Family Defense Clinic achieves legislative reform of child abuse reporting in New York
When Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed the Anti-Harassment in Reporting bill into law on December 19, it marked the culmination of a four-year, coordinated effort on the part of NYU Law’s Family Defense Clinic.
The new law requires callers to New York State’s child maltreatment hotline to identify themselves when reporting alleged abuse or neglect. The identity of the caller will remain confidential, but it is no longer possible for an adult to trigger a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation anonymously. With the signing of the bill, New York becomes only the second state—Texas was the first—to ban anonymous reporting.
“These investigations are very, very invasive and disturbing to the kids,” says Professor Chris Gottlieb ’97, the director of the Family Defense Clinic. “Allowing anonymous reports was allowing people to abuse the system and call in maliciously false reports.” Anonymous reports have triggered investigations of more than 10,000 New York families annually, with 86 percent determined to be unfounded at the close of the investigation, and with more parents ultimately cleared of wrongdoing after review. The majority are families of color. An investigation by ProPublica in 2023 indicated that “the hotline had been weaponized by jealous exes, spiteful landlords, and others who endlessly called in baseless allegations.” According to ProPublica, the investigations sometimes included strip searches of children.
The passage of the bill marks the clinic’s third successful legislative impact project in recent years. In 2020, New York passed a bill reforming the procedures used by the State Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment. Two years later, Hochul signed the Parental Equity Act, which gave unwed fathers the same opportunity to maintain rights to their children that was afforded to married fathers and to mothers of any marital status; for decades, that had not been the case. The Family Defense Clinic spearheaded those legislative efforts and the most recent one in collaboration with a coalition of community activists, family defenders, and social workers advocating for change.
Gottlieb says that, while individual client defense work is still at the core of the clinic’s mission, “the clinic has expanded what we’re doing more affirmatively—through impact litigation, narrative shifting, and legislative work—as the family defense field becomes more dynamic.”
The Family Defense Clinic’s efforts to make the anti-harassment legislation a reality commenced in 2021. Over three academic years, clinic students brought together stakeholders, compiled research for legislators, and helped develop testimony to lawmakers in support of the bill. All those efforts paid off in June 2025 when both houses of the state legislature passed the bill by large margins. That decisive legislative win was followed by months of negotiation over minor amendments before the bill finally reached the governor’s desk in December.
“I think it’s fair to say we had a really effective campaign of educating the governor on this,” says Gottlieb. “They told me they had never had a bill for which they had been contacted by such a diverse set of motivated advocates and community groups. That was gratifying to hear.”
While the four-year effort to pass the Anti-Harassment in Reporting bill has crossed the finish line, the clinic continues to pursue the passage of another bill—requiring CPS investigators to notify parents and caretakers of their rights—that has also been in its sights for several years. “One lesson here,” says Gottlieb, “is that nothing happens quickly in Albany.”
