I was excited to hear this series, because I thought that Serial’s past productions tried to tell complicated stories and bring the audience closer to the truth while acknowledging that it’s impossible to know the whole truth. This series went in with a thesis and then used jaunty, character-driven, “This American Life”-style reporting to give the illusion that you’re getting multiple perspectives. I respect that it’s already complicated, once you get a county controller involved, and you have systems at the county level that have to protect children based on state and federal laws (mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect began in 1974 with a federal law, CAPTA)….
There are many pieces of misinformation from the first episode.
1. that child abuse by medical means is rare, and mostly seen in TV or movies;
2. that doctors “diagnose” a caregiver with Munchausen by proxy, rather than doing a deep dive of the medical records and piecing together doctor-shopping or incosistent caregiver reports to suggest that the child injuries are suggestive of over-medicalization;
3. That CAP specialists as a whole are on a mission to find abuse where none exists; on the contrary, they’re called in after other healthcare providers have suspicions of abuse. CAPs tend to find child abuse less often than less well-trained, first-line providers.
4. That suspected parents are fully transparent to people like Dyan, the reporter, or Mike, the controller, rather than giving their side of the story and knowing that their child’s full medical records are all protected under HIPAA unless they parents waive HIPAA for ALL the kid’s providers, including the ones that call out evidence suggestive of abuse. You basically cannot get around the imbalance of information in these cases, until it goes to court and all the records are subpoenaed. Even then, sometimes, the judge will make a decision about admissibility that biases the jury, which is a major reason for the Kowalski v Johns Hopkins verdict being overturned
5. That doctors somehow rip families apart. Doctors are mandated to report good-faith suspicions of abuse, or risk losing their licenses. Then child protection and law enforcement gets involved. A judge makes an order to remove a child from custody. And doctors do not take that decision to report lightly, even though their licenses are at risk.Please don’t conflate child protective case workers with doctors, even if you have heard from some anonymous caseworkers that they say “When in doubt, pull them out.” This reporting makes it sound like that was the Lehigh Valley Hospitals’, or Dr. Jenssen’s MO, when it is not.
Finally, I would bet that Neary interviewed other experts on child abuse whose perspectives on the central doctor she targeted, Dr. Jenssen, did not align with the villain narrative and chose to leave those out.
