Abuse Inquiries and Response Policies

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The formal investigation of institutional child sexual abuse is a recent development, largely dating from the early twenty first century, and it grew out of journalism before it became a matter of criminal and civil law. The Boston Globe's Spotlight team's 2002 investigation into the Archdiocese of Boston's decades of transferring accused priests rather than removing them is widely credited with prompting the first wave of formal legal response, since it showed investigators what a subpoena could later confirm in full: that abuse allegations had been documented internally for decades and had not been acted on.

The inquiries that followed take several different legal forms, and the form shapes what an inquiry can find. A grand jury, such as Pennsylvania's 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, has subpoena power and can compel testimony and the production of internal records under threat of prosecution, but its report is bound by the rules of the criminal process that produced it. A government commissioned Royal Commission, such as Australia's, is broader still: it can examine many institutions at once, religious and secular, hold public hearings, and issue policy recommendations with no criminal charge attached. A body commissioned report, produced at a church's own request, has access to internal archives a government investigator might never see, but its independence rests entirely on how free the commissioned researchers were to publish what they found.

The genre is not confined to any one religious body, however heavily the Catholic Church's own record dominates its public reputation. Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined the Jehovah's Witnesses' own internal case files directly, finding documented allegations against 1,006 of the organization's members and recommending it abandon the internal two witness rule it had used to weigh an allegation before deciding whether to report it externally. The same investigative method, applied to a different religious body, produced a comparably documented and comparably damning finding, which is why the category this essay introduces is built to hold any religious body's own record rather than one alone.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An abuse inquiry is the atlas's record of an investigation into institutional child sexual abuse within a religious body, distinct from the individuals it names. The type holds five kinds of record: a government commission convened with statutory investigative power, a grand jury report produced through a criminal justice process, a church-commissioned report a body retains to examine its own history, an investigative report from journalism rather than any commissioned body, and a response policy, the rule a body adopted once an inquiry's findings were in. Each entry records who commissioned it, what period and jurisdiction it covers, what it counted, and what it found, described in the inquiry's own terms.

The model most later inquiries have followed in some form is the John Jay College study the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned in 2002. Working from surveys returned by 195 dioceses, representing 98 percent of diocesan priests nationally, and 140 religious communities, researchers compiled a population based count of accused clergy and reported victims across the period 1950 to 2002, publishing the results in 2004. The shape that study set, a commissioned count over a defined span and a body of participating jurisdictions, is the shape a government commission or a church's own later report still follows, whatever authority stands behind it.