Changelog
What changed, and when
This archive is a living dataset. Records are added, classifications are revised, and figures move as a result. Anything that alters what the corpus asserts, how a record is categorised, or how a published number is computed is listed here with its date.
Corrections to individual records are handled separately, through the corrections and right of reply process. If you cited a figure from this archive and need to know whether it has since moved, this page and the dataset downloads are the places to check.
Seven institutional records from the New Zealand Royal Commission; Anglican and Methodist gain their own categories
New Zealand's Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care examined eight faith groups. This archive had extracted findings for one of them. Reading the relevant chapter in full produced six further records — the Plymouth Brethren record published earlier today was the seventh — each resting on the Inquiry's own findings about the institution named. Every paragraph cited was read and quoted from the report itself before drafting.
- Gloriavale: the Inquiry found victim-blaming 'particularly evident' there, with the founder teaching that women could avoid sexual assault by their dress and conduct, and current leader Howard Temple accepting that young women may have felt assault was their fault as a result. Until 2012 the community had 'little to no dealings with police', handling allegations internally under its doctrinal text so as to lead 'transgressors to a place of repentance, and victims to a place of forgiveness'.
- Salvation Army New Zealand: 238 claims of historical abuse and neglect confirmed as at 1 August 2020, with the Salvation Army accepting the abuse in its care was wide-ranging. Women in its Bethany Homes were made to feel shamed as unwed mothers and pressured to adopt their children while denied information and medical support.
- Methodist Church of New Zealand: the Church accepted that its Conference 'failed to provide sufficient monitoring, oversight and safeguarding' of three children's homes and 'that these failures enabled abuse and neglect to occur', and took full responsibility for those abused in its care and at Wesley College Pukekohe.
- Catholic Church in New Zealand: 26 reports of alleged abuse relating to nine Society of Mary members at St Patrick's College Silverstream between 1951 and 1985, and acknowledgement of the harm at Marylands School and the Hebron Trust, where many of those in care were disabled boys, 'street kids', and tamariki and rangatahi Māori. The Inquiry identified the teaching that priests undergo an 'ontological change' at ordination as a source of the clerical power differential.
- Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia: acknowledgement that children were abused in its care, that members of the church covered up abuse, and that it lacked responsiveness to those who tried to report. Two Anglican chaplains were among the abusers at Dilworth School. An archbishop told the Inquiry that ordination changes the nature of the person — 'your being is changed' — and the Inquiry recorded that one minister's abuse had been described within the church as 'an affair'.
- Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand: a survivor's evidence that parents entrusted their daughters to the minister who abused them 'because he was a Minister', and an acknowledgement that Berhampore Home had no reporting system by which children's care could be monitored. This record is the thinnest of the seven and its scope note says so: it rests on one survivor's account and an oversight admission, not on a systemic doctrinal finding.
- Two new categories: Anglican and Episcopal, and Methodist and Wesleyan. Around 18 Anglican records and 6 Methodist ones sat in the catch-all 'Other Christian' bucket while smaller groups — Lutheran with 5 records, Mennonite with 4 — each had their own. Existing records were moved across, reducing 'Other Christian' from 164 records to 143. This is the same granularity problem the July audit fixed between traditions, appearing inside Christianity.
Effect on published figures
Institutional-event records 131 to 137; sources 2,250 to 2,256; core conviction count unchanged at 1,030. Anyone grouping this dataset by Christian denomination should re-derive those counts: Anglican and Methodist records no longer appear under 'Other Christian'. All seven New Zealand records are inquiry findings, not criminal convictions, and none names an individual as a perpetrator except where that person's separate criminal record is cross-referenced. Where an institution disputed survivor evidence, the Inquiry's record of that dispute is carried in the record rather than resolved.
Waldorf record re-cut from the primary source and upgraded to a conviction; Plymouth Brethren inquiry finding added
An earlier version of the Waldorf record published today rested on secondary summaries and was filed as an institutional finding, with the teacher's convictions hedged out as unverifiable. Reading the underlying 200-page report in full changed that: it documents both convictions from the court's own files, and finds that anthroposophical doctrine — not merely the teacher's classroom position — strengthened his authority and supplied the frame in which the assaults were normalised. The record is now a conviction record. A Plymouth Brethren Christian Church finding from the New Zealand Royal Commission was added, and a cluster now links the Sri Lankan monastic ordination cases.
- Germany, 1994: the Überlingen Waldorf record was rewritten from the IPP München report read in full, and re-filed as a criminal conviction rather than an institutional finding. Konrad Z. was convicted by the Amtsgericht Überlingen on 18 May 1994 of sexual abuse of persons entrusted to his care in conjunction with sexual abuse of children — 12 months suspended plus a DM 2,000 fine — over assaults on twin pupils in his own class. He had already been convicted in Switzerland on 20 August 1990 of indecency with a child at another Waldorf school, a conviction that became final, and had concealed those proceedings when hired. The school's board learned of it, accepted his account that it was a smear campaign after the Waldorf federation's legal adviser vouched for him as 'a completely upright person', and told neither the staff nor the parents of his class.
- That record now rests on the doctrinal mechanism the report establishes, which is what brings it inside this archive's criterion. An ordinary school-abuse case fails the operative-means test: a teacher's authority is custodial, and a religious ethos in the surrounding institution is context, not instrument. The IPP's chapter on 'ideological risk conditions' found more than that — the doctrine that a pupil's placement with a teacher is a destiny relationship rather than chance 'considerably strengthens the authority of a class teacher', whose position it describes as often constructed as untouchable in the anthroposophical context; and a parent's evidence records that Z.'s sexual assaults were framed to the school community as fate and normalised, against a karmic premise under which no suffering is undeserved.
- New Zealand, 2024: added the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care's findings on the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, from 'Whanaketia', presented to Parliament on 24 July 2024. Thirty-two survivors told the Inquiry about abuse or neglect within the church's care, against five allegations the church acknowledges. The Inquiry found the church's belief that homosexuality is inconsistent with Biblical teaching, coupled with a belief that sexuality can be managed, led to attempts to 'correct' or 'manage' survivors' sexuality through conversion practices; recorded a member's evidence that a husband has complete authority over his wife 'in all matters including marital relations'; and found the church's assemblies self-regulating with no national policies and limited external accountability.
- The Plymouth Brethren record carries the Inquiry's own record of the church's disputes rather than resolving them: the church does not accept the survivor evidence about sins being aired before other members, and while acknowledging five allegations does not necessarily accept they occurred within its care. It is an inquiry finding, not a criminal conviction, and names no individual as a perpetrator.
- Added a cluster linking the five Sri Lankan cases in which a child was placed in a Buddhist temple to be ordained, or was resident there under a chief incumbent's care, and was abused by the monk holding that authority. Scholarly work on child ordination in Sri Lankan Theravada describes systemic barriers to disclosure around this pattern; the corpus records only the cases that reached an adjudicated outcome, which is a floor on the pattern rather than a measure of it.
Effect on published figures
Core records 1,029 to 1,030 and sources 2,246 to 2,250. The Waldorf record changed slug, class and evidence tier — anyone who retrieved it earlier today under the 2025 institutional-finding slug should re-fetch it. Also rejected this cycle and recorded as such: the Quaker material in the 2021 IICSA report, which is a finding about record-keeping and audit structure rather than about abuse enabled by spiritual authority, and names no perpetrator and no identified victim.
Appellate verification is now stated on every conviction — including where it has not been done
A conviction that was later overturned does not meet this archive's criterion. Until now, a record with no appellate history meant two incompatible things — that the appeal record had been searched and nothing found, or that nobody had ever looked — and nothing in the data told them apart. Every record asserting a conviction now carries an explicit `appellateStatus`, and the proportion still unverified is published rather than left implicit. No record's evidence, sources, or proceedings changed.
- Added `appellateStatus` to every record with `evidenceStatus: "convicted"`, with six values: `affirmed` (an appellate court considered it and the conviction stood), `modified` (conviction stood, sentence altered), `none-found` (searched, no appeal located — a checked state, not an unknown one), `disturbed` (conviction quashed, vacated or reversed), `pending` (appeal filed or within the appeal window), and `unchecked` (not yet verified). Records that do not assert a conviction carry null, because the question does not arise for a charge, a civil finding, or an official finding.
- Published the current position in /data/COVERAGE.md: of 1,031 records recording a conviction, 272 (26%) have an established appellate position — 175 affirmed, 76 searched with no appeal found, 21 with the sentence modified while the conviction stood — and 739 (72%) are marked `unchecked`. Those are being worked by jurisdiction. An `unchecked` record is not a claim that no appeal exists; it is an open question, and the count of open questions is now stated so a reader can weigh it.
- Recovered 76 records' worth of appellate research that the schema had been discarding. Researchers had already searched for appeals on these and written the result into `scopeNote` — 'No later appellate disposition was located', 'Appeal status unconfirmed' — because there was nowhere else to put it. That work was invisible to any query and is now a queryable state.
- `disturbed` is never inferred automatically. Adverse language in a record's prose overwhelmingly describes something other than that record's own conviction falling: a co-defendant, a companion prosecution named for contrast, an extradition fight, or an appeal against sentence. Tested against the corpus, a keyword rule produced 38 matches that were mostly false positives — including the one Philadelphia conviction that stands, a conviction expressly upheld on appeal, a case whose murder convictions were reversed while the rape conviction it documents is live, and a case where an appeal court overturned a suspended sentence and jailed the defendant. A conviction that genuinely fell must be asserted by a person and is reviewed for removal or reclassification.
- Wrongful-conviction records are excluded from derivation. The West Memphis Three record's own appellate history states that direct appeals affirmed the convictions in 1996 — true at the time, and followed by DNA exclusion and vacatur in 2011. Reading that as a standing conviction would invert what the record documents.
- The field is exposed in the case index, the per-case API, the CSV exports and the OpenAPI schema, and is documented in `schema/CODEBOOK.md` §8. A build gate now requires an explicit value on every new conviction record; `unchecked` is permitted, so it never blocks a record being added — it only stops the backlog growing without being counted.
- Corrected an overstatement in COVERAGE.md, which said a conviction's standing was established 'as documented at build time'. It now reads 'so far as the record establishes', which is what the data supports.
Effect on published figures
No records were added, removed, or reclassified. Anyone who has filtered this dataset on `evidenceStatus: "convicted"` and treated the result as convictions that stood should now also read `appellateStatus`: 26% of those records have a verified appellate position and 72% do not yet. The unverified majority is a gap in this project's verification, not a finding about the underlying cases.
Corpus enrichment: Zen, Afro-Brazilian, Hindu and evangelical records added; four duplicate records merged
A research cycle targeting under-covered traditions added five convictions and resolved four same-case-different-slug duplicates found during deduplication. Every added record rests on an adjudicated outcome in which the victim was inside the perpetrator’s religious authority. Candidates that failed that test are listed below as rejections, so the reasoning is public rather than invisible.
- Germany, 2017: Hans Rudolf Döring (Dorin Genpo Osho), founding abbot of Bodaisan Shoboji — the first German branch temple of the Rinzai Zen Myōshinji line — and a vice-president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, was convicted at the Landgericht Augsburg of serious sexual abuse of seven boys aged four to thirteen and sentenced to seven years and nine months. Two of the boys were the sons of a widow who had sought him out for grief counselling in his capacity as a Zen teacher; another was a refugee he had taken in through church asylum.
- Scotland, 2025: Walter Masocha, self-styled archbishop and founder of Agape for All Nations Ministries International in Stirling, was convicted at the High Court in Livingston of attempted rape and of indecent and sexual assaults against two congregants, and sentenced to ten years in custody with a further four years of supervision. He told the women God had given them to him and that the contact was him casting out demons. A separate set of convictions against him from 2015 was quashed on appeal as a miscarriage of justice and forms no part of this record.
- Brazil, Planaltina (Distrito Federal): a terreiro leader was sentenced to nine years, seven months and six days for the rape of a girl who was thirteen at the time and who attended the religious centre with her parents, themselves members. The sentencing court expressly found that he exploited the relationship of trust and the spiritual ascendancy — 'a ascendência espiritual' — that he held over her.
- Brazil, Porto Alegre: a babalorixá was convicted of sexual violation by fraud against two women who consulted his religious centre, the acts carried out as what he presented to them as ritual procedure. Recorded as a first-instance conviction that has not become final, with appeal still available.
- India, Sirsa district (Haryana), 2025: Raman Giri, priest of the Sherawali Mata temple at Ding village, was sentenced to 25 years of rigorous imprisonment under the POCSO Act, the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act for the sexual assault of a boy who had come to the temple to worship.
- Four duplicate records were merged. Deduplication before writing found four same-case-different-slug pairs already in the corpus: Gurdarshan Singh, the Maryland granthi whose 1997 guilty plea was held twice; the Sorocaba pai de santo whose sentence was raised from 136 to 175 years on appeal; Tawanda Shumba, the Gweru shrine prophet, held twice under the same magistrate, date and sentence; and Mohammed Hanif Khan, the Bradford imam, held twice for the same Bradford Crown Court sentence of 13 years with a 3-year extended licence, one copy mis-dated to 2015. In each case the fuller record was kept and any distinct source from the other was folded into it. Duplicates of this shape pass the slug-uniqueness gate because both entries are individually valid; they are found only by scanning the corpus for matching names and places.
Effect on published figures
Tracker core records moved from 1,028 to 1,029 and sources from 2,241 to 2,246, after five additions and the removal of four duplicates. Two candidates were rejected on the criterion and are recorded as such: a Muzaffarnagar temple priest convicted of assaulting a boy he had lured away with the offer of a trip, where the priesthood was not the operative means of the coercion; and a Limpopo sangoma convicted of raping a ten-year-old who was a guest in his home as his wife’s niece, where the trust exploited was domestic rather than spiritual. Searches that returned no qualifying adjudicated outcome are also recorded, so they are not repeated blind: Diamond Way and Ole Nydahl, Kalu Rinpoche organisations, Ásatrú and Heathen kindreds in the Nordic countries, Wiccan covens in the UK and Australia, and Freemason and Odd Fellows lodges.
Classification audit: accusation violence separated from practitioner traditions
An internal bias audit of the classification layer found that the tradition vocabulary mixed three different relationships into single categories, and applied coarser labels and more delegitimising language to non-Western traditions than to Christianity. No case record's evidence, sources, or proceedings changed. What changed is how records are grouped and labelled.
- Witchcraft- and sorcery-accusation killings are no longer filed under the tradition of the person who was accused. Ten records — where the victim was killed or persecuted for being accused of supernatural harm — moved to a new top-level category, 'Witchcraft- and sorcery-accusation violence'. Filed as before, a tradition filter counted these as offences by that tradition, when the tradition-identified party was the victim.
- Satanic- and ritual-abuse panic prosecutions moved out of 'Western occult' into a new category, 'False ritual-abuse accusation and miscarriage of justice'. Eleven records — including the West Memphis Three, McMartin Preschool, the San Antonio Four, Orkney, Rochdale, and Outreau — document harm done to people wrongly accused, not by practitioners.
- Every record now carries a `convictedParty` field, marking whether the convicted party held spiritual authority over the victim or not. Filtering the corpus for convictions previously returned records whose conviction ran opposite to the archive's thesis, with nothing in the data to distinguish them.
- The tradition family label 'Indigenous spiritual authority or imitation' is now 'Indigenous spiritual authority'. Pairing a living tradition with 'imitation' in one label meant every fraudulent claim to Indigenous identity incremented that tradition's count.
- 'Claimed spiritual healing or mediumship' is now 'Spiritual healing, divination, and mediumship'. The hedge 'Claimed' appeared on the predominantly non-Western bucket and on no comparable Western one.
- The tradition 'US curse-removal fraud' was retired and its records moved to 'Divination and fortune-telling services'. A tradition names what someone practised; the offence belongs in the record's type and proceedings, not in the identity axis.
- The healing category was subdivided by practice — traditional practitioners, energy and bodywork, hypnosis and trance, mediumship and divination, plant-medicine ceremony, exorcism and spirit extraction — replacing a single undifferentiated bucket that held 68 records across 29 countries. Ten Western practitioners previously filed under 'New Age' moved into these shared practice buckets, so that comparable practice now sorts together regardless of region.
- Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam gained subdivisions comparable to those Christianity already had. Christianity was resolved to ten denominational buckets while Buddhism's records — spanning Theravāda, Vajrayāna, Zen, and Western convert sanghas across sixteen countries — shared one.
- Type labels scoped to one tradition were rewritten to match actual use: 'Trafficking (juju/voodoo oath control)' is now 'Trafficking under spiritual coercion'; 'Curse-removal fraud' is now 'Fraud under spiritual pretext'; 'Initiation death' is now 'Death during ritual, initiation, or withheld care'. Each label named one tradition while the category was in use across ten or more.
- The OpenAPI specification now derives its tradition and type enumerations from the live vocabulary instead of a hand-maintained copy, and declares the new `convictedParty` field. The `convictedParty` field was also added to the case index endpoint and to the CSV exports, alongside a derived `is_authority_conviction` column. Anyone counting convictions of spiritual authorities should use that column rather than `is_convicted`, which also counts convictions of accusing mobs and records of wrongful prosecution.
Effect on published figures
Record counts per tradition changed for the categories listed above. The corpus totals — 1,283 records, 1,028 core, 2,241 sources — are unchanged, as is every record's evidence, sourcing, and proceedings history. Anyone who cited per-tradition counts before this date should re-derive them from the current dataset or the versioned API.