State audit faults social workers for not checking on child abuse victims

FARGO (KVRR-KFGO) – Some North Dakota social workers aren’t checking on suspected victims of child abuse in a timely manner – even in the most critical cases, according to an audit of the North Dakota Human Services Dept.

Human services workers are required to check on potential victims for whom there could be substantial risk of death or sexual abuse within 24 hours of a report. Instead, the audit found that for those crisis-level cases, state workers didn’t check on victims for 13 days – on average.

In 68% of all reviewed cases, potential abuse victims were not checked on in the allowable time frames.

Human services acknowledged the problems identified by the report, saying that due to “extreme” staff turnover the case ratio for workers exceeds the appropriate level.

The report says this is the third audit in a row to identify the response time issue and that nearly 600 cases of severe child abuse could have been avoided had human services addressed the issue when it was first identified.