Nebraska
Neb. Rev. Stat. § 28-711 — Nebraska Child Abuse Reporting Statute
- Clergy named as mandatory reporter?
- No
- Confessional exemption?
- Yes
- Statute
- Neb. Rev. Stat. § 28-711
- Clergy named
- Not expressly
- Pending
- —
Nebraska's mandatory-reporting law at § 28-711 names physicians, nurses, school employees, social workers, and several other professionals by title, then adds the phrase 'or any other person' to extend the duty to everyone. Clergy are not listed by name. The catchall extends the duty to any person, so clergy are covered on the face of the text. The federal Children's Bureau, in its 2023 state-by-state compilation, records that clergy are not enumerated in Nebraska and may be covered only through the 'any person' designation, and that the reporting laws do not address clergy-penitent privilege at all. The gap that matters most isn't the enumeration question. It's what happens after a report is filed. Section 28-714 abrogates three evidentiary privileges in proceedings that flow from a § 28-711 report: physician-patient, professional counselor-client, and husband-wife. The clergy-penitent privilege, codified separately at § 27-506 as Rule 506 of the Nebraska Evidence Rules, is not on that list. The omission is not an oversight in the text; it is the gap. Rule 506 gives any person the right to refuse disclosure of a confidential communication made privately to a member of the clergy acting as spiritual advisor. The clergyman may assert the privilege on the communicant's behalf. Because § 28-714 does not reach Rule 506, a clergy member who receives a disclosure of abuse in a pastoral context retains a viable statutory basis to decline to produce that communication, even in the judicial proceeding that follows. The duty to report and the privilege to withhold the communication in court coexist, unresolved, in the statute. Willful failure to report under § 28-711 carries a Class III misdemeanor penalty under § 28-717. Nebraska divides misdemeanors into seven classes at § 28-106, and Class III is the third of them, with a ceiling of three months' imprisonment, a $500 fine, or both. Three lighter classes sit below it. No Nebraska statute creates civil liability for failure to report. The enforcement exposure for a clergy member who declines to report a pastoral communication is light by design. Nebraska's structure (a catchall that may or may not reach clergy depending on who is reading it, a privilege abrogation list that stops short of Rule 506, and a misdemeanor ceiling) is a version of the incomplete-reform pattern UCO tracks in every state. Naming clergy plainly and pulling Rule 506 into the privileges that already fall away is the fix Nebraska needs, and a version of it is owed in most other states too.