Within the first three days that Kaitlin and Jeremy Kuykendall enrolled their 15-month-old daughter in a Navy-run daycare near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, her “smile disappeared as we started walking down the hallways,” Kaitlin Kuykendall remembers.
By the third day at the facility, her daughter held Kaitlin’s hand tighter as they walked closer to the daycare center. When a bruise appeared on her daughter’s thigh, the couple reported it to the director of the Child Development Center, or CDC. The next day, she was told that video footage showed the 15-month-old being “inappropriately touched.”
But what did that mean?
The Kuykendalls spent months filing information requests and even enlisting their member of Congress to find out what had happened.
“It’s upsetting because you want to know what happened to your child. You want to know how to help them,” Kaitlin Kuykendall told Task & Purpose. “[My daughter] wouldn’t sleep with a blanket anymore. She had all these triggers which I had no idea where they were coming from because we weren’t being told what happened to her specifically.”
Eventually, the Kuykendalls were provided a copy of the Navy’s investigation into the report and video footage through information requests, which answered their questions.
But according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report released this week, keeping parents in the dark about incidents at daycare was part of the system.
“Parents or legal guardians may not be aware of the specifics of the alleged abuse or neglect of their child, thereby limiting the potential actions they can take to address the allegation,” the IG said in its report.
The Inspector General found that DoD policies on suspected child abuse or neglect at CDCs lack “uniform requirements” for each of the services on the types of communication, notification timeframes, what information should be shared, and management of notification files.
Kaitlin Kuykendall said the report was not surprising because “we lived that.” She was the one to bring her suspicions to the CDC director and didn’t find out that there were three CDC employees involved in her daughter’s abuse. In January 2024, two out of three of the Ford Island CDC daycare workers involved in the incident were found guilty of third-degree assault, according to Hawaii court records.
While the IG found huge holes in how each military service handles reports of abuse, a major policy overhaul will come from the IG’s findings. The acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness told the IG that an updated policy with specifics on identification, notification, and reporting abuse allegations to parents or guardians will be issued by Sept. 30, 2025.
According to the IG, the Chief of Naval Personnel said the service would revise and reissue policies with detailed notification guidance for parents and guardians.
Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The IG also reported that during their evaluation, the Department of Defense established a policy in December 2024 requiring that CDCs and base officials inform parents or guardians of suspected child abuse or neglect – an issue that was raised by a mother alleging child abuse at Army War College’s Carlisle Barracks daycare in Pennsylvania. The mother told Task & Purpose in January 2024 that she watched as her child’s behavior “started regressing at a rapid rate” within the first 10 days of attending the daycare.
Again, the parents later learned that CDC officials suspected or even knew of abuse, but did not inform them.
“The CDC knew our preschooler was actually penetrated three to four times in a 48-hour period and they allowed us to drop off our child the following morning like nothing happened, a full 24 hours later,” the mother said at the time.
Army officials in that case said that they followed Army procedures for handling problematic sexual behavior involving children and Pennsylvania reporting laws — procedures the IG says should be improved and brought in line with the other services.
“Had I known what I know now I would have never put her in a situation like that because it seems so unfair to families and to the children especially and it just doesn’t create a safe environment,” Kaitlin Kuykendall said. “I’m glad that this IG report came out and it brought up these concerns and flagged them because these are things that people just think naturally are happening. But not having that policy in place is alarming.”
A second IG report on military CDCs will review the military services’ implementation of those policies and whether abuse allegations were addressed and appropriately communicated at select CDCs.
Kaitlin Kuykendall said the second IG review is supposed to include the Ford Island CDC. IG officials would not comment on the contents of the upcoming report and did not have information on when it would be released.