South Carolina
SOUTH CAROLINA
Joanne L. Schaekel
Program Consultant
Child Protective Services Unit
South Carolina Department of Social Services
P.O. Box 1520
Columbia, SC 29202-1520
(803) 898-7517
(803) 898-7641 Fax
Item 1.1: This item includes 5,846 families served by county flex funds from the Social Services Block Grant, and 4,442 families served by the Emergency Assistance Program of title IV-EA.
Item 2.2: "Other" includes clergy.
Item 3.3: South Carolina requires some form of intervention for all children who are the subject of a report.
Items 4.1: "Psychological or Emotional Abuse or Neglect" is defined narrowly, requiring clear and convincing evidence and a demonstrable link between the parents behavior and the childs behavior and validation by a mental health specialist. "Other" includes threat of harm (3,862), delinquency (46), abandonment (80), and educational neglect (494). "Threat of harm" includes perinatal substance exposure.
Item 4.2: "Unknown" includes intakes of unborn children whose birthdate was not added to the system by the worker following birth.
Item 4.6: Programming to provide these data for the time period requested was not in place. However, existing data for 1997 indicate that children in 188 (3.6 percent) of the 5,193 substantiated investigations had been the subject of an investigation within a 12-month period prior to the most recent 1997 report. The same data indicate that children in 759 reports (14.6 percent) had received a prior CPS investigation in the nearly 18-year period that computerized records have been maintained.
Item 4.9: State law prohibits any court hearing to take place without the presence of a guardian ad litem. One guardian usually represents a sibling group.
Item 6.1: A South Carolina statute forbids a person to be identified as a perpetrator without a court order and also expands the use of the Central Registry for employment purposes. Many perpetrators agree to accept services in return for not being officially identified as a perpetrator in the Central Registry. These changes have resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of perpetrators not identified.
"Non-Caretakers" are not under the purview of DSS. Such cases are considered criminal acts in South Carolina. "Other" includes child victims with no specific individual perpetrator.
Item 7.1: This number includes 180 allocated workers and 36 allocated supervisors.
Item 7.3: The triage system of CPS intake requires a supervisor to assign a response time based on the risk factors recorded on the intake document. Response periods are 0-2 hours, 2-12 hours, and 12-24 hours. State statute requires all investigations to be initiated within 24 hours. Initiation is defined as leaving the office to make contact with the child, the parent, or a collateral individual who has direct knowledge of the childs current condition. These are recorded in order of preference, i.e., child, then parent, then collateral. Because the database does not record the response time assigned by the supervisor, the number of cases in each Priority Standard category is unknown. However, the number of cases responded to within 2 hours was 8,521; the number responded to within 2-12 hours was 5,779, the number responded to within 12-24 hours was 6,245, and the number responded to within 25 hours or more was 28. These cases may or may not have fallen into the Priority Standard with that time requirement.
