Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Volume 16: Religious Institutions

The royal commission sat for five years and examined institutions of every kind, among them schools, sporting clubs, the armed forces and out-of-home care. Volume 16 covers religious institutions and rests on three kinds of evidence: private sessions in which survivors spoke to a commissioner, thirty public case studies, and surveys of the claims and complaints that church bodies themselves had received.

The numbers need to be read with their definitions. Counts from private sessions are counts of people who chose to come forward, as they stood on 31 May 2017. The Catholic claims data cover claims that church authorities received between 1 January 1980 and 28 February 2015; that is the period given in the body of the volume and under “Other data sources” in its summary, while the summary’s section on the Catholic Church prints 31 December 2015, the end date of the Anglican data. The proportion of priests who were alleged perpetrators is a weighted average over those who ministered between 1950 and 2010. “Alleged” is the commission’s word: the data record claims, not findings of guilt. The commission says that it heard more allegations about the Catholic Church than about any other religious organisation, followed by the Anglican Church and the Salvation Army.