The global scale of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church

A series of abuse scandals, often involving children, have rocked the Catholic Church in recent decades.

The Catholic Church has been repeatedly rocked by child sexual abuse scandals over the last three decades.

An independent inquiry on Tuesday said it had concluded there were about 216,000 victims of sexual abuse carried out by the French Catholic Church’s clergy between 1950 and 2020.

It is the latest in a series of landmark reports and investigations that have helped lift the “veil of silence” around the crimes.