FEDERAL POLICY
HHS Releases Study of National Child Abuse Registry
from the Child Welfare League of America 6.22.09
On Thursday, June 18, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a congressionally mandated study reviewing the feasibility of having a national child abuse registry. The study and the directive to create a national child abuse registry were included in the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (P.L 109-248) which dealt with a number of issues involving child sex offenders.
The study, Interim Report to Congress on the Feasibility of a National Child Abuse Registry, concluded that there a number of significant challenges in creating one national child abuse registry. One of the report’s conclusions is that the benefits of such a registry are largely unknown due to the differences among states. The study also points out that the 2006 law’s requirements were general, and may create additional problems as a result. For instance, the law limits the information in a national registry to a perpetrator’s name; the report points out the difficulty in listing common names and the confusion that could result. The report also points out that the original bill (H.R. 5219) to create a national registry was introduced as a free-standing bill. Normally, such a bill would have been reviewed by congressional committees that deal with laws such as the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatments Act (CAPTA), but the legislation did not go before those committees. Instead, the language was inserted into the Adam Walsh Act, which was crafted by the key criminal justice committees in the Congress… read more
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