While working as a resident in a Bronx medical clinic a few years ago, Isuree Katugampala discovered how sharing concerns about a patient’s safety with her supervisor could lead to dire and unintended consequences.
The mother of a toddler had confessed that, on occasion, her husband’s jealousy escalated to hitting her.
The mother said the violence had never been directed at her child and that she could go stay with a cousin in an emergency.
Katugampala encouraged her to work with a social worker to apply for food benefits so that she could become more self-sufficient and discussed other support that could help mom lay the groundwork to leave her relationship.
“I talked to the patient for a long time. She just wanted a little more time before she was ready to leave,” Katugampala recalled. They agreed to speak again in a few weeks.
Next Katugampala went to her attending physician to seek advice, but instead of counseling her, the physician went directly to the clinic social worker. By the time Katugampala returned to the examination room, the social worker — guided by her understanding of state laws that obligate certain professionals to report suspected child abuse or maltreatment — had called New York state’s child abuse hotline.
“Mom was visibly shaken,” Katugampala recalled. “And I was so heartbroken. I had worked hard on building trust. Now I had to tell her what would come next.”
Child protective workers would ask both parents probing questions and interrogate neighbors, searching for evidence of parental wrongdoing. Not least, there was the possibility that her child would be taken from her. Unspoken was the fact that her husband would soon learn that his wife had talked about her abuse at his hands.
Katugampala recalled how scared the mother looked. In the coming weeks, she would also discover that the trust she had worked to build was permanently broken.
“I set up a follow-up appointment,” Katugampala said, “but she didn’t show up. I called her, but she didn’t answer.”
She never saw the family again.
Relentless Rise in Reports
State mandated reporting laws date back to the the 1960s, when children’s advocates argued that professionals often ignored signs of child abuse and neglect.
The new laws required doctors, teachers, social workers and others to immediately report any “reasonable suspicion” of child maltreatment by a parent or caregiver to a state hotline. In order to override misgivings, what constituted abuse, neglect, reasonable suspicion and a parent’s minimum degree of care were left intentionally vague.
State law, for example, says that a child can be considered neglected if their condition is impaired or in danger of becoming impaired if the child has been left without “proper supervision or guardianship.” But what constitutes proper supervision is left completely undefined. When can an older sibling care for their younger sibling? Can a child ride the subway alone and at what age? The law has nothing to say to guide mandated reporters.
The laws, however, are quite firm about the penalties for failing to report, including potential loss of professional licenses, fines and even criminal charges.
Over time, these mandates created a relentless rise in the number of reports, embroiling millions of families.
Parent advocates protest against ACS in Lower Manhattan, Oct. 21, 2021. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
In 1974, when Congress passed the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act requiring states to establish mandated reporting laws in order to be eligible to receive federal funding for child welfare, some 60,000 reports were made each year nationwide.
By 1980, that number had grown to more than 1 million. Reports increased to 2 million and then 3 million over the next two decades. In 2019, there were 4.4 million reports nationwide.
Here in New York City, mandated reporting laws result in more than 60,000 calls a year
When a hotline operator determines that a call merits further attention, which happens in about 75% of cases statewide, investigations of families must follow.
But only one in five calls in New York City in 2023 resulted in a finding of child abuse and neglect, according to a review by the NYC Family Policy Project.
Educators, medical professionals and social workers have become increasingly vocal in saying that too many families, particularly Black and brown families, are needlessly subjected to child welfare investigations that often don’t leave children safer. In many instances, they say, the investigations drive parents and children away from seeking the help they need.
Resistance to Reporting Grows
In response to the mounting calls to rein in unnecessary reporting, New York state this April required all mandated reporters to complete an updated online training that includes warnings to check their implicit and explicit biases.
But the new training, critics say, does little to address the systemic pressures on mandated reporters, especially the expectation that reports be made immediately, the lack of clarity around what should be reported and when, and the threat that those who don’t report may pay a steep price.
Last year, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, acknowledged that the problem is bigger than any individual reporter, urging a “whole government approach” to change the “culture of reporting” in testimony to the state Assembly Committee on Children and Families.
Administration for Children’s Services commissioner Jess Dannhauser testifies at a City Council hearing, April 24, 2023. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
“ACS has been saying for decades…when in doubt, call us. And so we’re trying to say no, it’s different now,” Dannhauser testified, in an extraordinary critique from a child welfare commissioner.
Now the chair of that committee, Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi (D-Queens), has introduced a bill in the state legislature that would eliminate criminal and civil penalties on mandated reporters who fail to make a call.
The proposed law is the latest breakthrough for a small group of activist mandated reporters who see their resistance to current policies as righteous civil disobedience, in a system where Black children in New York City are seven times more likely to be the subject of investigations than white children and Latino children are five times as likely.
At two hearings leading up to the bill, activists went public with their objections, some openly stating that they are prepared to refuse to report families in some common situations.
Erinma Ukoha, a high-risk OB-GYN working in Manhattan, said at the first hearing in September 2023, that she did not believe she would need to report a parent who could not or would not stop using drugs. Ukoha explained in a later interview with THE CITY that she believes a reasonable interpretation of the law allows for her to work with substance-using parents to create safety over time, rather than immediately report them.
“I thought it was important to push back against the narrative that a drug test is a parenting test,” Ukoha said. “I think it’s clear that what we have in place right now isn’t working and that mandated reporting goes against our duty to our patients to do no harm,” she testified.
OB-GYN Erinma Ukoha treats women with at-risk pregnancies, March 14, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Before coming to New York, Ukoha received training at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital in a highly regarded program providing care to opioid-using pregnant women. When there was a question of child safety, the hospital held a “Pediatric Care Coordination Timeout” during which staff came together to share perspectives alongside outside providers who often knew the patient better.
“We’d talk about the patient’s strengths, what resources they had, what resources we could provide,” said Ukoha in an interview with THE CITY. “That process allowed us to be more critical of our own biases, more collaborative and more creative.”
For decades, by contrast, the idea that children could only be kept safe if any suspicions of child harm were reported to the state immediately remained sacrosanct, while the kind of creative thinking that Ukoha describes was considered dangerous. Now public officials have begun to say that that mindset — and the public policies that enforce it — need to change.
A Culture of Fear
Mandated reporters who spoke with THE CITY said that throughout their careers, they were routinely warned that not reporting a parent could lead to the loss of their professional license or worse, adding that that culture of fear drives many professionals working with children to report parents, even when they have misgivings about the impact that their call might have on a family.
“Doctors, social workers, teachers often have crippling debt and cannot afford to lose their license,” said Matthew Holm, a pediatrician working in the Bronx. “Even if loss of licensure happens only one time, there’s a huge amount of fear.”
Some reporters acknowledged that at times, the threat of a call to the hotline had been helpful in getting parents to make changes. As professionals on the frontlines, they said, they know that some children do need to be protected from their parents.
What they don’t believe is that it helps children for the professionals who know them best to be forced to defer their judgment to hotline operators or investigators, some fresh out of college, who approach the issue from a prosecutorial, evidence-gathering position. That evidence is collected to provide the backbone of a potential case put before a family court judge to justify a request to remove a child from their family and put them in foster care or put the family under court supervision.
Critics say that this approach is both traumatizing and detrimental to problem-solving for families that are struggling with issues such as mental health, family conflict, lack of a social safety net, stressors related to poverty, school truancy and the like.
Activists also describe a culture of fear of liability that erodes trust among colleagues and often leaves them unable to collaborate effectively when faced with difficult situations. Some said that they sometimes did not share concerns about children’s safety with supervisors for fear of being pushed into making a report they didn’t believe was the best way to protect the child.
In recent years, questioning the child welfare reporting machine has moved from the margins to the mainstream. During the COVID pandemic, episodes such as parents being reported to the hotline for educational neglect when their children had not received electronic devices to sign into remote learning highlighted the harm done to families in the name of keeping kids safe.
The American Federation of Teachers union, with 1.8 million members, has recently made mandatory reporting reform a focus. In January, it released the findings of a survey of more than 1,000 school staff nationwide, titled “Nobody Wins,” declaring: “Reporting is not an effective intervention. It relies on educators’ fear of professional reprisal. Mandatory reporting fundamentally interferes with effective family engagement by driving away the families who most need help and can even deter students from disclosing abuse or attending school.”
Frivolous reports can also terrorize families. One doctor interviewed by THE CITY described an incident in which a patient’s mother was reported by a teacher, who had mistaken a rash for a bruise. That led to investigators strip-searching the child’s body and aggressively questioning the mother in front of her child, leaving the mother in tears.
Those reports have a particularly widespread effect on families of color. One-third of all children and half of all Black children nationwide will at some point be the subject of a child protective investigation. In 50 predominantly Black and Latino zip codes in New York City, according to a report by the NYC Family Policy Project, one in 10 children experience an investigation in any given year. In Brownsville, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City, it’s one in five.
Yet this dragnet, with a focus on children who are enrolled in school and go to medical appointments, fails to detect serious abuse that endangers children’s lives. Jahmeik Modlin, who was just 19 pounds when he died at age four last year, was not previously on the radar of the Administration for Children’s Services, nor were three surviving siblings who, like their brother, had been deprived of food, according to prosecutors who filed criminal charges against his parents.
The children were not going to school, and none had been to the doctor in more than two years, according to prosecutors. Jahmeik’s parents have pleaded not guilty to murder charges, which are still pending.
‘Soft Policing’
In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Briana Taylor in 2020, a listserv of social workers began discussing what they could do about the harms of mandated reporting.
Concerned about their own “soft policing” role, they began to educate themselves about what happens after they make a report. “A lot of us didn’t know that an investigator can come at 3 in the morning, strip search babies, or walk into a home without telling people their rights,” said Leah Plasse, a school-based social worker.
That June, Plasse co-founded Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting, which today has an email list of 350 people nationwide and an Instagram reach of over 1,500. The organization created an alternative training that guides mandated reporters to think critically about making a report. Their primary work focuses on supporting like-minded professionals who need a place to share their struggles.
“People feel really stuck,” Plasse said. “They want to help families in very difficult situations but there are so few options and resources. It’s like running up against a wall. We can do all this work. But at some point we’re told that we don’t know enough, and our only option is to report.”
Such discussions have since turned public and are pushing change. Opening his most recent in a series of state Assembly hearings leading up to the reform bill last fall, Hevesi noted that the criminal and civil penalties were introduced at a time when the government was trying to convince people to make reports. “Now it’s the opposite,” he said.
Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi (D-Queens) chairs a hearing in Lower Manhattan on children’s services, Oct. 21, 2021. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Testimony urged new strategies the state could use to move fewer reports forward to investigation, including giving the city the authority to close baseless investigations after 24 hours rather than being forced to keep them open for the standard 60 days, and providing decision trees to help guide mandated reporters to aid a family and to determine when it may be permissible to forego calling in a report.
With chronic school absenteeism now endemic following COVID-era school shutdowns and remote learning, testimony also questioned the benefits of making hotline calls reporting parental neglect in response.
Nora McCarthy, co-founder of the NYC Family Policy Project, testified that Texas and California are among states where “issues of school attendance are not ignored but they’re handled by the schools,” where undiagnosed learning issues, bullying or anxiety may be at play.”
“That’s not always a preventive service case for a parent which treats the parent as a perpetrator.” McCarthy noted that in New York City, almost 90% of neglect-only cases that involved educational neglect in 2023 — or 8,000 cases total — were ultimately not substantiated. When school staff are concerned that absenteeism may be a sign of more serious abuse or neglect, McCarthy stressed, they would still have the option to call in a report.
While most of the reporters interviewed for this article argued that their decision to support a family rather than report them fell within a reasonable interpretation of mandated reporting laws, a few also confessed that they had chosen not to make a report to the state even when that clearly violated the law and put their own careers at risk.
One said she felt lucky to work with teens because it makes it easier for her to honor their autonomy in finding their own best solutions when they experience physical, sexual or emotional abuse at home. If a teen she worked with wanted to file a criminal charge or have her make a report to Child Protective Services, she said, she would support them.
But if they want to figure out a way to stay safe that involves no government intervention, such as moving in with a friend or relative, she respects that, too, because they are the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences.
‘I Believe That It Should Be Abolished’
At Hevesi’s first hearing on mandated reporting in 2023, Megha Sardana, a representative from Safe Horizon, the largest victim services organization in the country, testified that she and many of her colleagues experience the mandate to report as a barrier to trust that “prevents us from really providing that support and access to healing for families.”
“We have staff who describe the wounds that they experience as mandated reporters as moral injury and that they carry these stories with them for years and even decades later and are haunted by the calls that they have made to the SCR,” she added.
During the question-and-answer period, Sardana felt so strongly that she went rogue, veering from Safe Horizons’ official policies to state: “If I’m answering as an individual rather than as a representative of Safe Horizon, I don’t think mandated reporting can be reformed. I believe that it should be abolished.”
Safe Horizon director Megha Sardana testifies at an Assembly child welfare hearing chaired by member Andrew Hevesi, Sept. 27, 2023. Credit: Screengrab via New York State Assembly
She added that other Safe Horizon employees had discussed asking for an exemption from mandated reporting from the state for people working with domestic violence victims — a request that top Safe Horizon leadership made clear in an interview with THE CITY they were not making at this time.
Safe Horizon runs both the city’s domestic abuse hotline and its child advocacy centers, where children who may be victims of sexual and severe physical abuse are interviewed by detectives, pediatricians and child protective investigators. Safe Horizon workers therefore regularly face Solomonic decisions about the best ways to keep victims safe.
Half of people seeking domestic violence services said in a recent study of over 3,600 respondents that reports to Child Protective Services made their situation “much worse,” including an increase in violence against them, while in roughly half of cases in which there is intimate partner violence, children are also victims of abuse.
In an interview with THE CITY, Safe Horizon’s CEO and deputy CEO discussed how the organization has tried to address over-reporting. When Safe Horizon staff decide that a report is required, the organization encourages workers to make those reports sitting alongside a parent whenever possible, giving the parent the opportunity to speak as well, and making sure that the hotline operator on the other end knows a parent’s strengths and all the ways she may be working with Safe Horizon to create safety for her children.
They aim their concerns at the perpetrator, not at the victims of violence, who historically have too often been scapegoated by Child Protective Services, they say. Safe Horizon also encourages teamwork in deciding whether a report is needed, so that the burden does not fall on an individual worker.
On the day of her testimony, however, Sardana clearly wondered if these measures went far enough.
“Too many of the victims and survivors that we serve,” she testified, “and too many of our colleagues and loved ones have had encounters with CPS that are dehumanizing. We know that these experiences are a profound barrier to safety and healing.”
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