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
Prior to that, each state had separate definitions, and there weren't really consistent definitions of maltreatment.
So the federal government decided to federalize this under a law that's called the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, or CAPTA.
And what the point I try to make in the book is that there was so much evidence during those congressional hearings that black children were being significantly harmed by these mandatory reporting laws and that these issues that were being called neglect that were largely related to poverty had nothing to do with child harm were being the majority of cases that were being reported.
Despite all of that, Congress pushed this law through.
After CAPTA passed, we saw the same patterns where Black children have continued to this day to be overly reported and overly removed by the system.
People today try to talk about CAPTA as, or what happens to Black children, the overreporting, over removals, as an unintended consequence of the law.
And the point that I try to make in the book is, if you know that a proposed law is going to significantly harm Black children,
and you know they're going to be over-reported, over-removed for issues related to poverty, and you pass that law anyways, and then those severe consequences become reality, that's not an unintended consequence.
That was the clearly foreseeable result of this policy.
And that's the policy that we still have in effect today that continues to the over-reporting of black children.
No, no, it's an important question.
I think they play a very important role.
I think, I don't, I don't know how much, I can't remember how much I talked about it in the book and we haven't talked about it here, but I spent most of my career in the child welfare system investigating cases of very serious abuse.
So I'm very aware that that happens.
You know, there's critics of the abolition movement will try to say like, we don't think that children are really abused or we don't care about children being harmed or,
just ignore that whole area and that's just not true at all i mean i saw it firsthand over and over and over i worked in a unit where i was housed with the fort worth police department literally across from the children's hospital because that's where most of my cases originated and
I relied very heavily on the child abuse pediatricians there.
I learned a lot from her and from my interactions with them.
I learned about how to tell that injuries that would present as what looked like a one-time injury, when you looked at the x-rays, you could tell that there were multiple incidents of broken bones by calcium deposits on the bones.
All kinds of different things I learned about that.
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