Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ran from 2013 to 2017 and produced, in December 2017, one of the largest public inquiries into institutional child abuse ever conducted anywhere: 17 volumes of findings and 3 further volumes of recommendations, examining religious and secular institutions side by side rather than singling out any one tradition.
Its Catholic Church findings addressed the same reassignment and concealment pattern documented in the United States, Ireland and later Pennsylvania, and went further than most prior inquiries in its recommendations, suggesting dioceses consider voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy and calling for mandatory reporting laws that admit no exemption for information disclosed in religious confession.
Its Jehovah's Witnesses findings are among the most detailed public record that organisation has ever had examined by an outside authority. The commission obtained the organisation's own internal case files, which recorded allegations of child sexual abuse against 1,006 members going back decades, with no corresponding pattern of reporting those allegations to police. The commission examined the organisation's internal "two witness rule," under which an accusation is not acted upon internally unless corroborated by a second witness, a standard the commission found effectively shielded abusers whose crimes by nature have no witnesses, and it recommended the organisation abandon that rule for handling abuse specifically. By placing two different religious bodies' institutional failures in the same public record using the same evidentiary standard, the commission's report is one of the few sources that lets the pattern be compared across traditions rather than assumed to be unique to one.