Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner? In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening…

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