Bill would criminalize making false allegations of abuse
March 13, 2008 | Posted by ANCPR Bill would criminalize false abuse charges
By MICHAEL C. LEWIS / Journal Staff Writer
POSTED: March 10, 2008
MARTINSBURG—Nine times, one aggrieved father says he fought to protect his name and his relationship with his daughters after he was accused of child abuse in a custody dispute.
The man, whose name we will not use to protect the identity of his daughters, said he is pleased that West Virginia legislators last week passed a bill that slaps criminal charges on those who falsely report child abuse or neglect in order to influence a custody case.
On Thursday, state senators passed House Bill 3065, after the measure met overwhelming approval in the House of Delegates last week. The bill charges those who makes a false abuse report with a $1,000 fine, or forces the plaintiff to pay for the defendant’s legal fees. The misdemeanor crime would also carry a punishment of up to 60 hours of community service.
The man, previously a resident of Huntington who now lives in Burlington, Ohio, said in 2003 and 2004, he was accused of breaking and entering, assault and sexual and physical abuse against his two daughters. Faced with serving at least one year in jail and losing custody of his daughters, the man fought the charges.
“They were never proven to be false. They were said to be ‘unsubstantiated.’ They found me not guilty. But I know I’m innocent. I want the satisfaction of knowing that on my record it was a lie, but I’ll never get that,” said the man, who said he spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove his innocence. “People have no idea how much time and money this wastes in the system.”
In West Virginia, from March 2007 to March 2008, West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Child Protective Services received and did paperwork on 37,165 incidents of child abuse. From those, 26,904 cases were further investigated, said John Law, spokesperson for WVDHHR. Only 3,998 cases were found to be substantiated, or less than 20 percent of all investigated incidents.
“There are circumstances of false reports. If it’s done intentionally, certainly it’s wrong. But there are also circumstances where someone says something and it is later found to be unsubstantiated. It doesn’t mean people lied, it means they reported in good faith something they perceived as child abuse,” Law said. “A lot of (cases) are proven to be unsubstantiated.”
Law said HB 3065 is a bill DHHR will be looking at “very closely.”
The lead sponsor of the bill, Delegate Jeff Eldridge, D-Lincoln, said that based on the statistics shown to him, the state spends as much as $18 million per year investigating and processing false abuse allegations.
“So much paperwork and so many man hours are spent investigating abuse allegations and some of them lack sufficient evidence. This bill makes people follow through with their allegations. If they file charges, then there will be a hearing on it,” he said.
Eldridge said the bill is a victory for people who truly are abused, and if passed, would save state taxpayers money.
“If the fathers or mothers are truly abusing the spouse, this bill will hold them accountable. At the same time, if they’re not truly abusing them, then there will be penalties for whoever filed it. There are consequences to this behavior.”
Sen. John Yoder, R-Jefferson, voted in favor of the bill.
“I think it’s only reasonable that people who deliberately make false reports of child abuse should be held accountable because it causes a very high degree of disruption to the family and encourages further fighting,” Yoder said. “We hold the people who go into the courtroom accountable for their words and we can charge them with perjury. I don’t see why someone who swears out a false complaint should not also be held accountable.”
Ron Foster, Region 4 coordinator for Men and Women Against Discrimination, or MAWAD, said HB3065 came about because more and more people have been using false allegations in Family Court to have one or more parents removed from the house.
“This is a huge issue. The children get hurt when false allegations are made because they’re denied the opportunity to spend time with the parent at a time when they need the parent the most,” he said.
The false allegation sets the stage for how much time the accused parent spends with the child after the alleged abuse occurs, and is a tool used regularly in cases involving sexual abuse, child abuse and domestic violence against the spouse, Foster said.
“This bill will definitely benefit child custody proceedings,” he said. “We are wasting an inordinate amount of court time. We believe this bill will have a significant effect on the number of cases that go through the court system.”
A study conducted in 2007 by MAWAD reviewed all requests and cases involving protective orders in Cabell County Family Court for 2006. The study determined that 76 percent of all cases were dismissed for one reason or another.
Berkeley County Family Judge Sally G. Jackson acknowledged that some of the allegations of domestic violence that she hears are proven false, but said that doesn’t mean the person making the accusation lied.
“What somebody thinks is domestic violence, I may not, and I may dismiss the case. But that doesn’t mean they’re lying,” she said. “I have to say sometimes there are cases where it seems people file charges not for very good reasons.”
Jackson said many times parents bring domestic violence petitions because a child says something about one of the parents and describes the incident different than it actually was. And what a child says to one parent may not be the same thing said to another parent, she said.
It’s for this reason, Jackson said, that parents must communicate with one another.
“Generally, the first thing a parent should do if a child comes home from visitation (and says something happened) is call up the other parent to see what happened,” she said. “Parents need to keep their lines of communication open. Parents get so wrapped up in hurting each other, that they forget they’re hurting their kids.”
For the man, the bill may be too little too late, but that’s because he now lives in Ohio.
“I have little to no faith in the judicial system any longer,” he said. “Every time I turned around I was being arrested for something I never did. I see how easy the system was to manipulate. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. I don’t want someone to go through the hell I went through.”
He described his relationship with his children as “great,” but every now and then, he said, they ask him why he went to jail.
Now, he said he uses the experience as a teaching tool to show his children the problems that are caused when people lie.
“I use it to teach them to be honest,” he said. “I went to jail because someone lied.”
Categories: Courts and Legislatures, Domestic Violence | 
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11 Comments »
If a child says one thing to one parent and another to another, that’s a time you need to take them to the woodshed and get their attention. As for the main part of the story the sentence is ticky-tack but it’s a start. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the wall of lies doesn’t come down in a day either.
i truly hope my ex wife and daughter roast in hell for these false allegations of child abuse.
i am now charged with this, and I badly need a pro bono attorney. can anyone help?
please contact me
vincent brown
awbplg@comcast.net
We have a friend who is going through a divorce.
He is anglo, and his wife is Chinese.
What makes their circumstances so exceptional to me is that having known them for about 7 years, I have always considered them to both be responsible, decent and level headed.
They have a 6 year old son, which they seem to dote over, and they were both clearly very good parents.
Now in the past Ms B made some incidental but ominous comments about the wife, which I disregarded at the time. Ms B told me that the wife would bitterly complain in private about her husband, but there was no substance to the complaints. Ms B described the complaints as being “child-like” and repetitious in nature.
Had my wife not told me this, I would never have thought this woman was child-like, nor someone who complained about her husband behind his back. She just seemed too nice and empathetic in public. In fact, she really won me over as a great mother and a great wife.
But clearly I was wrong!
Well, this couple separated about a year ago. Since then the husband has wanted to see the child 3 days per fortnight, but the wife refused. She would only agree to 8 hours per fortnight.
So after failing to get anywhere in mediation, the husband filed for greater access to his son via the Family Court.
In response his wife filed allegations of child sexual abuse.
Now I won’t go into detail about these allegations, but to say that they are completely preposterous and bizarre.
I read the wife’s statement and the allegations in full, as did Ms B. We both agreed that the wife was either lying or she is so disturbed by the divorce that she is deluding herself. In fact I had to pinch myself a number of times as there was no logic in the ramblings, apart from references to women’s intuitition and references from the internet about bed wetting being linked to child abuse. She also supplied some selective snippets from the internet suggesting that any form of shared care was disruptive to children.
My final take was that this was all about child support, given that in Australia child support reduces if the child sees the other parent on overnight stays. Its the only way I can understand what has happened.
But now to my point, and this is eerily similar to one of the comments by a poster to a previous post.
The husband has hired a solicitor and barrister to represent him in Court.
He told me recently that while in a briefing with his barrister, the barrister said that in his experience, Chinese born wives are particularly malicious during divorce. In fact he mentioned that of the 5 most spiteful wives that he comes across per year in his work as a barrister, about 3 tend to be Chinese born.
Now make of this what you will, but if true, it is a worrying statistic for many fathers out there.
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People who are found to have made false child abuse allegations in a custody battle should be punished. The government went to all the trouble (using taxpapers money) to create House Bill 3065 they should exercise House Bill 3065 and punish the individual making the false charges. If they are not punished they will continue to use the system to their benefit. While this is happening the children are the ones that suffer.
I see so much written about “Father Rights”, who is protecting the mothers?
@Karen Painter
The current atrocious system of courts that are so biased against Fathers and their rights is what is “protecting” the mothers, Whether they are right or wrong.
@Karen Painter @O’Kelley
Courts are not protecting mothers, nor are they protecting the children OR the fathers. Instead, courts have an almost unfailing drive to keep as many cases in court as long as possible, to justrify bigger budgets and bigger salaries.
In many states now, activist groups that were once strongly pro male or pro female now concentrate on better court outcomes all around. By working together, men and women can help diffuse some of the “pro-court” atmosphere so prevalent today. We should all support groups like “Men and Women Against Discrimination”.
Anyone (father or mother) who makes false child abuse charges should be punished. The courts need to take quick action and not draw the custody case out for months and sometimes years. As time passes it just continues to have a truely negative impact on the innocent children and their families. The parents of the children as well as all members of society have a obligation to protect the chidlren. It should not take case workers, court appointed guardians, judges and attorneys so long to make a decision. These long drawn out cases costs the people invovled lots of money unnecessarily.
In the state (West Virginia) where my daughters child custody case is being handled the courts are NOT always in favor ot he mothers. I don’t believe they should be biased either way. It should ALWAYS be handled fairly and the best interest of the children should ALWAYS be the courts focus.
In some cases, the childs well being is best with the Father and sometimes the Mother.
Unfortunately the court isn’t always totally knowledgeable of the childrens situations. They are provided information from a court appt guardian or counselor who has and obtains very limited information before making a decision on behalf ot the children.
I believe that both the Mother and Father play important roles in the children’s lives and it is the duty of each parent to nurture the relationship of the children with the other parent.
The children get hurt and they need the opportunity to spend time with each parent; during these battles is when the children need the parents the most.
I believe there should be criminal charges placed. Parental Alienation is parental abuse and child abuse. All child abusers should be personal held accountable and stripped of all rights to ever be around children again. They are preadotors that prey on the under developed mind of a child. The more time they have to do this the more they are successful they should be confined to a jail cell. The system rewards their behaviour instead of punishing for contempt of court rulings. There is legislation and then there is justice. Also hatred is not an emotion that comes natural to a child it is a learnt and taught behaviour. Hositily breeds hostility.