ABSTRACT
Indications of the incidence of clergy sexual abuse have been provided by public inquiries that have had the capacity to compel religious institutions to provide documents and records of abuse, where they have been preserved, on a large-scale basis. Understanding clergy-perpetrated abuse has largely taken two approaches – a focus on the individual perpetrator and a focus on systemic issues. The more widely experienced challenges of prosecuting historical child sexual abuse (CSA) through the criminal justice system have been experienced by survivors of clergy abuse. Survivors have often suffered years of trauma and further consequences of CSA, including broken relationships, poor educational outcomes, unstable housing, substance abuse and addiction, incarceration for criminal offending, and poor mental health. The strongest theoretical perspectives acknowledge individual characteristics and systemic factors that led to the perpetration of the clerical CSA. Clergy-perpetrated CSA has become a political issue, with survivors seeking multiple forms of justice, including civil litigation, criminal prosecution, denomination-based processes, and public inquiry.
