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.