INDICATORS AND REPORTING
To report child abuse and/or neglect:
Local After Hours Line: (866)764-2233
After Hours/ End Harm:
(800) 562-5624
BIA Child Abuse Hotline:
(800) 633-5155
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Any individual who has reason to believe that a child is a victim of abuse or neglect must make a report. To report, you can call the Indian Child Welfare Program, Child Protective Services, Law Enforcement, BIA Law Enforcement or the BIA/Tribal Social Services.
Definitions
Abuse:
- Physical – infliction of physical injury as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning, shaking, or otherwise harming a child. This includes the result of over-discipline or physical punishment.
- Emotional – psychological/verbal/mental injury – includes acts or omissions by the parents or other caregivers that have caused, or could cause, serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorders. This includes extreme forms of punishment such as confinement of a child in a dark closet.
- Sexual – includes fondling a child’s genitals, intercourse, incest, rape, sodomy, exhibitionism, and commercial exploitation through prostitution or the production of pornographic materials.
Neglect:
- Physical – characterized by failure to provide for the child’s basic needs. This includes refusal of, or delay in, seeking health care; abandonment; expulsion from the home or refusal to allow a runaway to return home; and inadequate supervision.
- Educational – includes the allowance of chronic truancy, failure to enroll a child of mandatory school age in school, and failure to attend to a special educational need.
- Emotional – includes such actions as marked attention to the child’s needs for affection; refusal of or failure to provide needed psychological care; spouse abuse in the child’s presence; and permission of drug or alcohol use by the child. The assessment will take into account cultural values and standards as well as recognition that failure to provide necessities of life may be poverty related.
- Medical – failure of a caregiver to provide appropriate health care for the child, resulting in harm to the child’s health, even though the caretaker was financially able or offered the financial or other means to do so. This may include prenatal exposure to drugs.