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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Appearances
and i relied on those doctors very heavily to make a determination if something was abuse or not abuse so i think they play a very important role what what i can say about it is that as it relates to the work that i do in trying to address these disproportionate harms to black children that there are a number of studies many have been done over the years that show that child abuse pediatricians are more likely to confirm that something is abuse when it happens to a black child
and believe that something is an accident when it happens to a white child.
Most of those studies have been done on abusive head trauma and have shown that doctors will repeatedly say that it's an accident if it's a white family.
But if it's a black family, confirm that it's abuse, send the child for a long scan, meaning a scan of all of their bones to see if there's other injuries and make child abuse reports.
So I think that child abuse pediatricians, even though they're very important to this process, are also subject to the biases that we've been talking about and contribute to the overrepresentation of black children in the system.
The difficulty in this conversation or the assessment of accidents versus non-accidents is that so many children who are
abused or children who are injured, whether it's accidental or not accidental, are pre-verbal and can't say what happened.
There are some cases, like we just talked about, where doctors can make a determination by looking for certain things or x-rays, certain physical evidence to make a determination that something was not an accident.
But I think when you have children who are pre-verbal, then there are people all around that child who are making judgments about what happened to the child.
And I think what research shows, what I've seen, is that those people are more likely to believe that something is not an accident if the injury is to a black child, and more likely to believe that something is an accident if it happens to a white child.
I'm writing a new book now that's more of a memoir about children that I removed that I think now did not need to be removed and how I was complicit in believing many of the biases that plagued that system.
And I tell a story about a neighborhood that I would go to often in Fort Worth on the east side that was predominantly, if not exclusively, a very poor black neighborhood.
I investigated a lot of cases there and found
When I worked in the unit of investigators and when we would get an investigation from that neighborhood, we would say to each other, we need to bring the car seat on this one.
Meaning that we were deciding before we even went there that we were going to be coming back to the office with someone's baby strapped into our car.
How can that presumption not influence the actual outcome of the case?
And the reality is that I...
was afraid to say in the book, but did say and still I'm really uncomfortable is that I was afraid to go to that neighborhood.
That was the neighborhood that was the bad neighborhood on the news where there were crime and gangs.
But if I'm going into this neighborhood and I'm scared to be there, how then is that influencing what I'm thinking is happening behind someone's door versus when I go to the nice white gated community in the suburbs where none of those things are going through my mind?
Showing 101–120 of 269 · page 6 of 14
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