Method
How a record qualifies
A record qualifies when the cited material documents, or in a pending matter alleges, that an affected person was subject to the accused person's or institution's spiritual authority, and that authority materially enabled the reported harm or made refusal harder.
Everything on this page exists to make that sentence checkable, case by case. The test applied to every candidate record asks whether the cited material establishes or alleges that the belief system gave the accused person or institution power over the affected person. Shared affiliation or a claimed religious motive alone does not qualify.
Scope
What is excluded, and why
Exclusion is not a judgment that these things don't matter. It is a claim that they are a different phenomenon than the one this corpus tracks, and blurring them together would corrupt the criterion.
Religious persecution
The inverse category: a state or majority prosecuting, jailing, or harming people for their religious belief or practice. This corpus tests the subject's claimed spiritual authority over an affected person; persecution runs in the opposite direction and is out of scope.
Outsider-directed violence and religious terrorism
Attacks carried out in the name of a belief system against people outside it — including terrorism that uses religious imagery or rhetoric — fall outside the criterion because the affected person was not under the accused or adjudicated person's spiritual authority.
Family-only nexus
Ordinary family violence that happens to occur inside a religious household does not qualify on family membership alone. The exception: cases where doctrine or claimed spiritual authority is what enabled or compelled the specific harm — the doctrinal-coercion exception — which do qualify.
Mere affiliation
An accused or adjudicated person's membership in a religious group, or an affected person's shared faith with that person, is not sufficient on its own. The authority relationship — not shared identity — is what the criterion tests for.
The heart of the method
Evidence tiers
Every record is labeled by the strength of what supports it. The tiers are never blended into a single undifferentiated "documented" status.
Tier 1
Criminal convictions that stood
A conviction qualifies only after appeals are checked. If a conviction was overturned, vacated, or the sentence reduced to acquittal on appeal, the case does not qualify as a standing conviction — full stop. A reversed conviction never re-enters the record under this tier.
Tier 2
Official commission and inquiry findings
Findings from royal commissions, government inquiries, parliamentary reports, and UN or state anti-trafficking assessments. These are official findings, not criminal verdicts, and are labeled as such.
Tier 3
Civil findings and court-supervised settlements
Civil judgments, and settlements reached under court supervision or as part of a legal process (bankruptcy-supervised abuse settlements, for example). Labeled as civil outcomes, never conflated with criminal guilt.
Proceeding status
Charges remain charges
Active criminal charges are published only with proceeding-level attribution and allegation language. They remain distinct from convictions, civil findings and official findings. Unverified leads stay private.
Taxonomy
Record classes
Core
1,117 records
The defining class: the cited record documents, or in a pending matter alleges, that the subject held spiritual authority over the affected person and that the authority made the reported harm possible or harder to refuse. Evidence status controls what may be said about guilt.
Context
109 records
Victim-directed ritual — cases where religious imagery or ritual apparatus was turned into the instrument used against a victim, but the case sits adjacent to the core test rather than squarely inside it. Distinct from religious terrorism, which is out of scope entirely (see Excluded, below).
Institutional-event
164 records
Institutional findings — a commission report, an internal review, a pattern finding — that document an institution's structure or failure rather than a single victim's case. Shown as map annotations; excluded from the core count.
Separate register
9 records
Published historical dossiers and moral-panic records held to their own sourcing standard and excluded from the core count. Research-stage dossiers remain private. These records preserve necessary context without implying that a discredited accusation was established fact.
Candor, not confidence
Known gaps and uncertainty
Being candid about what this corpus cannot show is the point of this page, not a caveat tacked onto it. A record count without its coverage limits is a claim this archive will not make.
The record skews recent, and that is a searchability artifact
The archive covers 1819 to 2026, but recent records are easier to find. Older cases remain in paper archives, untranslated local press and court systems without searchable databases. The date range describes this corpus, not the history of the phenomenon.
The largest category reflects source access as well as the underlying record
Christian-context records are the largest group in the corpus. That distribution is shaped by searchable court decisions, public inquiries and English-language reporting. It cannot establish which tradition produces more harm.
Coverage gaps reflect access, scope and digitization
The internal coverage ledger records jurisdictions with no qualifying record, limited access or incomplete review. Court portals, publication rules and local-language indexing vary sharply. A zero is a research status, not evidence that no qualifying harm occurred.
Public proceedings capture only a fraction of abuse
The corpus begins where a victim, witness, institution or authority created a public record. Non-reporting, delayed disclosure, prosecutorial discretion and attrition between report and judgment exclude many incidents. The archive counts documented proceedings, not total harm.
Convictions are easier to find than acquittals or cases never prosecuted
Search indexes, news coverage, and appellate records concentrate on cases that were charged and won. That structurally biases any court-record-based corpus — this one included — toward the prosecuted. Non-prosecutions and acquittals are undercounted by construction, not by editorial choice.
Room for error
Corrections and source review
Sentences reduced or suspended on appeal are stated as what they are, not repeated as the headline figure from the original trial. Where an appeal changed the outcome, the current status is what the record shows.
Standing traps — specific case identifiers and dates for convictions that were later overturned — are documented internally so an overturned conviction cannot re-enter the record through a future update. This guards against the corpus contradicting itself over time; it is not a claim that no error has occurred.
The corpus also records honest empties: countries, decades, or traditions with zero qualifying records are left at zero rather than padded, and the gaps above explain why an empty cell is not evidence of an empty history.
If you find an error — a misclassified record, an overturned conviction not yet reflected, a source that no longer supports its citation — submit a correction through the encrypted corrections form. Every submission enters a private verification queue; nothing publishes automatically. The corrections page explains review, right of reply and changed-disposition handling, and the privacy notice explains analytics and intake retention.