Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Research cluster

Sri Lankan monastic ordination and temple-residency cases

Adjudicated Sri Lankan cases in which a child was placed in a Buddhist temple to be ordained as a novice, or was resident there under a chief incumbent's care, and was abused by the monk holding that authority. The recurring mechanism is specific: families — the scholarship emphasises poorer families in particular — hand a boy into monastic custody, and the monk's religious standing is what makes both the placement and the child's continued silence possible. Scholarly work on child ordination in Sri Lankan Theravada describes systemic barriers to disclosure and institutional silence around this pattern; the cluster records only the cases that reached an adjudicated outcome, which is a floor on the pattern, not its measure. The cluster is an indexing category, not an organization, and implies no coordination, shared doctrine or collective culpability among those recorded.

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