Prosopon Healing Launches Orthodox Church Sexual Misconduct Database

Clergy-related sexual abuse has been a significant and problematic element of religious institutional conduct. From leadership conduct to political cover-up to institutional denial, it plagues the international religious community in an ongoing manner.

It bathes the laity with a dour expression about the moral legitimacy of their faith. It condemns the majority of innocent clergy with the broad brush blame of the minority of clergy who commit heinous acts, primarily pedophilic acts against young boys and sexual misconduct against adult women.

It does not exist solely within the confines of the Roman Catholic Church. It has a rich extent into other religions and other denominational faiths, including Eastern Orthodox Christianity. However, not all believers and advocates are silent, nor inactive in systematic justice efforts.

One such group is Prosopon Healing. A survivor and research-focused initiative. One working to address clergy-related abuse in Orthodoxy. They are a registered non-profit public benefit corporation—a professional corporation for compiling and reporting data while offering resources for survivors.

In August 2025, Prosopon healing launched the first database on clergy-related abuse in Orthodoxy in the world. It’s called The Orthodox Church Sexual Misconduct Database. It is an open-access aggregator of public information based on court filings, news publications, and official statements.

The Prosopon Healing methodology uses distinct categorizations for representing the data on clergy-perpetrated abuse. They have an Incident ID, name of the accused perpetrator, name of the institution, who is the overseeing bishop, and their role.

They continue with the parish/diocese/monastery/school, the outcome, the year of the abuse, the year reported, and then the state/country. It is a huge undertaking. Their current coverage spans more than 56 jurisdictions.

Prosopon Healing’s research team has a preliminary media/lawsuit sweep spanning 2002–present and found approximately 800 victims and over 250 accused clergy. These are explicitly characterized as undercounts given the rationale and patterns of underreporting.

Outside the U.S., most cases were within the Russian Orthodox Church. Within the U.S., most were affiliated with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Gender patterns emerged. Child victims skewed male and adult victims skewed female.

Their methodology amounts to systematic web/legal-docket searches. They incorporated ChatGPT-assisted search-term generation only without auto-labelling. There was a human review of every article when extracting data properly.

The published inclusion criteria for the database were admissions, defrockings, institutional findings, legal complaints, resignations, and settlements. They incorporated an abuse-victim-centred approach.

All reporting to law enforcement should be the first step as well as conducting an independent, third-party investigation as a benchmark standard. There should be caution with processes done without third parties or done entirely internally via church processes. These have the capacity to retraumatize.

Prosopon Healing credits predecessors’ contribution to this initiative through Pokrov.org: Melanie Sakoda, Cappy Larson, and Greta Larson. Sakoda and Larson were foundational in the reporting work. There is ongoing analysis on Substack.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash