Child Abuse Prevention Month

By Dr. Margie Donlon and Luanne Peterpaul

Assemblywomen Luanne Peterpaul and Margie Donlon

With our collective experiences as a physician, and a former municipal judge, assistant county prosecutor and co-author of New Jersey’s Anti-Bullying law, we have seen firsthand the horrible effects of child abuse, bullying and manipulation. Many children carry the emotional and psychological scars into adulthood. 

The scale of child maltreatment in the United States remains staggering. According to the Administration for Children and Families, an estimated 2,000 children died from abuse and neglect in 2023. Infants under one year old accounted for 44 percent of those fatalities.

So, we wanted to highlight National Child Abuse Prevention Month with an update on some of our legislation to protect kids. 

We have introduced a bill that would toughen the law requiring school districts, charter schools, nonpublic schools, and contracted service providers to review the employment history of prospective employees for allegations of child abuse or sexual misconduct. The legislation addresses the practice of some school districts that enabled educational personnel to escape the repercussions of a child abuse allegation by simply changing jobs. The law provides due process mechanisms for the employee or potential employee to challenge the allegations. 

This bill changes the current law to require the Department of Education’s Office of Student Protection to develop the forms to be used in compliance with the employment history requirements. Current law also requires applicants to positions involving regular contact with students to provide a list of former employers within the last 20 years. Our bill removes the 20-year limit. The bill also requires the education commissioner to create and maintain a secure and centralized school employee identification database to provide school districts and other educational entities with ready access to any information that may disqualify a potential employee. The legislation also increases the maximum civil penalty for giving false information or willfully failing to disclose information from $500 to a maximum of $10,000. 

We also sponsored legislation that consent to being photographed, filmed, or recorded in a sexual manner does not include or imply consent to disclosure of that image. Unscrupulous people and bullies have used social media to gain the trust of children and obtain images that they then post to harass and humiliate the children online. Their actions destroy kids’ reputations and create lasting psychological trauma – too often resulting in the young victims harming themselves. 

Our bill gives these victims recourse. Now it’s clear that an initial consent to being photographed in sexual or sexually suggestive images cannot be used as the victim’s consent to the disclosure of the images. 

In addition, we sponsored a bill designated as the “New Jersey Kids Code Act,” to require online service providers to protect minors’ online privacy. The bill calls for online service providers to provide default settings for safeguards at the highest level of protection for users who are minors. This legislation prohibits providers from reducing or prompting a minor to reduce privacy settings. It also creates requirements and prohibitions to collecting and using a minor’s personal data. The bill also establishes prohibitions for service providers to use marketing and advertising tactics to target minors to access products such as illicit drugs, tobacco and alcohol while also profiling the user. 

The State Assembly unanimously passed our bill last month to create a separate crime for depicting sexual exploitation or abuse of children using Artificial Intelligence, or computer-generated or manipulated sexually explicit images.

We also have cosponsored legislation to require the Division of Child Protection and permanency to maintain a child abuse reporting hotline with resources available to victims and families. The DCPP regularly contracts with community-based agencies to provide a variety of services to children and families, including counseling, parenting skills classes, substance abuse treatment, and more. It is essential for families to be made aware of these services that empower them to break the cycle of abuse.

We have to do everything in our power as legislators and as citizens to protect these most vulnerable young residents.