After a third consecutive year of raw, emotional debate over religious freedom and child safety, the Washington Legislature has passed one of the nation’s toughest laws requiring clergy to report suspected child abuse or neglect.
Senate Bill 5375, sponsored by Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, passed the House 64-31 on Friday, April 11. It now heads to Gov. Bob Ferguson, who must sign it for it to become law.
The bill makes clergy members mandatory reporters of child abuse or neglect and does not include an exemption for information shared in a confessional. Currently, as InvestigateWest has previously reported, Washington is one of the few states that does not require clergy to report suspected child abuse.
Frame, a survivor of child sexual abuse, hopes the bill will prevent religious institutions from hiding abuse. She said her own abuse only stopped once she told a teacher, a mandatory reporter.
“Children need trusted adults,” Frame said on the Senate floor in February. “They need to know that if they tell somebody they’re being abused, like I told my teacher in the fifth grade that I was being abused, that they can trust that that person will make it stop.”
Efforts to make clergy mandatory reporters in Washington began more than 20 years ago, spurred by national revelations of abuse within the Catholic Church. Frame reintroduced the idea in 2023 after reading InvestigateWest’s investigation of child sexual abuse by Jehovah’s Witnesses and the loophole in state law allowing clergy to hide such allegations.
Most states list clergy as mandatory reporters of child abuse or neglect, but many make an exception to the rule if the allegations are learned in a confessional setting. Washington’s bill contains no such carveout: Clergy would be required to report abuse regardless of how they learned of it. However, they would not be compelled to testify in court about confessional communications.
When lawmakers debated the issue two years ago, the exemption for confessions became a sticking point. Catholic lobbyists, citing religious freedom and the sanctity of confession, opposed any version of the bill that would require priests to report information shared in that context.
In 2023, they successfully lobbied against a version of the bill that would have only required priests to warn authorities if a child was in danger — without disclosing specifics.
Another bill in 2024 kept the loophole for confessions fully intact, but some Democratic lawmakers felt it was too much of a compromise, especially as new sexual abuse allegations against the Catholic Church emerged in Washington. In May, then Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced the office was investigating three Washington dioceses for covering up child sexual assault.
“Quite frankly, it made it hard for me at a personal level to stomach any argument about religious freedom being more important than preventing the abuse, including sexual abuse, of children,” Frame said in January.
This year, Frame made it clear from the outset that she wasn’t willing to budge on the exemption. The Catholic Church again opposed the measure, but a group of Catholics and former Jehovah’s Witnesses coalesced to provide testimony from victims who were against any loophole allowing religious leaders to hide abuse. Former Jehovah’s Witnesses noted that their denomination defines confession more broadly than the Catholic Church, further complicating any potential exemption.
In the House vote last week, opposition came primarily from Republicans, some of whom had supported previous versions that maintained confession exemptions. Stephanie Barnard, R-Pasco, said she no longer supported making clergy mandatory reporters after reading a ProPublica investigation that found mandatory reporting laws in Pennsylvania led to low-income families being targeted for unsubstantiated reports.
Other lawmakers raised concerns about religious liberty or questioned the law’s effectiveness in protecting children.
Frame said in an interview that she’d be open to having a conversation about a more “trauma-informed approach to mandatory reporting overall,” but she considers it a separate issue from the question of whether clergy should be included.
“That is not an argument to exclude a community of mandatory reporters,” Frame said.
She credited survivors who testified over the years for helping the bill succeed.
“It took three years on my part and it’s been a fight in the making for 20. And I think it was worth the wait because we got the best possible version of it.”
InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.
