A teacher observes students playing at a Chicago school playground. Many states are grappling over who should be required to report incidents of child neglect and abuse. (Photo by Robbie Sequeira/Stateline)
Conversations with survivors of sexual abuse left Missouri state Sen. Tracy McCreery wondering what could have prevented the harm, leading her to sponsor a bill that would require clergy and religious workers to report suspected child abuse or neglect.
Her bill would have forced ministers to report even if they learned of abuse during confession or another religious rite. She urges people to view the issue through the lens of child safety and not against religion.
“Children are just very vulnerable and it’s up to us as adults to not allow them to be harmed,” the Democrat told Stateline. “There shouldn’t be an exception for adults that know about something and just don’t report it.”
Her bill failed to advance as the Missouri legislative session drew to a close. Other state lawmakers across the country also are grappling with the question of who should be required to report suspected child abuse or neglect, known as “mandated reporters.”
Some legislators are weighing whether clergy should be included — and whether they should be forced to reveal information from confessions. Other lawmakers are wrestling with whether sports coaches, talent agents, camp leaders and other professions with access to children should be mandated reporters.
The religious freedom question played out most recently in Washington state. A Washington law enacted last year requires clergy to report suspected child abuse and neglect, even when they receive the information through confidential communication during a religious rite, such as confession. Catholic bishops and then Orthodox churches sued, saying it violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The U.S. Justice Department joined the lawsuit on the bishops’ side.
Confession is considered a sacred rite in the Catholic faith. Penitents confess their sins to a priest, who is forbidden by church law from revealing anything said. The Washington law “puts Roman Catholic priests to an impossible choice: violate 2,000 years of Church teaching and incur automatic excommunication or refuse to comply with Washington law and be subject to imprisonment, fine, and civil liability,” the bishops’ suit said.
A federal judge blocked enforcement of that portion of the law, and the state eventually agreed to drop the obligation. Clergy remain mandated reporters, but state prosecutors do not enforce reporting requirements related to confession.
In New York, a pending bill would add any “clergy member or other minister of any religion” to the list of required reporters, similar to a Kansas bill that passed the state House but died in the Senate this session. Both bills would exempt information received through a confession.
South Dakota lawmakers also considered adding clergy to the state’s list of mandated reporters this year, with exemptions for confession, though that proposal failed in committee. Church opponents said requiring faith leaders to make “subjective” calls on whether difficult life circumstances or poverty amount to reportable abuse or neglect would interfere with the clergy-parishioner relationship, and run afoul of First Amendment protections, the South Dakota Searchlight reported.
A pending Vermont bill, however, aims to end the mandatory reporting exception for confession.
McCreery rejects the idea that an adult should be able to confess to abuse in a religious setting without prompting a report, and thinks there are loopholes in reporting laws that undermine child safety.
“That really repulses me,” she said. “Why are we not thinking about our obligations to protect the child?”
But Chris Motz, senior counsel with First Liberty Institute, which pursues religious freedom cases, said the Washington litigation should serve as a lesson to other states considering similar bills.
“The lesson for state legislators is going to be that they have to respect long-standing religious rights, while balancing the important interests in safeguarding children,” he said. “We don’t have to always see things as sort of a winner take all, this or that. We can do a little bit with both hands.”
Carrying the legal burden
The bills sometimes define “clergy” widely, including not only ordained leaders such as priests and rabbis, but also those who serve as spiritual leaders of any religious community, church or sect.
Michael W. Halcomb, an ordained minister and assistant professor at Montreat College in North Carolina, told Stateline that if abusers know clergy must report anything disclosed in counseling or confession, they may never seek help at all.
“If reporting is mandated, abusers will likely never come forward for help or counseling,” Halcomb said. “That means the abuse stays completely hidden no matter what happens.”
Halcomb said many pastors are not equipped to determine where “spiritual guidance ends and a formal criminal confession begins,” which could complicate broad reporting mandates.
“Whoever has the ability to isolate a child, in other words, should have to carry the legal burden to report.”
But Vermont Democratic state Rep. Esme Cole introduced a bill seeking to repeal the state’s clergy-confidentiality exception. Cole said the bill is not aimed at one denomination or only at what is said in confession. She said it is also about abuse known about by church leaders that is never reported; she wants such leaders to be required to report as well.
The issue is personal, Cole told Stateline. A close friend, she said, is an adult survivor of physical and emotional abuse that happened in a church setting when he was about 10. The priest accused of the abuse, she said, never faced discipline and was instead moved elsewhere.
Cole calls it the “pass the trash” loophole.
“When there’s bad behavior, and by bad behavior I mean real abuse committed by a member of the diocese they move them to the next church over or two churches over,” Cole said. “If we want to stop that kind of movement in its tracks, it needs to be reported.”
Cole’s proposal comes against the backdrop of a long history of clergy abuse allegations in Vermont’s only Catholic diocese. After the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2024, another 118 people submitted confidential claims, after previously settling 67 lawsuits for about $34.5 million, VTDigger reported.
Who else should report?
Other states are debating whether to add coaches and other professionals with access to children to mandated-reporter lists.
If the goal is protecting children, Halcomb said, states should look beyond churches and impose reporting duties on “anyone with unsupervised authority over minors,” including club sports coaches, private tutors and camp volunteers.
This month, Connecticut passed legislation requiring paid municipal youth camp directors, assistant directors and staff members age 21 or older to serve as mandated reporters.
Although the South Dakota clergy bill failed, the legislature did approve a separate measure requiring any “coach of a school activity” to be a mandated reporter. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed it into law in March.
California expanded its definition of mandated reporters to explicitly include certain school volunteers, governing board members and private school employees as of July 1, 2026, and requires annual mandated-reporter training. The state also enacted a law last year that added talent agents, talent managers and talent coaches who work with minors.
Beth Sanborn, a retired Pennsylvania police officer, now leads other school resource officers in mandated-reporter training sessions as a Montgomery County School Safety Coordinator. She asks them to imagine being pressed to describe to a stranger their last sexual encounter.
The question elicits nervous giggles from flustered adult officers, she said. She then asks them to think of a young child who has been sexually abused by a relative, and how the fear and shame can be overwhelming enough for them to not seek help.
“What if you’re an 11-year-old kid and what if it was nonconsensual? What if it was your uncle?” Sanborn said. “Do you really want to share that with a stranger? It became a shared responsibility for us who are trained to recognize these signs.”
In Pennsylvania, Sanborn said she saw a complete shift in mandated reporting after 2012, when the state enacted a law that requires school employees and contractors with direct contact with children to receive training on recognizing and reporting child abuse. The laws were enacted in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State.
Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys. The scandal led to the dismissal of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s revered longtime football coach, who was criticized for not doing enough after learning of an allegation involving Sandusky as early as 1998.
Sanborn thinks some school officials, from teachers to officers, hesitate to report because of a common misconception they must prove abuse occurred. The point of mandated reporting, she said, is for adults to pass along a reasonable concern before a child is harmed.
“The school resource officer gets to see one facet of a kid’s behavior. The coach gets to see another. The guidance counselor sees another. The favorite teacher sees another.”
Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at [email protected].
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes NC Newsline, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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