Ongoing Research: Clergy-Perpetrated Abuse in the Orthodox Church 

Unpublished: New data acquisition to study clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse in the Orthodox Church. 

 

We employed ChatGPT to aid us in generating key search terms in order to facilitate finding online media news stories concerning clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse in the Orthodox Church. Each published news article was read to extract key data (e.g., accused clergy, victim count, adult or male vs. female) to generate the summary plots below. 

 

Our preliminary search resulted in cases in the media primarily between 2002 – present and involving 738 victims of clergy sexual abuse and 196 accused clergy. However, these numbers are greatly underestimated since our data analysis is limited to only media stories found online. 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. In the United States, these data demonstrated that the majority of clergy abuse cases were within Greek Orthodox Church of America under the care of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (see data in pie charts stratified by jurisdiction). 

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When the data were split by child vs. adult clergy abuse, 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. There are two possibilities for this: (1) females are more likely to speak up about the abuse compared to males or (2) females might actually be the majority getting sexually abused by clergy across the various Orthodox churches. 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. 

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The graphs below summarize these results. 

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