(AUSTRALIA)
The Catholic Weekly [Archdiocese of Sydney NSW, Australia]
October 26, 2026
By Virginia Miller
Dr Virginia Miller is a research fellow at the Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. She is the author of four books and numerous articles on child sexual abuse, elder abuse, euthanasia and religious freedom.
Last year she published ‘Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence’. Michael Cook, of The Catholic Weekly, recently interviewed her about her findings.
You have analysed inquiries into child sexual abuse which were conducted in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland, England and Wales, Spain, Italy and France. Which were the best and which were the worst?
The ideal inquiry into child sexual abuse would be objective/evidence-driven, forensic in nature, free from ideological bias, and offer significant recommendations for child safety in terms of current deficiencies in the Church and other institutions of interest.
In my view none of the inquiries fully met this standard. However, whilst some of the inquiries (notably the John Jay and the Italian inquiries) are only deficient in some respects (and hence I would call them the best inquiries) other inquiries have significant defects, such as generating unreliable figures, or they have a strong ideological bias, and, in my view, their findings should not be trusted (e.g. the NZ, French, Spanish inquiries).
Interestingly, I have found that the trajectory across the years regarding the degree of unreliability is such that the more recent inquiries (excluding the ongoing Italian inquiry) are the most unreliable and sensationalistic.
Your research undermines the credibility of some claims made by these inquiries. But isn’t the moral outrage justified?
Evidence suggests that the Church has been the site of widespread child sexual abuse and failed children and their families in many instances.
Accordingly, the fundamental fact that needs to be acknowledged at the outset of this discussion is that the Catholic Church is responsible for an unacceptable level of historical child sexual abuse and moral outrage against the Church for its failings on this front are justified.
However, moral outrage must also be proportionate. For example, in terms of the allegations themselves we would expect a different degree of moral outrage in response to an allegation of rape than in response to the allegation that a student felt uncomfortable when a nun watched her swimming (both allegations are counted together as allegations of sexual abuse in the Irish inquiry).
We would also expect a lewd suggestion to a five-year-old to cause more moral outrage than a lewd suggestion to a mature 20-year-old (in the French inquiry a child is categorised as anybody under the age of 21).
Moreover, moral outrage is warranted if it can be demonstrated that bishops didn’t respond to allegations of child sexual abuse. However, most of the allegations in these inquiries were made decades after the events (in Australia 90 per cent of the allegations were made at least 10 years after the alleged events occurred) and bishops didn’t know at the time that abuse was occurring (at least as far as these delayed reports of sexual abuse are concerned).
Furthermore, the difficulty of responding to historical allegations (where there is often no corroborating evidence and an accused person who claims to be innocent), must be acknowledged. It is also important to stress that moral outrage is the appropriate response to false allegations of child sexual abuse (of which there is not an insignificant number) and the damage that is done to individuals, and the institutions they are a part of, who have false claims of child sexual abuse made against them.
So, notwithstanding that these inquiries played an important role in shedding light on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church they should not be exempt from scrutiny especially in relation to the harm they cause.
For example, the Pennsylvania inquiry was deemed to be in breach of the Investigating Grand Jury Act by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 2019, and some of its findings were ordered to be sealed permanently. Of particular concern, the Supreme Court justices argue that the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report did not protect people from the harm of unproven allegations.
Australia’s Royal Commission apparently cost about $500 million. Was it value for money compared to other inquiries?
The Australian Royal Commission was by far the most expensive inquiry.
For example, the French inquiry cost 2.6 million euros, the John Jay inquiry cost US$3 million, the Canadian inquiry cost CAD$72 million dollars, the Irish inquiry cost around 145 million euros.
We might therefore expect in terms of the criteria of intellectual depth and utility of findings that the John Jay inquiry would suffer greatly by comparison with the Australian inquiry, in particular, given that the former generated a report in two volumes and cost US$3 million (roughly equivalent to AU$4 million) while the latter generated a report in 16 volumes and cost $500 million.
However, this is not so; indeed, the John Jay inquiry is superior to the Australian inquiry in a number of important respects, notwithstanding the huge resources expended on the latter.
The figure that sticks out in the Royal Commission’s findings is that seven per cent of Catholic priests are accused paedophiles. Is that accurate? Is it still a problem?
The claim that seven per cent of Australian Catholic priests are child sexual abusers (and in some religious orders the figure was claimed to be 20 per cent) is an absolute scandal. It gives the impression that if you were to gather 100 random priests in Australia, seven of them would be child sexual abusers.
This is completely false and this falsehood needs to be set straight.
According to the Royal Commission’s own report during the period 2000-2010 (the most recent years in the report) less than ten Catholic priests (in percentage terms 0.1 per cent) in total were the subject of an allegation of abuse. Generally, from 1990 through to today there are very low numbers of contemporary reported cases of child sexual abuse. Moreover, most recent allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church concern lay church workers and not priests.
So where does the seven per cent figure come from? It is the product of a weighting methodology – the seven per cent figure is not an actual numerical fact; it is rather an estimate and we can see from the number above (0.1 per cent) that it is unreliable as an estimate.
Have safeguarding mechanisms introduced by the Catholic Church (in Australia and elsewhere) since the 1990s been effective?
In the book I argue that safeguarding mechanisms that were initiated in the Church in the 90s, and that have been refined since, have been effective in reducing child sexual abuse and the, what has been called, “crisis” of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is an historical problem.
Most media reports fail to make clear that safeguarding mechanisms and redress schemes initiated in the Catholic Church in the mid to late 90s have evidently been effective since reported incidents of child sexual abuse alleged to have been perpetrated in the Catholic Church in recent years are very low. Generally, from 1990 to today there are very low numbers of reported cases that relate to contemporary cases of child sexual abuse.
The general pattern of abuse in all of the inquiries is of a peak period of abuse in the 60s, 70s, or early 80s (depending on the country in question) declining, generally, in the 80s and declining sharply in the early 90s when safeguarding mechanisms were introduced in the Church.
After your inquiry into all these inquiries about the prevalence of sexual abuse amongst Catholic clergy, do they have common statistical failings? How do they estimate unreported cases?
Firstly, it is important to note that not all of the allegations relate to the clergy, generally they relate to a mix of clergy, the religious and church workers. For instance, in the Irish inquiry, which primarily focused on residential schools, some of the allegations concern gardeners and even sexual abuse by family members when the children were on holidays.
But yes, there are definitely global patterns of abuse which show that child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is, predominantly, an historical problem.
That said, some of the inquiries have speculated that there is currently a significant problem with child sexual abuse in the Church (notwithstanding that the number of current allegations are very few) when unreported cases are considered.
For example, the Royal Commission argued that the current situation in the Catholic Church in Australia, regarding child sexual abuse, when unreported cases are considered, is likely to reflect the high numbers in the 1970s. It was their view that today’s unreported cases would be reported in 30 years, given that most of the allegations made to the Royal Commission concern abuse that is alleged to have occurred decades ago.
However, this claim cannot be correct because allegations of incidents that are alleged to have occurred in the 90s (some 30 years ago) are actually very low. Moreover, given that 77 per cent of all claims of child sexual abuse made to the Catholic Church in Australia were made after the creation of a redress scheme, it would seem that the redress scheme encouraged people to make claims, disrupting patterns of reporting.
By contrast, it is my view, given the effectiveness of safeguarding mechanisms in the Church, and the growing awareness of child sexual abuse, that unreported, serious, cases of child sexual abuse are low. This is consistent with the findings of the Royal Commission that show there was a peak in reported incidents of child sexual abuse in the 1960s and the 1970s followed by a sharp decline in the mid-1980s.
Furthermore, estimated large numbers of unreported serious cases of child sexual abuse based on the “findings” of crime multipliers (in the case of the New Zealand inquiry) and surveys (in the case of the French and Spanish inquiries) have been discredited.
Concerning the NZ inquiry that used speculative crime multipliers, it was estimated that 254,000 people (mainly children) were abused in state and faith-based settings between 1950 and 2019. However, as just mentioned, this number has now been discredited, in large part, because it was expected that the projected victims would come forward during the inquiry and validate these projected figures. But they did not. Instead, only 2,300 people came forward.
A further worrying point is that these speculative figures based upon crime multipliers and surveys are reported by the inquires and the media as actual allegations.
For example, the Spanish inquiry claims that 1.13 per cent of adults in Spain (440,000 people) have been abused in religious settings. Yet, this is not true. According to the survey 1.13 per cent of the survey respondents, ie, 90 respondents, said they had been sexually abused as children in a religious environment. Indeed, the solid empirical base in relation to the survey is as follows: they conducted a survey, 8,013 responded, 1.13 per cent ie, 90, said they had been sexually abused as children in a religious environment, period.
Nearly all the reports dismissed the influence of homosexuality upon child sexual abuse. Was this justified?
All of the inquiries I analysed show a preponderance of male on male abuse – that is, child sexual abuse in the Church is overwhelmingly committed by men who abuse boys.
This finding is not limited to male priests in the Catholic Church; the figures are the same for the Anglican Communion, religious communities and for the laity. However, female on female abuse is very rare. Hence, we are talking about male homosexuality.
The proposition that male on male abuse in the Catholic Church was situational in nature (that priests abused altar boys because they had access to them and not a sexual attraction to them) put forward by the John Jay inquiry some 20 years ago has now been shown to be false.
For example, IICSA (the UK inquiry) has evidence of the pornographic content that predator monks, who only had access to boys and who were charged with child sexual abuse, were accessing on the internet. It was in many cases consistent with a male homosexual orientation.
That said, the inquiries are certainly correct to argue that a same-sex sexual orientation, in and of itself, should not be conflated with child sexual abuse.
Here I would also like to add that child sexual abuse in the broader community is predominantly male on female, and the findings in the Church are somewhat anomalous. That said, it is of concern that these fact-finding inquiries decided to dismiss these striking numbers, or to explain away this “inconvenient truth”, presumably for ideological reasons, especially given these inquiries are responsible for making recommendations for child safety in institutions.
About nine years have passed since Australia’s Royal Commission concluded its work. Looking back, what do you think of the quality of communications from the inquiries and of media coverage?
It’s important to keep in mind that the sensationalistic media reports about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are based on the executive summaries of the inquiries that the inquiries give to the media.
Indeed, the French inquiry released its report to the media before it released its final report that clarified the findings.
Certainly, these inquiries, generally, have media departments and are well-aware of the incendiary impact their media releases will have, yet they lean towards sensationalism notwithstanding the serious consequences of sensationalist reporting on child sexual abuse in the Church.
For example, media reports of unproven and dubious claims of missing children and mass graves at the residential schools in Canada led people to believe that children had been routinely murdered by church workers in Canada. The public outrage in relation to this imprudent reporting resulted in 100 churches being either vandalised or burned to the ground.
There is a lesson to be learned concerning the ease with which serious harm can be done to individuals and institutions, including the Catholic Church, as a result of false or unproven allegations, sensationalistic, misleading media reports and, more generally, a cavalier attitude to evidence-based truth-telling on the part of those advocating an otherwise worthy cause.
Indeed, the John Jay inquiry made a recommendation that the US Catholic bishops educate the public about the historical nature of the complaints given that the public that relies on news reports about the extent and nature of the abuse have the wrong impression of the findings of the inquires, e.g. many people believe there are currently large numbers of priests who are paedophiles.
However, unfortunately, we also know from the experience of the Spanish bishops, who did in fact advocate for accurate reporting in the media, that such arguments are usually interpreted by the public as defensiveness or insensitivity and not as attempts to ensure accurate reporting of what are serious allegations.
From my own experience I know that the media are generally reluctant to publish evidence-based objective reports on child sexual abuse in the Church.
We’re all still traumatised by horrific stories of abuse by some priests — even if they happened decades ago. How long will it take before society can form an impartial and balanced view of the sexual abuse crisis?
In order for society to form an impartial and balanced view of the sexual abuse crisis it must first apprise itself of the facts and of objective evidence-based accounts of the crisis. Without doing so, it might well be the case that an impartial and balanced view will never be had.
Unfortunately, Catholics need to do their own research to find out the truth because they cannot rely on mainstream media to give them an unbiased account.
I was like everybody else, shocked and sickened by the media reports of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and, therefore, undertook my own research because I needed to know the health of the institution that I was an active part of. At that stage I trusted that the inquiries’ findings and the media reports were accurate. However, they are not.
Hence, in my view the Church, perhaps unsurprisingly, is failing adequately to correct the misinformation in the media and the reputational damage that results from misinformation of the extent and nature of child sexual abuse in the Church (as opposed to the reputational damage from actual failings).
Based on some of the findings of some of these inquiries it is evident that, at times in the past, the Church prioritised its reputation over the rights and needs of victims/survivors of child sexual abuse, including their right to justice.
However, faced with massive and ongoing reputational damage, as a result of these inquiries and, in particular, the often sensationalistic and misleading media coverage of the findings of these inquiries, the Church, no doubt shocked, ashamed and, perhaps, fearful of provoking an even greater backlash, seems to have lost the will to defend its reputation against disinformation and defamation (as opposed to damning facts and justified criticism).
Yet, given the alarming trajectory of the inquiries and the damage that is being done to the Church by misinformation, the Church must respond.
Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence’ was published by Firenze University Press last year. The 260-page book is available as a free download under Creative Commons.