At least 35 percent of calls to Florida’s child abuse hotline are inaccurate, off-the-wall or simply can’t be proved, a national expert says.

But the state’s wide-open acceptance policy nevertheless forces investigators to check all of them out.

That policy, a legacy of the state’s sensitivity over past child deaths codified in the 1999 Child Protection Act, has created an avalanche of formal abuse reports — more than 180,000 last year.

The enormous workload, 59,000 reports larger than the previous year, is burying investigators, say local child welfare managers. The plaint is echoed by Richard Gelles, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Children’s Policy, Practice and Research, who just completed a yearlong review of Florida’s abuse hotline.

The review, mandated by the state law, revealed hotline counselors rarely reject calls, even those that fail to meet the state’s criteria for an abuse report. Counselors are accepting calls outside the Department of Children & Families jurisdiction, those where the child cannot be located, and those that point out a family’s financial or social woes rather than signs of child abuse.

“The hotline is supposed to be a gate,” Gelles said. “They’ve got the gate rusted, stuck open.”

Children & Families officials, who run the hotline, disagree. They say they’re following state law and accepting calls that meet Florida statute. They say they reject between 25 percent and 30 percent of calls that don’t meet the criteria.

They attribute the constant influx of reports to increased productivity among the hotline staff and changes in the law — which require the hotline to accept calls from mandated reporters such as judges, police officers and teachers.

Reports are passed to the 15 local districts to investigate. And many of those districts say they’re swamped because the hotline isn’t carefully screening calls.

“There’s a sense the system has overwhelmed itself by taking on too much of everything,” said George Atkinson, program administrator for the Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s child protective investigative unit. The Sheriff’s Office took over child abuse investigations from the state Department of Children & Families a year ago.

Local caseloads grow

Last year, Broward was swamped with more than 15,700 reports, according to Children & Families’ fiscal year data. Typically, abuse or neglect is verified in about half of all reports, said Cheryl Stopnick, a Broward Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman.

In Palm Beach County, 35 percent of more than 10,000 reports led to clear cases of abuse or neglect.

The danger, Gelles and others say, is that more files on investigators’ desks mean less attention given to each case, creating a greater chance a child truly at risk of abuse or neglect will slip through an investigator’s fingers.

“While that’s well-intended, to look at more situations, if the end result is that you wind up with 50,000 cases in your backlog statewide, you have to say, ‘Well, did I get a benefit out of this or did I create another set of risks?'” Atkinson said.

Gelles thinks Florida is courting danger by accepting 95 percent of the calls to the hotline and turning them into reports to be investigated.

“I equate that to the game of playing Russian roulette,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before some child in the backlog pool is really badly injured.”

Others knee-deep in Florida’s child welfare system agree something needs to give.

“The demands on the job have increased, like, tenfold,” said Lynn Boughner, family safety program operations administrator for the Department of Children & Families in Palm Beach County.

“I’ve been an investigator back prior to our current system; I never had a child die on me. I would say pretty much I did a lot of the same steps people do now but you didn’t have a million pieces of paper to fill out or a computer facing you every day. …

“Maybe they’ve added more people but they’ve added more cases, more complex cases; it just seems like this cycle we can’t get out of.”

As a first step to relieving some of that caseload bloat, child welfare managers — and Gelles — would like to see tighter screening of calls accepted by hotline workers.

For example, workers now find themselves doing full-fledged child abuse investigations into families suffering money, mental health or other social problems.

“I’ve never seen the necessity of making someone wear the scarlet letter A and be investigated only to be offered voluntary services,” Gelles said of the typical outcome of most child abuse investigations. “It just doesn’t seem right to use the child welfare system as the social services safety net.”

Also, workers often get pulled in to reinvestigate closed cases, Atkinson said.

“Because of the mandated reporting situation, sometimes something will happen with a child in the past and it may have already been investigated and disposed of, but when it gets mentioned in a new venue, let’s say a new counselor or psychologist, they might feel obligated to report that. And we may get the whole thing recycled again,” Atkinson said. “That happens with some regularity.”

Values vs. care

It’s not uncommon for investigators to get bogged down with cases that question parents’ values rather than the care of their children.

“We’ve had people report the parents drink in front of the children,” Atkinson said. “Now you can almost read between the lines the [caller] has the belief drinking is bad, and I can respect that, but it’s probably not within the purview of a child protection investigation.”

Sometimes, investigators work on an abuse report they know is false, Boughner said. But they must do all the interviews, background checks and paperwork anyway. That’s the law.

“Every case has to be treated the same with the same steps, the same amount of work regardless of its validity,” she said. “I think that’s the killer.”

Allowing investigators to label a case as patently unfounded would ease workers’ loads — as long as they got their supervisor’s approval, Boughner said.

But what’s truly imperative is a screening tool at the hotline level, those in child welfare say. In this, state officials agree.

In his report, Gelles suggested Florida create a scientific formula to determine what elements make up a provable case. He said that while that creates the chance of rejecting calls that may have merit, it’s safer than creating a massive backlog of open cases.

Linda Radigan, head of family safety for Children & Families in Tallahassee, while eager to lighten investigators’ caseloads, worries that weeding out too many iffy calls could be dangerous.

“On the face of it, sometimes you cannot tell,” she said. “That’s why half the investigations we go out on result in no findings of abuse or neglect.”

Christine McMillon-Lane, director of the state’s hotline, emphasized that a computer program can’t detect the nuances in a caller’s voice the way a counselor can.

“I’m a proponent of tools, but it can never replace human decision-making,” she said.

Gelles also would like to see the hotline counselors actually act as counselors. “Let’s have them offer real concrete pathways to social services,” he said.

That would go a long way in triaging calls — separating them by serious allegations of abuse or neglect versus calls about a family’s inability to find day care or adequate housing.

Whatever the solution, something needs to be done to rein in the unwieldy caseload, local child welfare managers say.

“They need to figure out what they want this department to be,” Boughner said. ” … Do they want us to be purely investigators? We can do that, but then you better shore up all of the [social] services staff and let us pass along those cases that really need services. Or do you want us to solve everyone’s problems?”

Shana Gruskin can be reached at or 561-243-6537.