The Church of England carries two reports from the UK government's Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and one independent review it commissioned itself, the fullest official record any national church has produced on this subject.
IICSA's first Anglican report, published May 2019, took the Diocese of Chichester and the Church's response to Peter Ball as its central case study. Ball, successively Bishop of Lewes and Bishop of Gloucester, accepted a police caution for gross indecency in 1993 rather than face prosecution the Crown Prosecution Service later admitted it had evidence to bring, and resigned quietly. Only after a man he had abused, Neil Todd, came forward again and the case was reopened in 2012 did the fuller picture surface. Ball pleaded guilty in September 2015 to abusing eighteen young men over fifteen years and was sentenced that October to thirty two months in prison. IICSA found the Church had put its own reputation above his victims' needs, naming a serious leadership failure by Archbishop George Carey among those responsible.
IICSA's second report, published October 2020, widened the lens nationally: 390 clergy or others in positions of trust connected with the Church had been convicted of child sexual offences between the 1940s and 2018, which the Inquiry attributed to a culture of deference toward clergy that supported accused priests over the children they had harmed.
The most recent finding reaches further still. The Makin Review, published November 2024, examined the Church's handling of allegations against John Smyth, a lay Reader who ran holiday camps linked to Winchester College before moving to Zimbabwe and then South Africa. Smyth was never charged: he died in 2018 while under investigation. The review found he had abused as many as 130 boys and young men over four decades, and that senior Church officers, informed as early as 1982 and again in 2013, had known and failed to act, a failure the review called an active cover up. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned days after publication, acknowledging he personally had not ensured the 2013 disclosure was properly investigated.