About the project
Spiritual authority used as coercion
Bound by Fear documents cases in which a person or institution used spiritual authority to secure compliance, silence, dependency or access. Each record states the authority relationship, documented harm and evidentiary status.
A record qualifies when an identifiable victim was subject to the perpetrator's spiritual authority and that authority materially enabled the harm or made refusal harder. The Method page publishes the full inclusion test, source hierarchy and exclusions.
The corpus covers established religions, new religious movements, healing relationships and occult groups. Records concern specific people, organizations and proceedings. They do not characterize entire traditions.
Corpus statistics
Criminal convictions
96%
1,071 of 1,117 core records. Charges, civil findings and official findings remain separately labeled.
Core records
1,117
1819–2026
Source records
2,392
Court, official, commissioned and reported sources.
Institutional events
164
Tracked outside the core incident count.
Tradition categories
24
Used for navigation, not comparison of incidence or risk.
Scale and scope
A broad estimate and a narrow record
Religious trauma survey estimate
37%
A 2023 survey of 1,581 U.S. adults estimated that religious trauma may affect as many as 37% of respondents under the study's symptom threshold. This is one self-report study of a debated, non-clinical construct. Read the study.
This documentary corpus
1,117
A narrower set of public records in which spiritual authority materially enabled documented harm. The count measures documentation under this project's rules, not prevalence.
Research basis
How the term is used here
Spiritual abuse as coercion and control
Oakley, Kinmond and Humphreys define spiritual abuse as coercion and control of one individual by another in a spiritual context. Their definition includes manipulation, enforced accountability, misuse of scripture, claims of divine position and isolation.
Oakley, Kinmond and Humphreys, Journal of Adult Protection (2018)
A safeguarding issue
The Church of England's safeguarding manual treats spiritual abuse as a form of psychological and emotional abuse, while cautioning that disagreement over belief or practice is not itself abuse.
Religious trauma is a related, broader concept
Research on religious trauma concerns a wider range of harmful experiences than this archive records. Bound by Fear uses a narrower documentary test tied to authority, coercion and established harm.
Slade et al., Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (2023)
Limits
What this corpus cannot establish
Source access, digitization, language, prosecution choices and institutional reporting shape every count. The archive overrepresents severe cases that reached public proceedings and jurisdictions with searchable records.
Counts cannot establish incidence, prevalence or comparative risk by country or tradition. A missing record means the project has not verified a qualifying public record, not that no abuse occurred.
Spiritual abuse is neither a diagnosis nor a standalone criminal offence. The crimes in these records include assault, trafficking, killing, fraud and forced labor; spiritual authority is the documented mechanism of coercion.