Alan Dettlaff
speaker
269 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Alan Dettlaff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
By 1968, with mandatory reporting laws in effect, there were 11,000 cases being reported.
But what we saw happen during this time is
The original intent of mandatory reporting laws was to capture these children who are being very severely physically abused and doing something about that to protect them from further abuse.
But very quickly, as states adopted mandatory reporting laws, we saw the definitions of child abuse expand greatly, first to things like malnutrition, then to things like the lack of supervision, then to things like not attending school.
And the net just widened considerably, even conditions of the home, dirty homes,
things like that.
And by the late 1960s became the largest form of reports that were being called in these neglect cases.
We also saw during that time that black children were immediately overrepresented.
Black children in that time in the 60s were about 8% of the population in the US, of the child population.
They made up over half of all child abuse reports.
And the connection I try to make in the book is that
What isn't always put together is that moment in time between 1962 and 1968 when these mandatory reporting laws were being developed was the exact time of the civil rights movement when there was incredible.
racial tensions and racial animus in the US.
And you also had publication of what people call the Moynihan Report, which was a report developed by Patrick Moynihan, who basically said that civil rights legislation would not be enough to
save Black families because the problems in Black homes were so severe.
And he attributed that to what he called a tangle of pathology because Black homes were being led by Black single mothers.
So he had these narratives out there about Black single mothers raising boys who this report said would become the criminal underclass of the future, really stoking people's fears at that time.
All of this is happening as mandatory reporting laws were being developed.
So then we see this outcome of more than 50% of calls being made on Black families for mostly neglect-related things.
And then a few years pass, and Congress decides to federalize this system of mandatory reporting laws.
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