This essay is in response to this piece written by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

I was a Child Protective Services (CPS) case worker in Kansas for ten years and investigated over 1400 reports, some of which involved child abuse pediatricians. I currently work as a therapist in a Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility (PRTF) in Kansas and help children heal from traumatic experiences. We treat many children who have had contact with the child welfare system in some capacity, oftentimes through the foster care system.

Rounding out my resume is a plot twist I never expected. Two years after I stopped working for the State, I was investigated for child abuse by my former agency, the police, and a child abuse pediatrician (CAP) working in the SCAN clinic at Children’s Mercy Hospital. This experience gave me an unwelcome perspective on how the system can wreck someone’s life.

It’s hard to dismiss my objectivity, and I’m proud of my ability to be fair and compassionate.

I’m a big fan of data because numbers help us fact check our emotions, but numbers don’t always tell the whole story. It’s been my experience that agencies involved in the child welfare system don’t always do the best job of tracking their own systemic failures.

To argue that CAPs don’t always allege abuse, Schaefer Riley quoted a 2009 study where 200 consecutive families were evaluated at a children’s hospital. James Anderst is the lead author of the study. He is also a child abuse pediatrician and the director of the SCAN clinic at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. I once sat across from him discussing a skull fracture I was investigating with the police. Years later, he was in leadership in the SCAN clinic when I was investigated. We are not well served by studies whose authors stand to benefit greatly from a favorable view of their work.

If you want to know if CAPs are quick to allege abuse, don’t just ask them. Ask people from other agencies who work investigations alongside them. I sat beside a police officer at a training recently and she said, “They assume abuse first and then work backwards to disprove it.” And beyond other professionals, listen to families who have had contact with CAPs to see if there are common threads you find concerning.

Quite a bit has happened since Dr. Anderst penned his paper in 2009, including my case in 2013 and Sarah Goble’s case in 2025. Doctors at the Children’s Mercy Hospital SCAN clinic were instrumental in both of our lives going off the rails. I spent three years on a Child Abuse Registry for something I didn’t do and couldn’t work in my chosen field because of it. Sarah’s children were removed from her care for six months after SCAN clinic doctors erroneously diagnosed child abuse. There are no numbers that will adequately convey how devastating these investigations are to families.

It’s easy for someone who has never been investigated by a CAP to dismiss my case and Sarah’s as one-offs. But when you’ve been investigated by systems who aren’t forthcoming about their failures, you begin to see patterns in other investigations that mirror your own. Instead of looking at our cases as anomalies, consider that you know what happened to us because we told you about it. And then consider that not every family is willing—or able—to do that. The narrative is often one-sided in favor of the system because most families are too intimidated to say anything publicly. They’ll say it in private to the ones who will say it publicly, though.

Schaefer Riley is correct that doctors do not make the decision to remove children from their parents and that this decision lies solely with CPS and a judge. This is an argument often made by CAPs when the ramifications of their medical opinions are in question. Although technically true, the argument is disingenuous.

Anyone who has worked in the system knows that a medical opinion is what the police and CPS rely on to prove their case. If a CAP has written a medical opinion stating that a child has been abused by a parent, they have painted CPS into a corner on the decision to remove. CPS operates from a place of fear, and nothing is scarier than the thought of leaving children in their home if a doctor says abuse occurred. This is the tricky position CAPs have put themselves in. They are an integral part of an investigation and use their influence to shape the outcome but then put their hands in the air and plead innocence when their incorrect medical opinion results in horrible decisions for families.

CAPs can’t have it both ways. If they are intricately involved in investigations (and they are) then they need to own their influence over the outcomes.

Shaefer Riley used the terms “supposedly false allegations” and “there’s more to the story” when discussing allegations against parents. These are statements often representative of the core belief that clients always lie and the system is always honest. This could not be further from the truth. Yes, clients often lie or misrepresent information, minimize, and deflect blame to get out of trouble. I know that well because I worked in CPS and listened to clients do it for ten years. A hard truth I learned both personally and professionally is that professionals also misrepresent information, minimize, and deflect blame to get out of trouble. The difference between the two groups is that it’s considered bad when clients do it, but it’s considered part of the job when professionals do it.

Schaefer Riley argues that child welfare agencies and hospitals cannot correct the record due to confidentiality. It’s important to note that the system creates the record. My frustration is less with the system being unable to correct the record due to confidentiality and more that they are often unwilling to correct the record when they’ve screwed up.

An example: An Internal Affairs officer approached the CAP on my case in an attempt to get her to change her opinion about me. This occurred after I presented information proving that the investigating officer had omitted large chunks of exculpatory information from his reports that indicated I was innocent. The CAP refused to amend her finding when given additional facts even though all signs pointed to the injury occurring outside of my care.

She protected herself, but where did that leave me? More importantly, where did that leave the child I was alleged to have abused? The doctor was in the child protection business, but when rubber met the road, she protected herself instead. Whether due to internal decision-making or pressure from her institution, the outcome was the same. The narrative was incorrect, and she refused to correct it.

As a CPS social worker, I was on the receiving end of quite a few unhinged rants alleging mistakes when there were none. I didn’t love this, but nothing adverse happened to me because my agency always backed me up. When it happens in reverse—when the system creates a false narrative about a family and refuses to correct it—the consequences for that family are dire and can involve their children being removed from their care.

It’s disconcerting when people say the wrong things about you and you can’t correct it. It’s even worse when the people saying the wrong things are government agencies and doctors with the power to upend your life. Anybody who has run afoul of the child welfare system knows that once the narrative is created it is almost impossible to get them off of it.

Wrong narratives are wrong no matter who creates them.

Calls for heads to roll, threats of lawsuits and violence, and public shaming make professionals afraid and unwilling to work in their profession. They want immunity protection because they fear the consequences of their mistakes. Parents also fear the consequences of their mistakes. The difference is that we talk about protection for the professionals but not the families.

What we really need to wrestle with is what should happen when the system gets it wrong. The threat of lawsuits makes it scary for professionals to do their jobs, but being railroaded by the system makes it hard for families to live their lives. What is the acceptable compensation when a parent takes their sick child to the emergency room, is wrongly accused of abuse, and has their child removed from their care? Can we agree that a parent in this situation will be rightly offended by a doctor refusing to admit they got it wrong to protect themselves?

It has long been troubling to me that a system that exists, in part, to hold people accountable refuses to hold itself accountable. There is no amount of money that would make up for the time I lost as a result of system incompetence. For the longest time, what I wanted more than anything was for the system to acknowledge they messed up and work to fix it.

I wonder how many other people in my position want that same thing.

Shaefer Riley ended her piece by stating, “More than 2,000 children in this country die each year at the hands of their caregivers.”  And this is how we do it. We cite that statistic and become fearful that more children will die if CAPs don’t intervene, and so they intervene. And then we become horrified because families are being ripped apart when they shouldn’t be and insist CAPs back off. We repeatedly swing wildly back and forth between the two but never land in the middle.

Children dying at the hands of their parents is horrific, but children being taken from the hands of their non-abusive parents is also horrific. We should be alarmed by both and work to help our caseworkers, doctors and police officers avoid these two extremes.

A simple place to start is mandating that CAPs inform parents that they are part of a team investigating child abuse. Families know who the police and CPS are and what they do. It is not asking too much for CAPs to be mandated to similarly explain their role.

Another solution is mandating second opinions by specialists when a CAP is involved. Going further, we need a level-headed conversation about what a CAP’s area of expertise is, and what it is not.

We should create an atmosphere of conversation instead of ridicule in which families and professionals talk about their experiences openly to establish and understand core issues and patterns. You can’t have a balanced narrative if each side is only listening to their own camp.

Importantly, give CPS case workers the training to make safety decisions independent of CAP opinions. I navigated around a CAP opinion as a CPS social worker, and I know it can be done.

We don’t make good decisions when we operate from a place of fear. Vulnerable families need us to be our best.

Andrea Verbanic is the author of Renegade Agency: A Memoir of a Family in Crisis and the Systems Meant to Protect Us.