language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-10-12

Indiana — duty to report child abuse or neglect (IC 31-33-5)

Indiana's mandated-reporting chapter. It puts the duty on every individual with reason to believe a child is a victim of abuse or neglect (IC 31-33-5-1), and sets out what a member of a school's staff must do: report directly to the department of child services or a law enforcement agency, and then tell the person in charge.

Applicability to EdTech

What the chapter says about where a safeguarding alert about a pupil ends up, and who acts on it:

• The staff member reports to the authorities, not to an internal designee. An individual required to report "in the individual's capacity as a member of the staff of a public or private institution, school, facility, organization, or agency" "shall immediately make a report to: (1) the department; or (2) the appropriate law enforcement agency" (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-2-a), and "does not have discretion to decide not to report known or suspected child abuse or neglect, unless a report has already been made and documented by the individual in charge under subsection (d)". Section 4 repeats the duty to make "an oral or written report" immediately to the department or the appropriate law enforcement agency (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-4-a).
• Telling the school's lead comes after the report. "After making the report", the reporter "shall notify the individual in charge of the institution, school, facility, organization, or agency or the designated agent of the individual in charge … that the report was made" (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-2-d). The statute's internal contact is therefore "the individual in charge" or that person's "designated agent"; it names no other role.
• Delegation is narrow, and must be in writing. The duty "may not" be delegated unless the person delegated to "is part of the child's care team and has personally been involved in the child's care" and the notification "is in writing" (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-2-b). That person must "Record in writing" who notified them and when, and when they reported (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-2-c-1).
• Passing a concern to someone else does not discharge it. The chapter "does not relieve an individual of the obligation to report on the individual's own behalf, unless a report has already been made to the best of the individual's belief" (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-3), and a "public or nonpublic school, school corporation" "may not establish any policy that restricts or delays the duty of an employee or individual to report under this chapter" (DUTY-TO-REPORT.md#section-31-33-5-5-b).

The chapter says nothing about deputies or availability. Its only record-keeping provisions are those of a delegated reporter (section 2(c)).

Contents

Scope note: only chapter 5 of IC 31-33 is extracted; the article's other chapters are not.

Licence

The corpus reproduces IC 31-33-5-1 to 31-33-5-5 verbatim from the Indiana General Assembly's Indiana Code 2026 chapter PDF, with each section's "As added by / Amended by" credit and the bracketed recodification notes.

Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It applied the doctrine to an arm of the legislature as well as to legislators: "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection."

The chapter PDF carries no copyright notice or terms (read 2026-10-12). The site's HTML at iga.in.gov is a JavaScript application, so no site terms of use could be read; that does not affect the statute text, which the General Assembly enacts.

Conditions: none attach to the statute text. The corpus nonetheless names the official source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Related

• Indiana student records — IC 20-33-7, the records a school holds
• Title IX regulations — the federal Title IX Coordinator, for sex-based harassment

Sources

• Indiana Code 2026 — Title 31, Article 33, Chapter 5 (PDF) — archived copy: sources/IC-31-33-5-2026.pdf (retrieved 2026-10-12)