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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]By the time you see the therapist, the incident will have happened a long time ago.

You are showing up as a stranger showing them a picture that is going to be close up of someone's skin. Maybe it's your arm maybe it's a kid, the therapist has no idea.

The therapist has never seen the child. The therapist doesn't even actually know if the child exists yet bc the person is a stranger.

So to sum up, all these people who are therapists are going to call CPS and say " at someone unknown time, on someone unknown day, at some unknown place, a man who calls himself Mr. Smith came into my office today and told me that he grabbed an unnamed child in anger." [/quote]

Also, he's not an unknown person and the child, while maybe not named, is also not unknown. The therapist would know exactly who these people are and how to get in touch with them. If they disclosed this information in session, as presented by the OP, it would absolutely have to be reported following that session, including the names of both parents, their address, their phone numbers, the child's name, and all the details of the incident, including any date, location, etc. information about when it occurred. That is what the report contains.

In any case, the reporting laws exist for a reason. The reporters do not have to judge whether something is worth investigating - they only have to judge whether something is worth reporting. Not everyone has exactly the same judgment, but I know zero therapists who would not report a client reporting the incident described in the OP. These laws exist to protect actual children. The child welfare system is incredibly flawed - I say that as a person who has worked and will likely work within that system again - but it does actually save the lives of real children. I would rather, as an investigator, discover that it WAS a one time incident in which dad lost his cool, was immediately remorseful and has taken steps to address the problem. That is a really easy to close case because you can be pretty confident that this family does not need oversight to parent safely. That is an example of the process working well.[/quote]

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