How Abuse Inquiry Entries Are Grouped

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The atlas divides its abuse inquiry entries into the five groups above by who produced the record and under what authority. A government commission is convened by a state with its own power to compel testimony and documents, the United Kingdom's Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse among them. A grand jury report is narrower and criminal in origin, a body impaneled to weigh evidence for prosecution whose findings are published even where individual charges have lapsed under a statute of limitations; Pennsylvania's 2018 report, naming more than 300 priests across six dioceses over roughly 70 years, is the type's largest single example and the one that most changed American public awareness of the pattern. A church-commissioned report is a body's inquiry into itself, retained on its own initiative or under outside pressure, and can examine the same events a grand jury does while reading differently, since the two write to different audiences under different constraints. An investigative report is journalism rather than any commissioned body, the form that opened several of the other kinds in turn. A response policy is not an inquiry but its aftermath, the rule a body adopted once an inquiry's findings were in.