The Preventionist - Podcast Rankings and reviews

Child welfare is a difficult, heart wrenching, nuanced subject. This podcast was well done. Thorough research, thoughtful writing, beautiful production. I highly recommend.

This is a well reported, mixed, edited podcast and more importantly tackles the critical topic of child removal and checks and balances in the child welfare and foster system. Highly recommend!

How extraordinary that with the reach of Serial and the resources of the New York Times, this is what they chose to devote those to. Sarah Koenig says in the trailer that she’s never heard anything like this story before, but she must not have looked very hard because these half baked, thinly sourced attacks on child abuse pediatricians are everywhere. And they’re all constructed the same way: using emotional and inflammatory soundbites from parents who claim they were falsely accused of abuse, while never examining the evidence in those cases thoroughly, and never seeming to consider that parents who actually abuse their children may be quite angry at those who try to hold them accountable. You’ll notice Dyan Neary never presents any actual data or compelling evidence that parents are being falsely accused in large numbers, or that Munchausen by proxy is being over diagnosed in LeHigh Valley or anywhere else- and this is because there isn’t any such evidence. Neary nevertheless concludes that child abuse pediatricians should be questioned more- as though they aren’t already questioned vigorously in court and bashed by irresponsible journalists in the media, claims to which they largely can’t respond because of HIPAA laws. Neary and the team at Serial criticize having a “better safe than sorry” approach to child abuse (which isn’t reality, it is not an easy or simple process to remove children from abusive households) without grappling with what “sorry” means in this context: the continued abuse and in some cases death of children. But hey, kids don’t listen to podcasts.