Collaborators Erin Miles Cloud, Shawn Koyano, Jasmine Wali, Erica Meiners and Shannon Perez-Darby explore the intersections between anti-blackness, education and mandatory reporting. Recorded from a live event on Monday October 30, 2023

Event in collaboration with Project Nia and the Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox series to launch the zine Youth Matter: An Illustrated Guide for Young People Beyond Mandated Reporting. Looking for tips on how to use the zine? Curious about how to integrate art into a world free of mandatory reporting and family policing? Check out the event recording.

How do movements for abolition of mandatory reporting and family policing intersect with larger movements for abolition of the criminal legal system? In this conversation, Erin Miles Cloud (Movement for Family Power), Jasmine Wali (JMac for Families) and Shannon Perez-Darby (Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral Project) discussed the history of and harms associated with mandatory reporting; its role in policing Black, brown, and indigenous families; and how together we can abolish mandatory reporting while building strong, safe, and connected communities.

A live Zoom training exploring mandatory reporting and why mandatory reporting harm reduction is essential to re-examining the root causes of and preventing child sexual abuse.

To access a version of the recording with Zoom captioning & full ASL interpretation, visit tinyurl.com/MRNNCaptionASL

Mandatory Reporting, Abolition, and Trans and Disability Justice hosted by The Trans Law Center

This Teen Dating Violence Awareness & Prevention Month (TDVAM) webinar explores the impact of mandatory reporting on domestic violence survivors, highlighting unique impacts for LGBTQ young people. Presenters share findings from a 2016 survey that examined how mandatory reporting affects the help-seeking of domestic violence survivors. Presenters also identify practical strategies advocates can use to decrease negative consequences of reporting and increase survivor safety and self-determination

Victim Rights Law Center's Jessie Mindlin and Oregon Law Center's Debra Dority have provided us with a 2 hour 17 minute video that meets Oregon Administrative Rules 137-085-0080 for advocate certification and includes recent legislative updates.

March 9, 2021. A conversation between Jasmine Wali and Nikita Rahman about Mandated Supporting!

Black communities, communities of color, and those living in poverty are over-represented in many systems, including the foster system, that claim to support and protect.

Watch a recording of the second webinar in the Shriver Center on Policy and Law’s Spotlight on the Foster System series, held on November 14, 2020.

This paper reports on a survey conducted in collaboration with the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Over 3600 people seeking help for domestic violence shared how their fears about and experiences of mandatory reporting impacted their ability to reach out for help.

A great visual overview of many of the dynamics related to mandatory reporting by Shana Salzberg.

Mandatory Reporter Laws by State by the Elephant Circle

Clarifying the limits of mandatory reporting when it comes to teen dating violence for Washington State. This resource is an important guide for creating policies clarifying the limits of mandatory reporting and discouraging overreach under current mandatory reporting laws.

Mandatory Reporting recommendations prepared for the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction

“Research, student listening, and expert consultation has led us to an immodest
conclusion: mandatory reporting needs to change dramatically to align with best practice in trauma-informed and survivor-centered care and to align with the self-defined needs of Washington students.”

We hope that this document will be a guide to analyze whether proposed reforms to family policing further entrench the family policing system or move us closer to the abolition of family policing. The questions we ask are a reflection of the world we want to build—one without family policing and one where children are safer.⁠

An overview of mandatory reporting history, practices and impacts from New York state-based social workers.

Peer-reviewed study documenting the impacts of the child protective system.

This article addresses social work’s place in the movement to “defund the police” and argues that social work’s collaboration with police and use of policing constitutes carceral social work. In defining carceral social work, this article specifies the ways in which coercive and punitive practices are used to manage Black, Indigenous, other people of color, and poor communities across four social work arenas – gender-based violence, child welfare, schools, and health and mental health.

This convergent mixed methods study of 2462 survivors surveyed through the National Domestic Violence Hotline explores how MR laws impact survivors’ help-seeking, the outcomes of their help-seeking, and whether their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation influenced their experiences.

A guide and resource list
developed by graduate students at the
University of Ilinois Chicago Jane Addams College of Social Work

Article from the Journal of Public Child Welfare published January 7, 2024

In the Spring of 2023 a group of organizers came together to explore the intersections of mandatory reporting, education and anti-blackness. From that conversation the resource Survival Until Revolution: Mandatory Reporting, Anti-Blackness and Education, was born.

In These Times Article by Roxanna Asgarian
For decades, reformers have tried to fix our broken child protective services system. Is abolishing it an idea whose time has come?

En español aquí

by Eli Hager, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

An excerpt from Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World​, by Dorothy E. Roberts.

Only 1 in 3 investigations prompted by teacher calls found any evidence of maltreatment. But even when a case is dismissed, “it doesn’t stop the PTSD”

By Asher Lehrer-Small

Article from the Imprint by Michael Fitzgerald

Teachers Rethinking Mandated Reporting by Erica Meiners and Charity Tolliver

Centering a Black mother’s five-year long ordeal with New York City’s family policing system, we examine the carceral roots of CPS and its destructive impacts on Black families. We call for abolishing the CPS family policing system; diversion of the billions invested in the foster industry to investment in quality-of-life resources de-linked from so-called “child protection”; and monetary reparations for generations of CPS violence against Black families.

NPR story by Kristin Jones

Presentation of Richard Wexler, Executive Director, National Coalition for Child Protection Reform-
Getting to the Root: Unpacking and Dismantling the Family Policing System
A virtual event sponsored by the National Association for Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books, March 2, 2023

By Mical Raz / Made by History
January 31, 2024

By Miriam Itzkowitz and Katie Olson

By Laura M. Schwab-Reese, Karen Albright, and Richard D. Krugman

Although mandatory reporting has grown substantially in scope and geographical coverage, there is limited empirical evidence to support its effectiveness in preventing harm to children. In the absence of rigorous evaluations, comparing the perspectives of individuals who work in systems with and without mandatory reporting provides important insights.

The purpose of this analysis was to compare perspectives of frontline workers, administrators, and experts in child abuse and neglect in a system with mandatory reporting (Colorado, United States) and one without mandatory reporting (The Netherlands).