Child sexual abuse in the catholic church: A scoping review of characteristics, prevalence, and explanatory factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This scoping review examines the academic literature on child sexual abuse (CSA) within the Catholic Church. Although clerical CSA has received significant global attention through media reports and public inquiries, scholarly research remains fragmented across disciplines and regions. This review synthesizes 50 peer-reviewed articles published between 1985 and 2023. Its goals are to trace the evolution of academic interest, identify dominant research themes, and analyze the disciplinary and methodological characteristics of existing studies. Findings indicate a noticeable increase in publications following major scandals in the early 2000s, particularly in North America, Australia, and Western Europe. The literature is dominated by legal, historical, and psychological approaches, with growing attention to victims' experiences and institutional responses. However, key gaps persist—especially regarding international comparisons, the evaluation of prevention policies, and the inclusion of survivor perspectives from non-Western settings. Quantitative and mixed-methods research remains limited, restricting the development of generalizable insights. This review highlights the need for more interdisciplinary and empirically grounded work, incorporating criminological, sociological, and public health perspectives. By providing a comprehensive synthesis of current academic knowledge, it helps define future research priorities and encourages more systematic, inclusive, and globally informed approaches to institutional CSA in religious contexts. • First scoping review of empirical studies on clerical CSA worldwide • Reviews victim, offender, and abuse characteristics in Catholic contexts • Compares prevalence estimates and methodological approaches • Examines organizational and cultural factors enabling CSA • Identifies gaps and priorities for future prevention research
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".