Kansas Publishes Child Sex Abuse Stats From Abortion Clinics 12 Years After Law Passed That Mandated Annual Reports
Will anyone get punished? Or is it just, “Oh, my bad!”
Kansas passed a law in 2011 demanding the Kansas Department for Children and Families (KDCF) produce child sex abuse records from abortion clinics.
KDCF never did it in the past 12 years despite abortion clinics reporting child sex abuse (who knows how many cases went unreported, though!).
The Topeka Capital-Journal found out when it requested the records after reports that a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio traveled to Indiana for an abortion.
Jason Tidd first reported the discovery in August.
Tidd followed up this weekend now that DCF made the reports public:
DCF has since published the required reports online.
“DCF has long tracked and publicly reported all child abuse data, including from abortion providers,” said agency spokesperson Mike Deines. “As medical professionals, abortion providers are mandated reporters and have always been required to make these reports. DCF has always acted on these reports, reviewing and referring them to law enforcement as appropriate.
“However, it’s important to note that the data represents the raw number of sexual abuse reports the agency receives from abortion providers — which does not necessarily represent actual cases. Between 2017 and 2022, only four of the nearly 140 reports were assigned for either DCF or law enforcement investigation.”
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After the Capital-Journal’s initial request under the Kansas Open Records Act, the agency created annual reports covering state fiscal years 2017-22.
“The Brownback Administration stopped publishing these reports in 2016,” Deines said in an Aug. 4 email. “It is unclear why. Once we were made aware of this, we updated the requested data from the missing years to ensure that the public record is complete. Additionally, moving forward, we have put in place procedures to ensure that this information is published as required by KSA 65-445(g).”
There is no excuse, Deines. 12 years. Twelve-freaking-years. Gov. Laura Kelly has been in office since 2019, so stop placing all the blame on previous administrations.
The DCF added the records to the website…at the bottom.
The reports showed child sex abuse at abortion clinics has gone up in the past three years. There have already been 56 reported cases in this fiscal year.
I’m going to puke. One victim was three years old. There were also victims aged 8 and 9. How do you not say anything? How do you not make this information public?
Here are the reports from 2017-2022.
The DCF finally published the reports from 2011-2016. That means three previous administrations didn’t create the reports.
Kansas voters recently voted to keep abortion legal in the state. The Value Them Both amendment failed on August 2 by 18 percentage points. A recount in nine counties confirmed the results.
I wonder if the child abuse statistics would have swayed any voters. It deprived the pro-life campaign of ammunition to go up against Planned Parenthood, which gave millions to the pro-abortion side.
Shame on you, Kansas. 12 years.
Will anyone be punished? No, because it’s government. Officials don’t have to pay attention to the laws.
The Topeka Capital-Journal editorial board does not appreciate Kelly’s people trying to deflect blame. They want answers along with the Republicans:
Could the state have done something to prevent some of these unspeakable acts? We will never know, because we were never informed. Our policymakers can’t do anything about these situations if they’re not informed about the issue.
Rep. Susan Concannon, R-Beloit, made a wise observation: “Gosh, it makes me wonder what other reports we’re not getting,” she said. “The whole purpose when I pushed for the establishment of this oversight committee was to hear this type of thing.”
Let’s hope such information is readily available — and acted upon — in the months and years to come.
Let’s also home the Joint Committee on Child Welfare System Oversight receives all the information it needs to do its job:
“Victims do need to be provided additional services,” [state Sen. Molly] Baumgardner said. “And they need to be more than just a number that appears in a report.”
Concannon, who chairs the Joint Committee on Child Welfare System Oversight, said she had never heard of the report or the requirement for DCF to produce it. She said the committee, which has a meeting next month, should be receiving the report.
“Gosh, it makes me wonder what other reports we’re not getting,” she said. “The whole purpose when I pushed for the establishment of this oversight committee was to hear this type of thing. … These are shocking numbers. It absolutely needs to be reported to the Legislature as a whole, but specifically to the oversight committee.”
Fellow committee member Baumgardner said the panel should address the report.
“We do need to continue to require our agencies to be transparent and forthcoming, rather than us just learning as legislators by an interview request from the media,” she said. “Why is there an increase in the number of children that have been victims of sexual assault, minors, and we don’t know about that? Why has there not been reporting?”
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“It deprived the pro-life campaign of ammunition to go up against Planned Parenthood, which gave millions to the pro-abortion side.”
That about sums it up. The sacrament of abortion must never be challenged.
The abortion enthusiasts infest the government.
Exactly. It’s so disgusting.
Oversight requires the overseer to be proactive in demanding information not simply content to accept whatever information is grudgingly provided. People and organizations will do that which is monitored and expected. When something isn’t monitored or there wasn’t an expectation set, as in this case, they won’t.
Bingo.
I don’t know where you’re seeing twelve years of non-publishing. From the cited news stories it looks like the reports were published from 2011 to 2016, and then they stopped for some unknown reason and never resumed.
My first assumption for why they never resumed is inertia: New people who weren’t around when the law was enacted never knew that they were legally required, it was just something they did, so once they got an instruction not to publish them it would not occur to them to resume without an instruction to do so. Eventually the people whose job this is would be so new they didn’t even know they used to be published, let alone that it was a law.
“DCF has since published the required reports online.” Did you read the article or the one from the Topeka newspaper? *I* didn’t see 12 years of non-publishing. The Topeka newspaper saw 12 years of non-publishing. They had the reports but never published them online or gave them to the public or lawmakers. If the reports were available to the public or lawmakers, the Topeka newspaper wouldn’t have reported it first. They weren’t published on the website until NOW when the newspaper reported the DCF didn’t make the reports public as they were supposed to. They just NOW put them on the website and made it public for everyone, along with lawmakers.
The first link is behind a pay wall. There are two articles from the Topeka paper, from Aug-15 and Sep-11; the first article says six years. The second one doesn’t explicitly contradict that until all the way at the end, in the second last paragraph. Until there it gives the impression that it’s referring only to the years the first article had already established as being missing.
“I’m going to puke.”
Me, too.
We’re not in Kansas anymore. This is the fricking Twilight Zone.
It’s insane. I’m hoping this doesn’t leak into Oklahoma. I enjoy this state too much!
Oklahoma is a good state!
The recent vote was not keep abortion ‘legal’. Basically it was to affirm that there is no right to abortion in the st const. WHICH THERE IS NOT ANYWAY: Personally i thought even putting it on ballot was stupid in that it gives credence to the bs lie that a st supreme ct judge can find things in the st const that are not in there. and politically was stupid since it wouldnt pass, partly due to JOCO morons. They should have waited until new legiature and gov next year
The voters rejected the amendment, which kept the abortion protections valid in the state. Therefore abortion is still legal in Kansas.
That was his point. If your read the Kansas constitution, there ARE no protections for abortion there. The entire women’s rights section has mostly to do with custody, not with murdering your offspring.
And he’s wrong. It doesn’t matter what you read in the state constitution. The constitution contains a right to abortion, because the supreme court says it does, and it is the ultimate authority on what the constitution means. There is no appeal from its decisions, except to some future state supreme court with different members. All federal courts, including SCOTUS, are required to accept its word that the right is there, hiding in a corner, even if nobody else can see it.
That is why the referendum was necessary. The constitution has to be amended to explicitly say that the invisible right is not there.
The problem is the question was very poorly drafted. Reading its text, even already knowing what it was supposed to mean, I still couldn’t figure out how it meant that. They need to try again next election, with a better-worded amendment that clearly says what it means and means what it says.
Didn’t the Supreme Court recently declare that as FALSE and that the abortion issue was a STATE issue to resolve?? Surely didn’t sound like the SC upheld a RIGHT ! Not saying you’re a paid troll – just odd that you seem to have so many answers to nearly every post on here. Mostly wrong though!
I could be wrong, but reading your post makes me think you’re looking at this as abuse that happened at the clinics, but I read it as abuse the clinics reported. This would be abuse that was done to the patient outside the clinic that most likely resulted in them visiting the clinic in the first place. I wish abortion clinics didn’t exist, but proponents would probably have used this as bolstering their side on the need for the clinics rather than detracting.
For background on this law, see cheryl sullenberger’s book
Doesn’t do much good when mandatory reporters don’t report. The ones that didn’t report as mandated by law should lose their license and go to prison.
But it turns out they did report. The state just didn’t publish the reports.
THAT is the issue!! Pay ATTENTION!! If you “report” that you robbed a bank but didn’t put it out for PUBLIC CONSUMPTION then you did NOTHING! Typical leftist logic – yeah, we filed a report but no we didn’t let anyone see it!
As I have family in Kansas, this doesn’t even surprise me. There’s a damn good reason that Kansas is probably the only “red” state that doesn’t increase in population.
Perhaps I missed it, but since the child abuse wasn’t reported an obvious question seems to be were the child abusers ever charged or punished?
Child abuse is against the law in Kansas isn’t it?
To ask the question is to answer it.
The supposed abuse was reported. That’s what this whole article is about. The clinics made their reports to DCF as required, and DCF handled them, but it did not publish an annual report on this activity as it was required to do.
But it seems that in all but a handful of cases the reports were not substantiated.
“”However, it’s important to note that the data represents the raw number of sexual abuse reports the agency receives from abortion providers — which does not necessarily represent actual cases. Between 2017 and 2022, only four of the nearly 140 reports were assigned for either DCF or law enforcement investigation.” So all the rest were apparently determined not to have been real cases.
I’m curious to know how it was determined that 136 of the suspected abuse cases were not real abuse, since apparently nobody bothered to investigate those cases. I find it difficult to believe that Kansas abortion doctors were making official reports of suspected sexual abuse of their patients and/or patients’ family members just for fun, and without any evidentiary basis.
Abortion has been used by criminals and their abetters to hide their crimes of raping little girls. Evil abounds with this practice and it needs to be stopped.
This is why career bureaucracy is a bad idea.
We are a child-hating society. We want to minimize how many kids are born by killing them in their mothers’ wombs. We turn away from prosecuting their abusers. We accept mutilating their bodies. We allow adults to sexualize them. We refuse to educate them properly. Then we call them stupid and lazy. Now that we don’t need their labor. we don’t value them. I don’t know how we change that.