Massachusetts
Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 119, §§ 21, 51A — Massachusetts mandatory child-abuse reporting statute
- Clergy named as mandatory reporter?
- Yes
- Confessional exemption?
- Yes
- Statute
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 119, §§ 21, 51A
- Clergy named
- Expressly
- Pending
- —
Massachusetts moved in 2002, in the wake of the Boston Archdiocese revelations. An emergency act signed that May rewrote G.L. c. 119, § 51A to expressly list clergy as mandated reporters (the definition was relocated to § 21 in the 2008 child-welfare overhaul): priests, rabbis, clergy members, ordained or licensed ministers, leaders of any church or religious body, accredited Christian Science practitioners, anyone performing recognized official duties for a church or religious body, and church personnel who regularly supervise, educate, coach, train, or counsel a child. The reporting trigger in § 51A(a) is strong on the page. A reasonable cause to believe a child is suffering abuse, neglect, sexual exploitation, or trafficking pulls in an immediate oral report to the Department of Children and Families and a written report within 48 hours. The same statute that names clergy also takes the social-worker, psychotherapist-patient, and clergy-penitent privileges off the table for reporting purposes. The carveout sits one subsection later. § 51A(j) provides that social-worker, psychotherapist, and clergy-penitent privileges do not block a § 51A report, EXCEPT that clergy 'need not report information solely gained in a confession or similarly confidential communication in other religious faiths.' The underlying clergy-penitent privilege at G.L. c. 233, § 20A stays intact behind that pointer. Subsection (j) does narrow the dodge by re-attaching the duty whenever the clergy member is also acting in another mandated-reporter capacity (counselor, teacher, coach, youth-group leader), and the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court have construed § 20A strictly in Marrero, Vital, and Nutter, limiting the privilege to communications genuinely sought as religious or spiritual counsel. A 2024 amendment (St. 2024, c. 285, § 15, effective March 23, 2025) replaced the first paragraph of § 51A(a) to address prenatal-substance-exposure reporting but left the clergy listing in § 21 and the confession carveout in § 51A(j) untouched. A 2025-2026 session bill, S.2659 (which absorbed S.127 as a new draft on November 3, 2025), would extend training and the broader child-welfare framework around the same clergy regime without disturbing the confession exception. That shape, a strong-sounding override reinstated by name inside the very section that lists clergy, is exactly the kind of self-cancelling reform UCO works to undo, here and in every state that has written one.