Teresa Collett, visiting professor from St. Thomas University, speaks to law students about the effectiveness of Kansas’ law requiring some kinds of professionals to file a report if they suspect a child to have been harmed by a sexual act.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Speaking to students Tuesday, former Kansas Special Assistant Attorney General Teresa Collett said a state law designed to protect children from sexual assaults might not be working properly. She said she thought this was because many physicians and other professionals in the state may be unsure when they are required to report suspicions of statutory rape.
“Its unclear whether Kansas health care providers, school counselors, etc., believe that they have the obligation to report the pregnancy of a minor that’s age 12, 13 or 14, maybe even 15,” Collett said.
Teresa Collett, visiting professor from St. Thomas University, speaks to law students about the effectiveness of Kansas’ law requiring some kinds of professionals to file a report if they suspect a child to have been harmed by a sexual act.
Collett, now a professor of law at the St. Thomas University School of Law in Minneapolis, Minn., spoke about those requirements during the “Sex, Jurisprudence, and Rock and Roll” event hosted by the University of Kansas’ law school and the KU chapter of The Federalist Society on Tuesday.
Kansas law says that professionals of many types, from counselors to dentists, are required to file a report if they have “reason to suspect that a child has been harmed” by a sexual act, with a child being anyone younger than 16, the legal age of consent.
However, there has been long-standing debate within the state about whether these professionals should only report those patients they believe were harmed during sexual activity, or if they needed to report all knowledge of sexual activity by those patients.
Collett said she interpreted this to mean professionals should be required to report all evidence of sexual behavior in those 15 years or younger because the harm that had been done to the children could be undetectable or unknown at that point.
“It is clear that the context of the law would require this,” Collett said during her speech.
Professionals who are required to report suspicions of statutory rape of minors include physicians who specialize in STDs, counselors, abortionists, providers of birth control and many others.
Multiple organizations have voiced concern that these types of laws are an invasion of privacy. However, Collett said she thought the laws were in the best interest of the general public.
“There can be no legitimate expectation of privacy regarding a criminal act,” she said.
Collett said the state felt its interest in protecting minors from sexual assaults was more significant than the privacy concerns of the victims.
“If we really want to help these minors, we need to be able to find out if this was a 16-year-old boyfriend or a 60-year-old schoolteacher,” Collett said.
Jelani Exum, associate professor of law at the University, also spoke during the event and said she saw how these laws could help catch assaulters and protect the general public, but didn’t think they were completely effective.
Exum said it had been suggested that these laws may make victims who are unsure about a sexual act less likely to seek treatment because they know their visit to a doctor or hospital would result in a legal investigation.
Exum said there were other issues with these mandatory rape reporting laws and the way they affect children, but privacy wasn’t one of them.
“There are a lot of times when law is in conflict with privacy concerns,” Exum said. “There’s no such thing as absolute privacy.”
Baylee Suskin, second-year law student from Parker, Ariz., said she found the event to be very informative as a whole, but didn’t think Collett addressed every situation that minors could experience.
“She didn’t really talk about the cases where you have two 13-year-olds having consensual sex and why only one of these children would be charged with a crime but not the other,” Suskin said.
— — Edited by Samantha Foster
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