child with the father to babysit her.  Several hours later the child became seriously ill, and after being rushed to the hospital, X-rays revealed a fractured skull and a subdural hematoma.  The father was immediately arrested for physical child abuse, handcuffed, and jailed.

He faced a minimum of eight years in prison because the radiologist, a self-proclaimed child abuse expert, reported that the force necessary for such an injury was either a fall from a third story window or by swinging the child by her feet and smashing her head against a wall.

During court testimony and under cross examination, the radiologist admitted having no scientific basis for her opinions.  She could not name one controlled scientific study that supported her claims that such force as she described was necessary to cause the child’s injuries.  Furthermore, she admitted that she had never personally witnessed a child injured by a three story fall or being swung by the feet and having the child’s head smashed against a wall.  In summary, she had no scientific studies and no personal knowledge upon which to base these outrageous conclusions.

Why was there a lack of science in her testimony?  First of all, because she was trained to be a child advocate and had no other experience--scientific or personal--in the field her first response was to claim child abuse.  Secondly, studying the force required to create fractures in children entails human subjects is an unthinkable kind of study in our society.  Our researchers, however, did find studies done on deceased animals whose bones had the same dimensions as those of children.  However, the child abuse expert called by the prosecution rejected the animal studies on the grounds that there were no comparison studies between animal bones versus human bones.  Therefore, the validity of the controlled university research was questioned.  Our researchers also discovered actual human studies done in Europe and had the studies translated from German into English.  In Germany, several studies were conducted on children who had recently died.  One study focused specifically on measuring the force necessary to break limbs, another on the force needed to fracture the skull.  The studies showed that the kind of damage sustained by our client’s child could be caused by a fall of only three feet onto a hard floor like that in the airport.  That was approximately the height of the fall the child suffered while being held in her mother’s arms and then having her mother fall top of her.  All allegations against the father were subsequently dropped when this scientific evidence was presented to the court.

Despite the radiologist’s intent to help the injured child by advocating against abuse (without any scientific research), she was actually harmed the child by denying the child a loving parent and making it more difficult for her innocent parents to defend themselves.  If her erroneous testimony had not been exposed, the child would have lost her father to prison. She would have been deprived of his love, attention and companionship on the basis of exaggeration and personal bias.

This kind of arrogance and the lack of knowledge on the part of "experts" who have no data on force, whether it relates to the torque required for a spiral fracture, the angle of bending necessary to break a bone, or the impact required to fracture a skull or cause a brain injury, have no place in a court where defendants must fight for their lives.

The cause of injuries to non-verbal children is often difficult to determine.  The search for evidence can be complex and time-consuming.  We work to force the justice system to make decisions on the basis of unbiased scientific data.  We believe that that is the only way of distinguishing between the guilty and the innocent, of distinguishing false allegations of child physical abuse from those that are true.

Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy

Another very difficult form of Physical Child Abuse is called Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.

This strange name came from a 1977 case in which English pediatrician Roy Meadow noted an article by psychiatrist Richard Asher.  In 1951, Asher used the name and legend of one Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Munchhausen, the notorious eighteenth-century German baron known for his outrageous tall tales, to describe a certain kind of psychiatric patient who sought out the attention of physician after physician for more and more outlandish claims of illness and rare diseases.

Roy Meadow noted that a small percentage of his little patients' mothers brought their children to pediatricians and hospitals all too often.  Meadow noted that these parents (almost always mothers), constantly insisted their children were ill.  He also noted that these parents seemed to enjoy the special attention numerous medical personnel had to give to the parent’s ever more exaggerated claims.  In the severe cases, Meadow noted that the parents were so intent upon obtaining the attention of medical personnel, they actually caused their children (by diet, poison and other means) to become ill.

Today, the contributors to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual call this kind of process "fact-titious"  illnesses and are studying Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy for inclusion in the manual.  Modern research notes that this constellation known as Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy involves the intentional production physical or psychological signs and symptoms in a person under the individual’s care.  Modern research suggests that the motivation of the individual is to assume the sick role (and the attention from medical personnel that comes with it) by proxy.

Although these cases are rare, our office has been involved in the defense of parents accused of this disorder.  These cases are quite expensive because they require experts in both medicine and psychology.  If an actual physical illness exists in the child, was it caused by the accused parent?  If no physical illness can be found, is the investigation and examination reliable?  These are just some of the questions our team works to answer--with our experts and our research data bank.