The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services has begun making publicly available the names of people who it believes have committed child abuse or neglect, despite the fact that some of them were never prosecuted for the accusations.The Commercial Appeal (http://bit.ly/1Hed9bR ) has reported that as of July 1, new additions to a formerly internal, confidential registry of people who investigators say were  “substantiated” for child abuse are being shared with an online, publicly accessible registry of abusers of adults. Most reports on this story imply the registry is with DCS. However, there is no public registry link on the DCS site.   CROSSVILLE NEWS FIRST talked with DCS director of communications Rob Johnson, who explained they are sharing their information with the Department of Health’s registry on the TN Dept. of Health’s web site.  Here is the link.    Also, there is no “list” per se of ‘abusers’ for the public to scan – only a place for people who know the name of someone they want to search for.  If you know the name, you can search for that name only to see if that person is on the registry. The internal registry is used to prevent those on the list from getting jobs at schools, for example. The public registry is used to prevent people who abused adults from getting jobs at places such as nursing homes.

If someone is on the Registry who feels they should not be, The Department of Children’s Services says people can appeal their placement on the registry.