Arkansas
Ark. Code § 12-18-402(b)(29) — Arkansas Child Maltreatment Act — mandated reporters (clergy paragraph)
- Clergy named as mandatory reporter?
- Yes
- Confessional exemption?
- Yes
- Statute
- Ark. Code § 12-18-402(b)(29)
- Clergy named
- Expressly
- Pending
- —
Arkansas names clergy directly in its Child Maltreatment Act. Section 12-18-402(b)(29) lists ministers, priests, rabbis, accredited Christian Science practitioners, and other religious functionaries as mandated reporters. The duty sounds firm on the page. The same paragraph then writes two carveouts back in. Carveout (A) excuses knowledge acquired through communications required to be kept confidential by the religious discipline of the relevant denomination or faith. Carveout (B) excuses knowledge received from the alleged offender in the context of a statement of admission, that is, a perpetrator's own confession about what they did to a child. The (B) carveout is the more consequential of the two. Where (A) mirrors the confessional-privilege shape common to other states, (B) is specific to the offender's voice: it lets a reporting obligation disappear precisely when the person who committed the harm discloses it directly to a clergy member. Section 12-18-402(c)(1) provides a general anti-privilege rule stating that privilege or contract shall not prevent a mandated reporter from reporting, but that anti-privilege override does not displace the (b)(29) carveouts, because those carveouts are written into the statutory definition of who qualifies as a mandated reporter, not into an evidentiary privilege structure. A separate provision, § 12-18-803(b), preserves the minister-penitent testimonial privilege for court proceedings, further reinforcing the institutional shield in any administrative or judicial follow-on. Arkansas also enacted Act 727 of 2023, which extended the limitations period for failure-to-notify offenses to ten years after the child victim reaches age 18 and created a self-victim exemption for mandated reporters who are themselves victims of the same offender. Neither change disturbed the (b)(29)(A)-(B) carveouts. Arkansas is one of the states where reform doesn't require rewriting the duty: the enumeration is already done. The work is removing two clauses from a paragraph that already does most of the job, so that a child whose abuser confesses to clergy doesn't lose the report that would otherwise reach DCFS.