Mandatory Reporting Laws: A Change in Reporting Behavior?

ABSTRACT

Child abuse reporting policies in the form of mandatory reporting continues to expand both in scope and practice across the United States (U.S.). With this development, it is important to understand whether there is a relationship between mandatory reporting laws and reporting behavior while analyzing how any response differs across professional organizations. Mandatory reporting laws serve as a top-down policy used by legislatures to alter the reporting behavior of practitioners, especially within education, law enforcement, and the social services. The reporting behavior of these professionals are important to analyze because they account for the three largest reporting groups in the U.S. After investigating 18 years of child abuse reporting state data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, I find that the reporting response to this policy differs across professional organizations. Both law enforcement and social workers reporting of suspected abuse does not change regardless of whether the reporting law is adopted. Education personnel, on the other hand, do alter their reporting behavior when a mandatory reporting law is enacted. Specifically, the decline in reporting is attenuated after the policy is put in place. These findings demonstrate the challenges associated with designing child abuse protection policies that influence multiple professional organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Mandatory reporting
• front-line practitioners
• child abuse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel Vallett

Joel Vallett is on the faculty at Southern Utah University (SUU) and teaches in the Master of Public Administration (MPA) program. His research interests center around policy incentives as a driving force for policy implementation, success, and ethical decision-making. He has continued to implement applied learning in the classroom and looks forward to helping his students develop into committed public administrators.