Who Has to Report It
ORC 2151.421 — the professions the statute names, and what immunity a good faith report carries
The children services page on this site is written for a family being investigated. This one is the other side of the same statute: the people the law obliges to make the call in the first place, and what the law gives them for making it.
Who handles this in Ohio: legal aid programs, lawyer referral and the state offices, listed in the Ohio directory.
Knowing or suspecting is the trigger, and immediately is the timing. A person the section names who is acting in an official or professional capacity and knows, or has reasonable cause to suspect, that a child under eighteen has suffered or faces a threat of abuse or neglect immediately reports that knowledge or suspicion to the public children services agency or a municipal or county peace officer in the county in which the child resides or in which the abuse or neglect is occurring or has occurred.
- An attorney; a physician, including a hospital intern or resident; a dentist; a podiatrist; a practitioner of a limited branch of medicine.
- A registered nurse, a licensed practical nurse, a visiting nurse, or another health care professional.
- A licensed psychologist, a licensed school psychologist, a speech pathologist or audiologist, a coroner.
- An administrator or employee of a child day care center, a residential camp or child day camp, or a certified child care agency or other public or private children services agency.
- A school teacher, a school employee, a school authority.
- A person engaged in social work or the practice of professional counseling, and a person rendering spiritual treatment through prayer in accordance with the tenets of a well recognized religion.
The duty attaches to the capacity rather than to the person. It is the teacher at school, the nurse on shift and the counselor in session that the section reaches, and it reaches them on a suspicion rather than on proof, which is the part most often misunderstood: the section asks for the report, not for the investigation.
Good faith participation carries immunity. A person who participates in good faith in the making of a report under the section, or in a judicial proceeding resulting from it, has immunity from any civil or criminal liability that might otherwise be incurred or imposed as a result of that participation.
Anybody at all may make a report under the section. The list is the list of people who must, and the immunity is not limited to them.
The penalty the section attaches to a failure to report, the confidentiality of the reporter's identity and its exceptions, the attorney and physician privilege provisions and their limits, the separate reporting duties for adults at risk and for hazing, which is its own page here, and what the agency does once a report is made, which is also its own page, are not covered here. Whether a particular person is inside the list, in a particular role, is a question for a licensed Ohio attorney, and the public children services agency takes the report either way.
Sources for this section (1)
- ORC 2151.421 — Reporting child abuse or neglect, and the investigation that follows
Legal information, not legal advice. Verified as of September 2026. Applying it to a particular situation is the work of a licensed Ohio attorney.