Mandatory reporting

[grum]

It's a conversation that got kind-of started at someone else's LJ, but it was at best tangentially related. So I figured I'd start it here.

What do people think of mandatory reporting laws? Of the intent behind their creation? Of their implementation?

Comments

[docorion.livejournal.com]

Depends.

I am subject to mandatory reporting of child abuse and elder abuse. Both of these laws assume that the victim cannot report the problem themselves, and that reporting is almost always a good thing. I suspect these are probably good assumptions. Domestic violence (something many people think there *ought* to be mandatory reporting for) is probably not best served by mandatory reporting; it would likely put the woman (it's almost always a women) at higher risk. So say the experts, and from what I've seen, I suspect they're right. Moreover, in general a woman who is being abused is still an independent actor (she could report if she wanted to, or thought it would benefit her; this contrasts with the elder and child abuse cases).

Implementation...well, they're sort of like laws against smoking; they create a standard, an expectation. Hardly anyone is ever charged with the crime of not reporting, to my knowledge (just like hardly anyone is ever charged with 'smoking in a public place where it's not allowed'; they're just told to put it out). They also create an infrastructure for making and investigating reports.

That's the gist of what could be a much longer conversation :-)

[fallenpegasus]

"always a women"

That attitude makes the male victims invisible, and unwilling to speak.

I personally know two male DV victims, and one male rape victim, where the perp was female. The hell that "The State" gave the rape victim was... unspeakable.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I was going to comment that docorion had said "almost always a woman" which is different from "always a woman", but then I went out and got some statistics and found that they don't really back that up, either.

According to the CDC:

--Nearly 5.3 million incidents of IPV occur each year among U.S. women ages 18 and older, and 3.2 million occur among men. Most assaults are relatively minor and consist of pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping, and hitting (Tjaden and Thoennes 2000a).
--In the United States every year, about 1.5 million women and more than 800,000 men are raped or physically assaulted by an intimate partner. This translates into about 47 IPV assaults per 1,000 women and 32 assaults per 1,000 men (Tjaden and Thoennes 2000a).
--IPV results in nearly 2 million injuries and 1,300 deaths nationwide every year (CDC 2003).
--Estimates indicate more than 1 million women and 371,000 men are stalked by intimate partners each year (Tjaden and Thoennes 2000a).
--IPV accounted for 20% of nonfatal violence against women in 2001 and 3% against men (Rennison 2003).
--In 2002, 76% of IPV homicide victims were female; 24% were male (Fox and Zawitz 2004).

It's not equal between men and women, but there's way too many men being abused to call it "almost always women". Hell, there's just way too many PEOPLE being abused, period.

[fallenpegasus]

It's good to see those statistics. But I suspect that the men are still being undercounted.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're right, and probably by a higher percentage than is true for women and children. Perhaps a significantly higher percentage.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Men probably are undercounted. (I hadn't looked at the numbers in a while (read: since the early 90's, when the studies undercounted men even more, and said so)). Women are probably *also* undercounted, but not by as much as men. I stand by the idea that it is more often a woman than a man who is the victim.

All of which is only tangentially relevant to the question of mandatory reporting laws. Which I still think are not useful in IPV, except in a statistical sense (I would really like to see a statistical summary of the questions patients are asked at most ED triage encounters, which are things like "Do you feel safe at home?" and "Have you felt threatened by your partner or spouse?").