A hand-coded record of U.S. Catholic clergy abuse scandals — each one geolocated to an exact institution and dated to the day the accusation became public. Below: how it was built, what every field means, and downloads in several formats and levels of aggregation.
Type-A (red) and Type-B (blue) events per year. The 2002 spike follows the January 2002 Boston Globe investigation that triggered a wave of allegations nationwide.
The dataset combines several public sources to pin down, for each accusation, where the accused clergy member was and when the accusation became public.
The base list of accused clergy comes from BishopAccountability.org, a non-governmental organization that compiles a public list of U.S. Catholic clergy who have faced a substantiated sexual-abuse allegation (newspaper articles from a reputable source or legal documents filed in court).
Complementary sources — newspaper archives, the Official Catholic Directory, the official websites of Catholic institutions, and Google Maps — are used to identify each clergy member's appointment at the time of the accusation and at the time of the alleged abuse, and to find the date of the first news article mentioning each accusation.
Every relevant parish, school, or institution is matched to an exact street address and geocoded to latitude/longitude. The analysis does not depend on whether an allegation is true — only on its media repercussions.
Because decades often passed between abuse and revelation, each scandal is one of two types, defined by where the accused clergy member was at the time of the accusation (see below).
A clergy member currently working in a Catholic institution is accused for the first time. Location: the institution where the clergy member works at the time of the public accusation. Date: the first article mentioning the abuse.
A clergy member is accused of abuse committed while working at an institution in the past. Location: the institution where the abuse allegedly occurred. Date: the first article mentioning the abuse.
This release contains 2,941 geolocated, dated scandal events — 1,117 Type-A and 1,824 Type-B — covering 1977–2010 across the United States, involving 2,076 distinct clergy members.
Built with the published paper's sample-selection criteria (below), this release closely reproduces the counts reported in the 2015 article — 1,125 Type-A and 1,899 Type-B scandals over 1980–2010 — confirming the data construction. Small differences reflect ongoing refinement of geocoding and dates.
Event-level data plus aggregations by year and state, and as zip×year and county×year panels — ready for Stata, R, Python, or GIS. Every file carries the Type-A / Type-B split.
| File | Format | Rows | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| scandals_events.csv | CSV | 2,941 | 1.0 MB | Download |
| scandals_events.json | JSON | 2,941 | 1.9 MB | Download |
| scandals_events.geojson | GeoJSON | 2,941 | 2.1 MB | Download |
| File | Level | Rows | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| scandals_by_year.csv | Year | 31 | 1 KB | Download |
| scandals_by_state.csv | State | 55 | 1 KB | Download |
| scandals_by_year_state.csv | Year × State | 540 | 9 KB | Download |
| scandals_by_county_year.csv | County × Year † | 1,556 | 39 KB | Download |
| scandals_by_zip_year.csv | Zip × Year † | 2,497 | 48 KB | Download |
† Unbalanced panel — location-years with zero scandals are not included.
The county×year and zip×year files are sparse panels — one row per location-year with at least one scandal event; location-years with no events are omitted, so cross-sectional totals are recovered by summing over year. The build script that generates every file above is included: build_data.py.
Fields in scandals_events.csv / .json. The compact map file uses short keys (e.g. t, p, inst) documented in build_data.py.
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id | int | Unique event id (sorted by date) |
type | A / B | Scandal type — A (red) or B (blue), as defined above |
priest | text | Accused clergy member (first + last name) |
role | code | P=Priest, B=Brother, D=Deacon, N=Religious, S=Seminarian |
diocese | text | Diocese associated with the clergy member |
minor_or_adult | code | Whether the alleged victim was a minor (M) or adult |
gender | code | Reported gender of the alleged victim, where known |
n_accusations | int | Number of accusations recorded for the clergy member |
date | YYYY-MM-DD | Date the accusation became public (the "scandal" date) |
year / month / day | int | Components of date |
institution | text | Parish / school / institution at the event location |
address | text | Street address, city, state, zip of the institution |
postal | text | Zip code of the institution |
county / state | text | County and state of the institution |
lat / lon | float | Latitude / longitude (WGS-84) |
news_link | url | Source news article for the event (often BishopAccountability) |
ba_link | url | BishopAccountability record for the clergy member |