Sri Lanka Buddhist Monastic Abuse Complaint Data, 2023 to 2026

Between 1 May 2023 and 1 May 2026, members of the public and of the clergy itself brought complaints against 285 different Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, according to data reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) from the country's National Child Protection Authority (NCPA). More than seventy percent of the complaints involved allegations of a sexual offense. Of the 285 monks named, the NCPA referred 27 for criminal charges; the agency told OCCRP it does not keep data on how many of those referrals led to a conviction.

The NCPA's own chairperson told OCCRP that cases were rising, and the agency's legal officer described having to press local police repeatedly to act on complaints, in one case saying the agency had to, in the officer's own words, take a stick and chase the police before an arrest was made. OCCRP's reporting, published 28 May 2026 by journalist Saroj Pathirana, also noted that cultural deference toward monks discourages much of Sri Lanka's own press from covering these cases at all.

This entry records the complaint and referral figures themselves, as reported by a government child protection agency, not a finding of guilt against any individual. Two convictions from within this same three-year window, of Uduwila Sujatha and of Mulleriyawa Wimalatissa, are recorded as their own separate entries on this atlas; no other individual named only in a pending complaint or an unresolved charge is named here.