NC Child Death Reviews

I have been asked recently about my experience in child death reviews. "Were the reviews meaningful? Did they make a difference in how child abuse cases were handled afterwards?" My answer to both questions was, "Yes, in my experience, the reviews were meaningful and they were effective in changing how future cases were handled, at least in the short term." However, the bottom line is that hindsight is perfect; gaps are going to be identified when we have all the information in front of us. In many cases, that evidence is going to cause us to cringe in light of the huge red flags that were going up before the death took place. In many cases, those red flags are only seen by an individual here or there who says to him/herself, "Oh, surely it isn't as bad as that" or "Maybe I'm just overreacting. I'll wait until someone else says something." In some cases these isolated individuals were getting the message without knowledge that there were others who were seeing the same thing. This is why it is so important for people realize how vital it is that they take responsibility for REPORTING ANY SUSPICION OF CHILD ABUSE OR NEGLECT. It's the law.
As to the change in prioritizing child death investigations according to their "high profile" status, I have to say that, in my opinion, that says something very troubling about the priorities of our state in dealing with the problem we have of abuse and neglect. We have, for many years, had protocols that would ensure more accuracy in child death investigations (Lisa Mayhew has diligently been educating frontline workers in law enforcement on these protocols, single-handedly). There was legislation introduced this past year that would have ensured specialists in these investigations, seeing to it that these protocols were followed and ensuring more effective, accurate, and efficient investigation of child death cases. Do the families not deserve that? And the children who have died of abuse...do they not deserve to have the truth known rather than having their death attributed to "natural causes" because the investigation was not done properly? We owe it to the families, to the children, and to our own consciences as citizens of this state to see to it that every effort is made to 1)protect our children and 2) do everything within our power to find out the truth in the most efficient, accurate, effective way possible about every child who dies in this state.