Documentary record Bound by Fear

Support

Every record here cost something to get.

This archive documents 1,020 cases in which spiritual authority was the instrument of harm — and 95% of them are criminal convictions, not allegations. That standard is the whole point, and it is expensive to hold: it means buying court records, paying translators, and getting past paywalls one jurisdiction at a time.

What a contribution pays for

$15

Pulls a court record

Most US federal dockets bill per page. A single opinion, with its appellate history, is roughly this.

Not yet open

Most common

$40

Certifies a disputed translation

Machine translation reads most judgments here and is used routinely. It cannot be cited when a conviction turns on a contested term, and it cannot be relied on for the languages where it is weakest. This pays a human translator where the record has to hold.

Not yet open

$120

Opens a blocked archive

Paywalled newspaper morgues and national court databases that publish decisions only behind a subscription.

Not yet open

Any

Choose your own

Any amount, one time or monthly.

Not yet open

Giving is not open yet — no payment processor is connected, and these controls are inactive by design rather than broken. If you want to support the work in the meantime, sending a documented case is worth more than money. Submit a case.

What your contribution funds

The long-term aim is a versioned public dataset with field-level citations, documented inclusion decisions and downloadable releases. Here are the milestones.

  1. Milestone 01 — reached July 2026

    1,000 / 1020 core records held

    A stable schema, published codebook and exploratory releases with explicit coverage limits. Every core record passed the published criterion; records naming unconvicted individuals were moved out of the core count before the threshold was declared.

  2. Milestone 02

    5,000

    The first analysis-ready release, subject to coverage and data-quality review.

  3. Milestone 03

    20,000-30,000

    A basis for carefully controlled cross-national and multilevel analysis.

  4. Stretch goal

    50,000-100,000

    Long-tail analysis and full on-site interactive exploration, with documented version history.

Where it goes

  • Court-record retrieval fees, which are charged per document in most jurisdictions.
  • Human translation where machine translation is not good enough — contested legal terms a record turns on, and the languages where automated output is least reliable. Machine translation does the routine reading and is why the archive reaches as many jurisdictions as it does.
  • Subscription access to paywalled legal databases and newspaper archives.
  • Hosting, and the engineering time to keep the archive standing and searchable.

Read this before you give

This is not a registered charity, and your contribution is not tax-deductible. Bound by Fear is an independent project, not a 501(c)(3) and not a fiscally sponsored one. Money given here supports the work directly. No part of it is a charitable donation for tax purposes, and you should not treat it as one.

Nothing here is a service for survivors. This is an archive, not a helpline, a legal service, or a counselling provider. If you need support, the organisations listed on the About page exist to provide it and are better placed than we are.

Funding does not influence the record. No contribution buys the inclusion, exclusion, framing or removal of any case. The criterion and the evidence tiers are published in full on the Method page, including the archive's known gaps and where it could be wrong.

Convictions
95%
Sourced citations
2,198
Countries
167
Years covered
1819–2026