The main design and analysis work for the Abuse in Religious Contexts project took place between 2021 and 2024, with public reporting of its findings taking place in spring 2025.

The project emerged out of an awareness of the need for more comparative research to be undertaken on issues on abuse across a range of religious communities and settings. The research team brought a range of experience to this work, as researchers, professionals with expertise in law and safe-guarding, and in advocacy and support for victim-survivors. A number of members of the team also brought experience of engaging with national abuse inquiries, including the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

Learning from the experiences of victim-survivors has been integral to the project’s work. Victim-survivors played a central role in sharing their experiences and reflections and with a group of people with experiences across different faith communities were also consulted on key elements of the project’s design and delivery. The project team itself includes people with different kinds of experience of abuse in religious contexts.

To enable us to learn from a range of experiences and perspectives, we have used an intentionally broad definition of abuse in religious contexts.

By abuse in religious contexts, we mean a person’s experience of serious harm or exploitation caused by someone who has some form of religious power or control in relation to them. This power can be linked to an abuser’s formal role in an organisation or the informal power that a person has through some form of religious status. It can involve power that comes from being seen as having particular inspiration or expertise (e.g. as a religious counsellor, healer, exorcist or teacher) or power that people have in a relationship because of shared religious assumptions.

Such abuse can take a wide range of forms. The expressions and effects of abuse can be physical, sexual, emotional and psychological, financial and/or spiritual, and can include coercive control over a person’s decisions and actions. Abuse can take the form both of a single, acute incident or of multiple experiences over a period of time.

By religious context, we mean any social situation or interaction in which people’s relationships, ways of thinking or practices are influenced by religious meanings. This can include formal religious settings like churches, mosques, synagogues, temples or faith-based educational or health services. They can also include contacts with individual practitioners (e.g. spiritual healers) who operate on a religious basis, as well as relationships within families, households or other informal networks which are shaped by a shared religious belief or culture.

The project was structured around six individual pieces of research, with the project team also meeting regularly to discuss issues and findings that emerged across these. The six areas focused on in this work were:

  • victim-survivors’ experiences and reflections in relation to disclosing/not disclosing experiences of abuse;
  • victim-survivors’ experiences of what supports or weakens resilience in relation to experiences of abuse;
  • the ways in which the use and interpretation of sacred texts connects with issues of abuse across different faith communities;
  • social and cultural factors associated with increased risks of abuse in religious contexts;
  • legal frameworks relating to abuse in religious contexts, with particular reference to mandatory reporting;
  • experiences of working relationships between those with safeguarding roles in faith communities and statutory safeguarding services.

Key findings from these studies, as well as over-arching findings from the project, are provided in the Findings and Events pages on this site.