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States of Fear
Mary Raftery's three-part RTÉ documentary series, 1999
Raftery brought the abuse of children in Ireland's industrial and reformatory schools, run by religious orders, to a prime-time audience, through the testimony of people who had grown up in them. On May 11, 1999, before the final episode aired, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologized for the state's "collective failure to intervene" and announced the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and a Redress Board.
How much the series caused that apology is disputed: Ahern later said it had little to do with it, while other accounts credit the broadcasts. Either way, it remains the clearest starting point for understanding Ireland's reckoning.
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Sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston
The Boston Globe Spotlight Team's investigation, from January 6, 2002
The first story showed that the Archdiocese of Boston had known about a priest's abuse and kept moving him between parishes. It rested on church documents a judge had ordered unsealed, which is why the denials could not hold. After it ran, the paper was flooded with calls from victims, and hundreds answered its request for information.
The Globe went on to publish more than 900 stories, Cardinal Bernard Law resigned, and the team won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This is the model the rest of this list learned from, and the best place to begin.
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Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal
Andrew Norfolk's reporting for The Times, from January 2011
Norfolk investigated the grooming and sexual exploitation of children for years, and within days of one of his Rotherham stories the council ordered an independent inquiry. When Alexis Jay reported in 2014, she found that at least 1,400 children had been abused in the town and that council and police leadership had failed them between 1997 and 2009. The head of the council resigned.
Read it for how sustained reporting on one town turned scattered warnings into a record the local authority could no longer dispute.
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Penn State child sex abuse scandal
Sara Ganim's reporting for The Patriot-News, from March 2011
Ganim, then a 24-year-old police and courts reporter, broke the news that a grand jury was investigating Jerry Sandusky, months before charges made the case national. It belongs here for what it revealed about a university rather than a sports team: the scandal led to the departure of Penn State's president, Graham Spanier, and the firing of Joe Paterno.
The paper won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for "courageously revealing and adeptly covering" the scandal. It shows how much a small local newsroom can uncover through patient court reporting.
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Boy Scouts of America sex abuse cases
The Los Angeles Times investigation of the Boy Scouts' "perversion files," 2012
For decades the Boy Scouts kept a confidential blacklist of men expelled over suspected abuse, locked in filing cabinets at headquarters, and fought in court to keep it private. The Times examined more than 1,200 of those files from 1970 to 1991 and found more than 125 cases in which men allegedly went on molesting Scouts after the organization had received detailed allegations against them.
The paper later published an online database of nearly 5,000 cases from 1947 to 2005. It is the strongest example here of records journalism: the institution's own paperwork, read closely, made the case.
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Joanne McCarthy (journalist)
Joanne McCarthy's reporting and the Shine the Light campaign, Newcastle Herald
McCarthy covered the sexual abuse of children, particularly in the Catholic Church, in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, and the Herald turned that reporting into a public campaign for a royal commission. Julia Gillard granted one in 2012 and acknowledged the paper's work as a major factor. McCarthy won the 2013 Gold Walkley.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard from more than 8,000 survivors and delivered its final report in December 2017. Few regional papers have changed national policy so directly.
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Exposure (British TV series)
"Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile," ITV, October 3, 2012
Mark Williams-Thomas built the documentary on interviews with women who said Savile abused them, and it aired after the BBC's own Newsnight had shelved a segment on similar allegations, with the BBC saying its story could not be substantiated. The broadcast opened inquiries well beyond broadcasting: in 2014, 28 NHS hospitals published the findings of their investigations into Savile.
Watch it alongside the story of the dropped Newsnight report, because together they show how a celebrated figure's access to hospitals and institutions went unchallenged for so long.
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Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home
Catherine Corless's research and Alison O'Reilly's Mail on Sunday reporting, 2014
Corless, a local historian, obtained death records showing that 796 babies and children had died at the Tuam home run by the Bon Secours Sisters, yet there were no burial records. When she brought her findings to O'Reilly in 2014, the publicity led former residents to come forward, and a state commission into Tuam and other mother and baby homes was set up in 2015.
This is the entry that best shows how patient work by someone outside any newsroom can become journalism, once a reporter takes it seriously.
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The Boston Globe
Spotlight's "Private schools, painful secrets," May 2016
Fourteen years after its church investigation, the Globe's Spotlight Team turned to New England's elite private schools and found that at least 67 had faced allegations since the early 1990s that staff sexually abused or harassed more than 200 students, many of them ignored or covered up. The team contacted 224 schools about misconduct allegations; at first just 23 replied.
It is the closest follow-up to the 2002 work, and useful for anyone who assumed the lessons of the church scandal had already been learned by secular institutions.
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Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times investigation of USC gynecologist George Tyndall, May 2018
Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle revealed that the University of Southern California had let a campus gynecologist keep treating students for years despite repeated complaints about his behavior with young women. USC's president, C. L. Max Nikias, resigned, and by 2021 the university had agreed to pay out more than $1 billion, including an $852 million settlement with more than 700 women.
The reporters won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. It is the clearest case here of a university health service protecting itself before its patients.
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El País
El País's investigation of abuse in the Spanish Catholic Church, from 2018
The paper began by publishing an email address where people could write in confidence, and the accounts that arrived grew into a database of more than 2,000 victims and over 1,000 alleged abusers, the only one of its kind for the Spanish Church. In 2023 Spain's ombudsman published the first national independent report on the subject, estimating that more than 200,000 children had been abused, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the findings a milestone.
Choose it to see what a newspaper can do in a country where the church had never been made to count.
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Houston Chronicle
"Abuse of Faith," Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, 2019
The two papers documented hundreds of abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches and thrust the problem into the spotlight. In 2021 delegates at the convention's annual meeting authorized an outside investigation of its Executive Committee, and in 2022 Guidepost Solutions found that senior leaders there were "singularly focused on avoiding liability" and that survivors were ignored or disbelieved, while a staffer kept a list of hundreds of accused abusers.
Read it for how sustained outside reporting kept a denomination's abuse problem in view until its own members demanded an independent account.
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Tylko nie mów nikomu (2019)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
"Tell No One," Tomasz and Marek Sekielski's crowdfunded documentary, released on YouTube in May 2019
The film follows survivors as they confront the priests who abused them as children, including one who admits it on hidden camera. Within two days it had more than 8 million views, Archbishop Wojciech Polak apologized "for every wound inflicted by the people of the church," and the prosecutor general ordered an investigation into the crimes it showed.
It is the most direct way into how survivors' own words, rather than a newsroom's documents, broke the Polish Church's silence.
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American Indian boarding schools
The Washington Post investigation of abuse at Catholic-run Indian boarding schools, May 2024
Reporters spent a year traveling to eight states, interviewed more than two dozen survivors and worked through about 10,000 pages of letters, diaries, memos and oral histories. They found that at least 122 priests, sisters and brothers assigned to 22 boarding schools since the 1890s were later accused of abusing more than 1,000 children, most of it in the 1950s and 1960s.
The following month, the US bishops apologized for the Church's part in "traumas experienced by Native children." It is the most recent landmark here, and a necessary one for American readers.
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