Legislation passed by Gov. Hochul makes it harder to save the lives of abused children

Lissette Soto Domenech’s emaciated 14-year-old sons — whom she wanted “to stay babies forever” — would probably be dead were it not for several anonymous calls to the Administration for Children’s Services.

An investigator responding to those calls in October found that one of the boys weighed 54 pounds; the other 51.

Both were well below the normal height for their age.

Which is not surprising given that the mother was only feeding them infant ­cereal and baby bottles.

One of the boys was also autistic but had never been evaluated or provided any kind of services.

The boys, who were apparently held captive and kept in diapers for their whole lives, had one lucky break: Those anonymous calls came in to the State Central Registry before December.

If they had been made this summer, they would have been ignored, thanks to legislation just signed by Gov. Hochul.

The Anti-Harassment in Reporting Act, pushed by progressive activists for years, was sold to lawmakers as a way to reduce false or frivolous reports of child maltreatment from angry landlords or vengeful
ex-partners.

“This bill will transform people’s lives,” Juval Scott of The Bronx Defenders promised the public, noting that it would protect “thousands of families from the threat of family surveillance and separation.”

People like Scott and Hochul may not want to hear this, but some of those families need to be surveilled and separated.

There are parents in this state who are suffering from serious drug addiction and untreated mental illness.

For instance, authorities are still looking for 11-year-old Jacob Pritchett, a nonverbal autistic child, whose mother told investigators that not only does she not have a child, “she has never had a period, that she’s never been with a man and that she’s Jesus Christ.”

Authorities have since searched local landfills for Jacob’s body and Pritchett’s mother has been released after invoking her right against self-incrimination.

The only reason that ACS went to look for Jacob in the first place?

An anonymous call.

Unfortunately, the new law means that New Yorkers with good reason to report anonymously — including neighbors who don’t want to suffer the wrath of mentally ill, drug-addled and abusive parents who live down the hall — will be ignored.

It is true that the authorities claim they will protect the confidentiality of people reporting abuse and neglect, even if they require them to leave their names.

But callers have good reason to be skeptical.

And given that the Domenech boys almost never left the house — their mother submitted false paperwork saying she was “homeschooling them” and she hadn’t taken them to the doctor in years — who else would have noticed what was going on?

Advocates supporting the ban on anonymous calls noted they were less likely to be substantiated than reports from social-service workers and less likely to cause children to be taken immediately into foster care.

But a look at long-term outcomes of anonymous calls suggests a different picture.

A paper in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect found that, according to national data, children in families who have been reported anonymously are more likely to be re-reported than those reported by social service workers — and also more likely to end up in foster care at a later date.

New York, like every other state, allows anonymous reporting of crime.

The NYPD Crime Stoppers program even pays people when an anonymous report leads to the arrest and indictment of a felon.

People who knowingly make false reports are subject to large fines and even jail time.

The only reason we now have a different policy when it comes to anonymously reporting child abuse is that Kathy Hochul and her progressive friends in the Legislature have placed the interests of adults over the safety of children.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow.