Ongoing Research: Clergy-Perpetrated Abuse in the Orthodox Church 

Preliminary data acquisition to study clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse in the Orthodox Church. 

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Our approach draws from media articles and court records in the public domain, using these sources as windows into how clergy sexual abuse is publicly represented, understood, contested, and the prevalence in the Orthodox world (56+ jurisdictions). 

 

Methodology:
Step 1: ChatGPT 4o was employed merely as a tool to generate effective search terms for finding Orthodox clergy abuse cases online (e.g., Orthodox church sexual abuse, Orthodox priest "affair", Orthodox deacon sexual misconduct, Orthodox church abuse lawsuit).  
 

Step 2: Every article identified online was reviewed by the authors of this study to extract the number of victims reported in the article or lawsuit. While the majority of incidents involve sexual misconduct, a few cases of extreme abuse—such as exorcism leading to death or severe emotional abuse by clergy—are also included.

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Step 3: If charges are dropped or evidence demonstrates that an allegation is false, this will be clearly indicated in the "Outcome" column of the database, and updated graphs will be generated accordingly.

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Results: The preliminary search, between 2002 - present, resulted in nearly 800 victims of clergy sexual abuse and over 200 accused clergy. However, these numbers are greatly underestimated since these data are limited to only media stories/lawsuits found online. Importantly, most victims do not report clergy sexual abuse let alone take legal action or result in a media story in the public domain. 

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Outside of the United States, results showed that the majority of clergy abuse cases were within the Russian Orthodox Church. By contrast, within the United States, data showed that the majority of clergy abuse cases were within Greek Orthodox Church of America under the care of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul (see data in pie charts stratified by jurisdiction). 

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When the clergy abuse data were split by child vs. adult, it revealed that in the case of males there were very little clergy abuse reports involving grown men. By contrast the results are almost flipped in the female case with most reports involving adult women victims. This gendered pattern of most victims of child clergy sexual abuse being little boys and most victims of adult clergy sexual abuse being adult women has been reported in other Christian denominations. Congruent with this result, the work of Pamela Copper-White (Batchelor, V. B. (Ed.), WCC 2013) demonstrated that the majority (90 - 95%) of those who are abused by clerics across various jurisdictions are adult women, not children. ​
 

The graphs below summarize these results. ​​

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(These data to be used only for educational purposes attributing credit to Prosopon Healing)