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.