The Other Side of Madness

***Trigger Warning*** Missoula Mental Health Center Employee Fired For Reporting Child Pornography

November 16, 2011 at 5:52 pm (Mental Health and Disability) (mandatory reporting, Missoula mental health center, reporting child pornography, reporting sexual abuse, sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual violence, Three Rivers Mental Health Solutions)

Now here’s one that really makes my brain hurt: a mental health worker in Missoula was recently fired for reporting that a client was in possession of child pornography.  Her supervisors didn’t believe it met the criteria of mandatory reporting, even though her client, John Gribble, was babysitting girls she suspected were at risk.

Health care workers are required to report any case in which they “know or have reasonable cause to suspect, as a result of information they receive in their professional or official capacity, that a child is abused or neglected by anyone,” but according to the administrator of Three Rivers Mental Health Solutions, this case didn’t meet these criteria because neither the victims of the child porn nor the children Gribble was babysitting could be identified by name.

Call me crazy but I assume releasing the names of the victims you exploit in child pornography is bad for business; and I would hazard a guess that the reason Gribble didn’t provide the names of the girls he was babysitting was because he had been… are you sitting down… REPORTED BEFORE!

That’s right, the final nail in the coffin; the thing that really blows my mind, is that the administrator at the mental health center fired this woman because she, quote, “Couldn’t tell me any names… In the past, this gentleman babysit kids and we were able to identify the mother and were able to carry out our duty to warn.”

In other words, the administrative staff at this mental health center considered it a breach of professional ethics to report a man they already KNEW to be a pedophile and already KNEW used babysitting jobs to gain unsupervised access to potential victims because this information wasn’t fucking specific enough!

The administrator officially stated that this woman was fired “in part” because of her report.  I wonder what the other “part” of it may be… maybe because she refused comply with the mental health center’s policy of harboring pedophiles?

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.