WASHINGTON (DC)
Ministry Watch [Matthews NC]
January 1, 2026
By Jessica Eturralde
Mandatory reporting laws, how they’ve changed, and what falls under clergy-penitence
In a troubling trend, police in Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana have arrested a number of church leaders in separate cases for failing to report alleged child abuse.
The wave of cases, which have arisen in the last month, raises questions about church and ministry accountability and their legal and moral obligations to protect children in their care, specifically by alerting civil authorities when leaders suspect abuse.
This basic duty has been a fixture of American law for well over half a century. Since 1967, every state has enacted some form of mandatory child-abuse reporting law.
But in nearly 60 years, there have been changes, and what has changed most is not whether the laws exist, but the scope of those laws: who must report, what they must report, the penalties for failing to do so, and understanding exemptions.
Because of these factors (which have changed across states and denominations as much as over time), many church leaders are unaware or uncertain about their own reporting responsibilities within these laws.
Failing to report properly can lead to criminal or civil penalties, expose the church to lawsuits, and inflict lasting reputational damage, as recent high-profile abuse scandals have shown. Most importantly, choosing not to report abuse to the proper authorities harms the vulnerable and sends the message that the Church is more invested in protecting itself than in defending the innocent (even if this is far from true).
All of this raises the stakes for church leaders to understand, in concrete terms, how mandatory reporting laws operate—and what those laws actually demand of them.
Who is a mandatory reporter? Understanding reporting laws.
A mandatory reporting law is a statute legally requiring designated individuals (typically professionals like teachers, doctors, social workers, and sometimes clergy) to promptly report any reasonable suspicion of child abuse, neglect, or maltreatment to authorities.
The threshold for reporting does not require definitive proof. Reasonable suspicion might begin with observed injuries, behavior changes, disclosures from children or adults, or other credible information.
Deadlines for filing reports are often short (typically 24 to 48 hours), and authorities expect reports to go to child protective services or law enforcement, not merely to supervisors within the church.
Penalties for failing to report range from misdemeanors carrying fines of up to several thousand dollars and potential jail time of up to a year, to felony charges in more serious cases.
Insurers, church leaders, legal and child-safety experts, and the courts often recommend that churches provide annual abuse-recognition training for staff, establish clear reporting protocols, and demonstrate due diligence by documenting any concerns and the actions taken in response.
Yet even as these best practices spread, the legal duty to report remains far from uniform for clergy: There is no federal statute mandating clergy reporting, and individual states set their own rules, creating a fragmented legal landscape.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia have some form of mandatory reporting law, but the scope of those duties varies. About 18 states (plus Puerto Rico) have universal compulsory reporting, which means every adult is a mandatory reporter of suspected child abuse or neglect.
In the remaining 32 states, the legal duty to report applies only to designated professionals such as teachers, health-care workers, and social workers—and in roughly 28 of those states, clergy, including pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, and similar religious leaders, are explicitly included in that group.
At least eight states also recognize civil liability, meaning a victim can sue the person[s] who failed to meet their reporting obligation.
Even as many congregations put formal safeguards in place: background checks, “two-adult” rules, internal reporting chains, and written protocols for responding to allegations, policies should emphasize managing abuse according to the ministry’s state laws.
To better understand those reporting laws, World Population Review lists mandatory reporting laws by state, and a more detailed breakdown for each state is available via Remnant Counseling Collective’s Ultimate Guide to Mandated Reporting Laws in All 50 U.S. States.
For church-specific guidance, Church Law & Tax provides a comprehensive state-by-state guide for ministries through its Advantage Membership (currently $129 per year).
How have the laws changed over time?
Over the past three decades, mandatory reporting rules affecting clergy have generally grown more stringent, with more states designating religious leaders as mandated reporters and narrowing the scope of confidentiality. Before the mid-1990s, relatively few statutes mentioned clergy by name, and broad clergy-penitent protections were common, often defended on First Amendment grounds.
That began to shift as Congress repeatedly reauthorized the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) and attached new conditions to federal funding, prompting states to revisit their child-abuse codes, including who must report. Those incremental changes set the stage for later waves of reform that brought clergy more squarely under mandatory reporting requirements.
In the late 1990s, several states moved to add clergy to the ranks of mandated reporters, generally doing so in ways that largely preserved longstanding confessional privilege. That number continued to rise in the early 2000s, as lawmakers in states such as Massachusetts revisited clergy-reporting laws in the wake of the Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight investigation into Catholic clergy abuse and cover-ups.
During the 2000s, more states moved to add or tighten clergy reporting requirements, with California and Pennsylvania updating their laws in the wake of high-profile scandals. At the same time, CAPTA’s reauthorizations in 2003 and 2010 encouraged states to broaden the range of ‘youth-serving’ professionals covered by mandatory reporting—changes that, in some jurisdictions, swept in church-based counselors and other ministry staff. Several states also stiffened penalties for failing to report.
In the wake of the Penn State scandal in 2011, and later amid the #MeToo movement and a series of other abuse revelations, states moved to tighten their child-protection and reporting laws.
By the late 2010s and early 2020s, successive reforms that narrowed exemptions and broadened who must report had helped bring the total to 18 states that now require all adults, not just designated professionals, to report suspected child abuse.
In the 2020s, state legislatures have increasingly focused on confessional privilege itself. For example, the debate earlier this year over Washington Senate Bill 5375 showed how far lawmakers are willing to go in reshaping confessional privilege, even as courts and public pressure have pushed them to compromise while keeping clergy on the list of mandated reporters.
Ongoing debates over the balance between religious freedom and protecting children from abuse have intensified in recent years. Courts have generally upheld the constitutionality of carving out exceptions to the privilege, while giving states broad discretion to shape their own reporting rules.
Understanding the clergy-penitent privilege
Problems often arise when ministers do not report, either because they assume the clergy-penitent privilege exempts them from mandated reporting or because they try to resolve the matter internally rather than contacting authorities. For that reason, ministers must understand how their duties as mandated reporters interact with the clergy-penitent privilege in child abuse cases.
The clergy-penitent privilege protects specific conversations, such as sacramental confessions or pastoral counseling, from disclosure in court.
In most jurisdictions where clergy are mandatory reporters, about 29 states that explicitly list clergy, plus others with “any person” laws, require that they must report suspected child abuse that comes to them outside privileged pastoral communications, such as through casual conversations, observations, or staff meetings.
At the same time, in roughly 30-plus states, clergy-penitent privilege still protects at least some confessional communications from disclosure in abuse cases, though the scope of that protection varies from state to state.
Yet, a small group of seven states—New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, West Virginia (and Tennessee in cases of child sexual abuse)—effectively impose no confessional exemption, requiring clergy to report abuse even when disclosed in sacramental confession or an equivalent penitential communication.
Washington state’s 2025 law (SB 5375) initially eliminated the exemption but, following lawsuits and a federal settlement in October, restored confessional protections while maintaining clergy as reporters overall.
The privilege does not cover every conversation between a minister and a congregant: Typically, it applies when communication is made in confidence to a minister solely to seek spiritual counsel. Church leaders should consult their state’s statute regarding the privilege.
In most jurisdictions, the privilege belongs to the penitent, not the cleric: it is the congregant, rather than the pastor, who ultimately decides whether to invoke or waive it.
Additional Resources
Many denominations now publish their own safeguarding guidance, giving pastors and church leaders concrete tools. The Christian Reformed Church offers a Safe Church Policy Toolkit, while GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) maintains a robust FAQ on abuse disclosure.
The Southern Baptist Convention provides state-by-state mandatory reporting guides, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) promotes its Creating Safe Ministries resources. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) hosts a Report Misconduct hub, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops aggregates Safe Environment resources for dioceses across the country.
The latest arrest cases show how easily churches can mishandle abuse when leaders misunderstand or ignore their legal obligations. As legislatures and courts continue to revisit where pastoral confidentiality ends and the duty to report begins, churches that stay informed and choose transparency over silence will be better prepared for what comes next.
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