About

Why this archive exists, what it believes, and where it began.

Mission

This archive documents sexual-abuse cases and institutional cover-ups by clergy and by the schools and ministries churches run. It is built only from court records and public sources, and it exists to do one thing: make the record permanent, organized, and readable — so that what an institution did, and what it declined to do, cannot be waited out and forgotten.

One standard

The Catholic Church’s abuse crisis has been documented for decades: by grand juries, by attorneys general, by newsrooms, and by archives that track abusive priests diocese by diocese. That scrutiny was earned, and it should continue.

But it has a shadow. Evangelical churches, independent Baptist congregations, and the Christian schools attached to them operate with no bishops’ conference to subpoena, no diocesan files to pry open, and — in the main — no comparable archive at all. Abuse in those institutions surfaces one criminal case at a time, is covered as one man’s crime, and disappears from the record when the news cycle ends. The institution that employed him, was warned about him, or declined to answer for him is rarely part of the story a year later.

This archive’s thesis is the publisher’s, stated plainly: non-Catholic churches and Christian schools have largely escaped the scrutiny the Catholic Church receives, and that asymmetry protects abusers. The remedy is not less scrutiny of anyone. It is one standard, applied to all of them — Catholic, evangelical, independent Baptist, and every other denomination — measured by the same public record.

Where it began

The archive began with one school: a small church-run school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where a teacher served for 29 years before a former student came forward and a court did what the institution had not. That case — built from its docket, its sentence, its appeals, and the records requested to test what survivors allege — is Case No. 1, and it is the template every later case file follows.

Credit where it is due: that case reached a courtroom because former students organized first — in the Facebook group “I survived West Chester Christian School (at least for a while)” and the wider West Chester Christian School survivor community on Facebook — found each other, compared accounts, and went to the authorities. This archive exists in their debt, and Case No. 1 records the credit in full.

Who publishes it

The archive is published by a former student of that school, who has publicly alleged that the institution allowed the abuse in Case No. 1 to continue. That allegation is recorded in the case file where it belongs — in the allegations tier, attributed, unproven — and it buys the publisher no special treatment in these pages: the same standards govern his own claims as govern everyone else’s. That is the point of having standards.