27-03-2025
Will making clergy mandated reporters curb child abuse? It doesn't have a prayer
(Photo by Getty Images)
Late last year, the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families said it had made a startling change to its training for mandatory reporters of child abuse. They said they've changed their training to emphasize that reporters should stop confusing poverty with 'neglect.'
Substantively, this will change little, since professionals still will be afraid not to report anything and everything. But the statement is a tacit admission of what research has shown about laws put in place decades ago with no studies to see if they would work: Mandatory reporting backfires. It drives families away from seeking help, and overloads the system with false reports, making it harder to find the relatively few children in real danger. Many one-time proponents have had second thoughts.
But instead of heeding the research and replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, in which professionals are free to exercise their professional judgment, many Washington state lawmakers want to careen full-speed backward. They want to expand mandatory reporting even further, to one of the few fields where it doesn't apply now: the clergy, including anything heard in confession. Legislation to do this has passed the state Senate and emerged from committee in the House.
But that, too, would backfire.
The reason expanding mandatory reporting to clergy has support in some quarters is obvious: What comes to mind when you hear the words clergy and child abuse? Likely, the sprawling sexual abuse scandal and cover-up within the Catholic Church. But with expanded mandatory reporting, pedophile priests either will stop confessing or go to a church where their voices won't be recognized.
It can also harm survivors, who sometimes first disclose their abuse in confession.
'The Seal offers victims a safe, secure and watertight place where they can be listened to without cost, where they can remain anonymous, and can decide what they're ready, and not ready, to share – and all of this in complete confidence,' said a spokesman for a group representing survivors of abuse in Australia, where there've been similar campaigns to end the exemption for the confessional.'The Confessional Seal as it presently stands literally saves lives and offers every abuse victim the chance to begin to heal.'
Now consider some hypotheticals about others who might be affected.
A mother is terrified. She's being beaten by her husband. But when she threatened to go to the police, he said: 'Go ahead, call the cops! They'll just call DCYF, and they'll take away the kids.' She turns to her priest/minister/rabbi/imam and says: 'Please help me to escape. Where can I turn to protect myself and my children?' The clergyman replies: 'I'm so sorry. I'm now a mandated reporter, and you may have allowed your child to 'witness domestic violence' if he saw or heard you being beaten. So I have to call DCYF.'
A single mother enters the confessional: 'Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,' she says. She says she's guilt-ridden for having left her child home alone when she went to work and her regular child care arrangement fell through. She didn't know what else to do. Her boss said he'd fire her if she didn't show up; then she wouldn't be able to afford the rent and the family would be evicted. After the priest prescribes the appropriate acts of contrition, the mother asks a question: Might the priest know someone in the congregation who could volunteer to provide child care if this ever happened again? 'As a matter of fact, I do,' the priest replies. 'But it's too late to do only that. You see, I am now a mandated reporter of child abuse. What you did can be considered 'lack of supervision.' So I have to report you to DCYF.'
The fact that the current Washington state bill doesn't require priests to say who confessed changes none of this.
As it stands now, clergy are among the only helpers to whom impoverished families can turn with less fear that they will be turned in to DCYF. Once the word gets around that even the confessional isn't safe, you can bet that parents like those in the hypotheticals above won't come forward and ask for help. Children at risk from pedophile clergy won't get any safer, and children whose families' 'crime' is poverty will be cut off from a potential source of support.
Of course, it's not a crime for lawmakers to rush into endorsing bad policy that doesn't have a prayer of stopping actual child abuse because it sounds good in a press release. But it sure seems like a sin.
