2025-12-04 16:00:08
Around the world, LGBTQ+ issues have become flashpoints in wider political, cultural, and authoritarian movements. Laws around gender identity, migration, civil rights, education, and even sports increasingly use LGBTQ+ people as rhetorical and legislative targets.
“One of the things that queer people do is they shine a light on society — how society is organized and what we take for granted,” said Gina Chua, executive director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, speaking at a session at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25).
The impact reverberates far beyond queer communities and individual struggles.
This political pattern, Chua and co-panelist Kae Petrin, a John S. Knight journalism fellow and co-executive director of the Trans Journalists Association, warned, is spreading transnationally. Authoritarian-leaning governments are using the oppression of queer communities to justify restrictions that extend beyond LGBTQ+ people.
Investigating LGBTQ+ stories requires navigating a reporting environment defined by scarcity of data, safety concerns, and inconsistent newsroom support. These challenges shape not only how these stories are told, but whether they are told at all.
The GIJN25 panelists emphasized that the LGBTQ+ reporting beat contains opportunities for high-impact investigations, but accepted that there are still challenges.
Data about LGBTQ+ experiences and identities is either missing, mislabeled, inconsistently collected, contradictory, or trapped in dozens of incompatible systems. When data doesn’t exist, journalists must collect it and create it.
“The data is a mess,” said Petrin, while encouraging reporters to collaborate with outside experts such as NGOs and community organizers, in addition to data journalists.
Activists often have access to unpublished surveys, community-gathered records, or regional reports with information about hard-to-reach populations that can be plugged into datasets.
“Some of the most successful [LGBTQ+] investigations combined data from dozens of sources into a single holistic set,” Petrin explained, while cautioning that reporting methodologies should always be transparent about data limitations.
Gina Chua, executive director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, shared insights on how to cover stories impacting the LGBTQ+ community. Image: Suzanne Lee, Alt Studio for GIJN
In Honduras, Dunia Orellana investigated and revived the cold case murder of trans woman Vicky Hernández by reconstructing the broader pattern of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. She obtained records for more than 200 victims and traced each case through the justice system, finding that only 24 had advanced judicially. By piecing together disparate police files, court documents, and historical evidence, Orellana built a comprehensive picture of systemic impunity. Her investigation became key evidence in an Inter-American Court ruling that held Honduras responsible for Hernández’s murder — for failing to prevent, investigate, and prosecute the death of a trans person.
Interviewing LGBTQ+ people, especially those living in hostile environments that criminalize gender diverse identities, requires careful reporting. Sources may be traumatized, at risk, undocumented, or unfamiliar with media.
Zahra Nader, an Afghan-Canadian journalist, who attended the discussion, asked: “I don’t want to speak for LGBTQ people because I’m a cisgender woman. I want to give them representation. I want them to represent themselves and tell their stories. How do I do that?”
As a starting point, Petrin suggested reporters and editors read “Why Should I Tell You? A Guide to Less Extractive Reporting,” published by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications for conducting trauma-informed and survivor-focused interviews. While the guide is not only focused on LGBTQ+ reporting, the lessons on preventing harm during and after the interview apply.
Tips include, first and foremost, letting the source know what to expect when a story comes out. Some sources are not used to dealing with the media and may not be fully aware of how a story may affect them once it is published. The guide suggests asking specific questions, such as if any of the information an interviewee shares could potentially put them or family members living in another country in danger.
The guide also suggests giving some of the editorial control back to the respondent by having the story read back to them before publication. The time between the interview and the publication can mean changes in the level of risk faced. A readback allows the source to decide whether or not to omit certain information.
In areas where LGBTQ+ sources face criminalization, such as Afghanistan and some Middle Eastern or African states, the panelists suggested partnering with groups who are familiar with the local context and culture and can assess potential risks.
Local partners such as NGOs and advocacy groups can advise on how to approach sources, help identify who is safe to speak, and give guidance on what questions may retraumatize.
Some mainstream newsrooms resist LGBTQ+ investigative work, dismissing it as low-interest or limited in scope.
QueerAF, a community outlet in the UK, uncovered extreme delays in gender-affirming healthcare, finding that wait times at some UK clinics would, in theory, stretch to an astonishing 224 years. To document the situation, the team worked closely with community organizers, advocacy groups, and clinic-level sources to gather and verify data.
There was initially little interest in the story among mainstream newsrooms, yet once published, The Gender Clinic Files garnered over half a million views and became the outlet’s most widely read story, driven by strong community engagement and widespread public concern. The story has since been picked up by other local outlets.
For stories to have broader reach and wider resonance, the panelists emphasized the need for reframing stories to show systemic failures, and to identify where LGBTQ+ stories intersect with other pressing issues.
“Frame them as governance failures that cause administrative chaos, violate federal law, or cost taxpayers money, not [only] ‘identity stories,’” Chua urged.
2025-12-03 16:00:22
Seas and oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet, yet remain among the least regulated and under-monitored spaces on the planet. Weak oversight, fragmented jurisdictions, and vast unpatrolled areas create conditions where environmental crimes, from illegal fishing to wildlife trafficking, continue largely out of sight.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25), speakers from around the world spoke at a panel entitled “Innovative Methodologies for Uncovering Environmental Crimes in the Ocean” to outline practical methodologies that reporters can use to investigate crimes at sea, even when evidence is limited and documentation is incomplete.
Maria Dalby of GRID-Arendal explains how jurisdictional loopholes are exploited by criminal networks on the open ocean. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
Maria Dalby, head of media relations for GRID-Arendal, a Norwegian environmental organization, explained that maritime crime thrives where governance is weakest. With overlapping regimes and few enforcement mechanisms, criminal networks exploit the gaps.
She highlighted two major global treaties that will reshape future reporting:
Both treaties, she said, will create fresh opportunities for investigative journalists to track how governments and corporations adapt, or fail to comply, with emerging rules.
One of the most replicable methods shared came from Daniela Castro, formerly of OCCRP. She presented a cross-border shark-fin trafficking investigation that began with a press release announcing an illicit shark fin trade seizure in Colombia. What stood out was not what officials disclosed, but what they left out. Key elements like the exporter’s identity, permit details, and the legality of the shipment were absent from official statements.
Each of these omissions became a lead for Castro. By combining elements of a previous leak, Narco Files, with public business registries and corporate filings, Castro’s team identified the exporter, whose legal representative was the son of a former Cali Cartel leader.
“You have to build your own record. Government documents alone will not give you the truth,” she said. In maritime crime, she added, these unexplained gaps in documentation often point to where illegal activity is hidden. Her approach is widely applicable beyond wildlife trafficking.
One of Castro’s most useful tools was a structured FOIA matrix. Over nine months, the team filed more than 45 information requests to Colombian agencies, including fisheries authorities, tax and customs offices, and maritime regulators.
Castro’s team created a structured spreadsheet to keep track of the FOIA requests, listing each agency, the objective of the request, and the responses received. This system became essential to stay aligned with the story’s goals over nine months of reporting.
FOIA responses, combined with on-the-ground reporting in Colombia, Venezuela, and Hong Kong, allowed the team to piece together key elements of the shipment and identify gaps in the company’s permits. Castro emphasized that this kind of multi-agency request strategy is replicable for many cross-border ocean investigations.
Indonesian reporter Abdus Somad of Jaring.id presented a complementary methodology: combining AIS vessel tracking with open source reporting from local communities.
Somad started with AIS (Automatic Identification System) data, but warned that illegal operators often turn off transponders, spoof their location, or make suspicious course changes. “When the AIS signal disappears, that’s when the real investigation starts,” he said.
That is why Somad uses a multi-layered verification process:
This hybrid digital-community model helps reporters fill gaps in data and document illegal fishing operations even in remote areas.
Indonesian reporter Abdus Somad of Jaring.id discusses combining AIS vessel tracking with open source reporting from local communities at GIJC25. Image: Alyaa Abdul Aziz Alhadjri for GIJN
Returning to the broader picture, Dalby encouraged journalists to follow how countries might implement the BBNJ and the future Global Plastics treaties. Issues ripe for investigation include:
These emerging frameworks will shape ocean governance for years, offering reporters new entry points for investigations.
The session offered a set of clear starting points for reporters:
Environmental crime at sea remains underreported, but the tools and strategies presented at GIJC25 show that even in the world’s least governed spaces, evidence can be found, and stories can be told.
2025-12-02 16:00:15
With traditional revenue streams continuing to decline, newsrooms are reimagining how to fund investigative reporting. Their most promising solutions go beyond paywalls and donation drives and focus instead on centering their readers and redefining the relationship they have with the audiences they serve.
“Instead of asking how we can get our audiences to care about our journalism, how about showing our audiences that we deeply care about them?” said Florence Wild, the chief development officer at CORRECTIV, a Berlin- and Essen-based newsroom.
During a panel at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Malaysia, Wild and other journalists shared insights into a changing dynamic between newsrooms and their audiences. When people feel invited to participate, collaborate, and help drive real-world change, they go from being passive readers to engaged collaborators and, ultimately, financial investors in journalism they value.
CORRECTIV has no paywall, no membership system, not even an email wall, yet operates on an annual budget of roughly €10 million (US$11.5 million) a year, explained Wild.
What they do have is a daily newsletter that generates a daily conversation and feedback loop with readers. “Sometimes we do surveys. Sometimes we do a choose-your-own-adventure style of investigations where we ask people to share tips or expert knowledge to help us while we’re working on an investigation,” said Wild.
This, combined with other innovative outreach strategies, has resulted in a revenue stream where about 60–65% comes from recurring and one-off donations, and the remaining 35% comes from philanthropic donations.
One of their investigations, which revealed that high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right party were plotting the forced deportations of millions of people living in Germany, drove more than three million people to the streets across the country in protest. It was the largest pro-democracy mobilization since the reunification of Germany.
One week after publication, the story was translated and performed as a reading on a theater stage, where another part of the investigation previously not reported was revealed. The performance was also live-streamed on the CORRECTIV website and through the public broadcasters, amplifying its reach. Additionally, the report was translated into 10 languages, including easy and sign language, “to make sure that everyone who was most affected by this secret plan would be able to understand the message of the investigation,” said Wild.
The harassment and threats against the reporters surged, but so did donations.
Wild said the CORRECTIV model is built on the radical idea that everyone can be a journalist. The nonprofit freely shares its methodology and research tools, teaches reporting strategies through its online academy, and also has the CORRECTIV Crowdnewsroom, which offers other strategies for reader involvement and participation.
Florence Wild, chief development officer at CORRECTIV, speaking at the GIJC25 in Kuala Lumpur. Image: Zahid Hassan for GIJN
For French investigative nonprofit Disclose, impact is at the center of their reporting strategy and a key motivation of their supporter base.
“We explain to our audience how we are useful… Don’t support us for the sake of investigative journalism, support us because ultimately our investigations could lead to change and improve our society,” said Pierre Leibovici, environment editor at Disclose.
The Disclose Team has invested in trying to generate impact after every investigation, measuring impact, and communicating the impact to audiences.
One week after the publication of their investigations, which cover topics such as environmental crime and illegal arms trade, call-outs for donations are sent out.
Parallel to this, the newsroom tracks about 20 categories of impact that include government responses, legal actions, public mobilization, protests, and policy changes, as well as tips sent by citizen reporters or crowd fact-checking. Each of these outcomes is meticulously recorded in a database and reported back to readers through an annual impact report that is free to access. A donation call-out campaign is also launched during the release of the yearly impact report.
Throughout the year, Disclose sends “impact emails” after publication, updating the readers who engaged most with the story, sometimes even months after a story was published.
Leibovici recalled an impact email they sent to readers 28 months after an investigation into an offshore LNG terminal. The state ultimately mandated TotalEnergies’ CEO to dismantle the project.
“These kinds of emails about long-term impacts are important to build loyalty with our audience and to show them why they have to support us,” said Leibovici.
Sustainable journalism is not about squeezing out donations or revenue but more about cultivating relationships — reporters and readers are partners who are both contributing and investing in a shared vision of change for the better.
Create new ways for audiences to experience and engage with the story.
Experiment with alternative payment channels.
Sanne Breimer, of SembraMedia, was the research manager for Global Project Oasis, which mapped the business models, revenue strategies, and sustainability practices of hundreds of digital-native newsrooms.
In countries where supporting newsrooms through subscriptions or donations is not a popular practice, experimenting with alternative payment channels can be a way to break through resistance.
General Enumero, a Brazilian outlet, is experimenting with PIX, Brazil’s instant, no-fee payment system, which allows people to make one-off donations and contributions. General Enumero launched an experiment using PIX tied to an investigative story series on Indigenous women for COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
Transparency is essential
Whether revenue comes from donations, memberships, or grants, newsrooms have to be open about their funding sources and spending. Transparency is the backbone of credibility that assures audiences that their support does not compromise independence, but rather strengthens it
Hire a salesperson
According to Breimer, one of the strongest findings from SembraMedia’s global research was that investing in a revenue-focused staff member dramatically increases income. In some European newsrooms, the study found a dramatic jump in revenue if the outlets have a combination of a finance person, a tech person, and a sales person.
“Sometimes it feels like chicken and egg. We don’t have the money to invest. But then… if you do invest in a person with these skills, it will also come back to you,” said Breimer.
2025-12-01 16:00:51
“Raise your hand if you have been approached by a scammer in any way,” said Frontline investigative reporter Martha Mendoza, moderator of the “Scams and Scammers” session during the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25). Most of the attendees raised their hands.
“Now turn to the person next to you and tell them how you were approached by a scammer,” she added, and the murmur of stories filled the room.
Law enforcement, governments, social media platforms, and even most newsrooms don’t fully commit to fighting the growing scourge of online fraud, even when scamming is spreading on par with drug trafficking and causes serious financial and emotional damage.
But journalists like Lian Buan, senior investigative reporter at Rappler, Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, founder and managing editor of Ghana Business News, Paul Radu, cofounder and head of innovation at OCCRP, and Mendoza are using data journalism, mapping, whistleblowers, undercover work, and traditional reporting methods to reveal a criminal activity that, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, siphons US$1.03 trillion a year globally.
“And if you think about the lack of restrictions on cryptocurrency combined with the rapid development of AI, the place where these scams are going is quite frightening,” Mendoza noted.
When suddenly there was a boom of PhDs in Ghana, and businesspeople who had money or were politically connected began insisting on being called “doctors,” Dogbevi sensed something was amiss.
“They go to events to speak, and everybody introduces them like ‘Doctor So and So,’ but they do not exude that kind of sense of someone with a proper Ph.D., so I decided to look into it,” Dogbevi said.
After an acquaintance revealed the name of the so-called university from which he received the Ph.D., Dogbevi found its email and physical address online. But a Google Maps street view search revealed that, instead of a higher education institution, the address shown was just a dump site in London. Digging deeper, he reached out to the company by email asking how he could get a Ph.D. and received an enthusiastic reply with a list of prices and degrees, and an offer to get a Ph.D. after taking a one-week marketing seminar in Dubai.
After Dogbevi’s team revealed the scam, Ghana’s Ministry of Education announced a crackdown.
Some helpful tips:
To detect scams, OCCRP’s Paul Radu also suggests you ask yourself the following questions:
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” dig further. You may be on the path to revealing a scam.
Once you’re certain you’ve detected a scam and you’ve collected initial information, it’s time to determine how far-reaching the structure is. Your run-of-the-mill scam might be operated by very large transnational operations linked to criminal syndicates, which involve other kinds of criminality, like money laundering, fraud, political corruption, human trafficking, and forced labor.
Mendoza described guarded compounds in Myanmar that look like business parks, with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people conducting phone and online scams with servers connected to Starlink. Southeast Asia workers with English skills are tricked into working in IT, then smuggled into Myanmar, and their income, which usually comes from scamming victims, is mostly spent within the same compound — in stores and with sex workers that are also trafficking victims.
As with other crimes, scamming snowballs. Small-time criminals might soon find out that they cannot operate without yielding to a larger ring, a more powerful criminal, or needing underground “angel investor” money to take their scam to the next level.
Scamming operations may also be linked to high-level politicians. Rappler’s Lian Buan described how Alice Leal Guo, a Chinese woman who posed as Filipino, ran a rapidly growing scam hub, the Philippines Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs), from a town where she was mayor. “When I got assigned POGO, I wanted to know who in the government did this. I’m very cynical that way. I always think that there’s some powerful person behind this,” Buan said.
Her reporting revealed links between POGO and the Duterte government, and in a rare instance of accountability — for a crime with alarmingly high levels of impunity — Leal Guo was sentenced to life imprisonment for human trafficking.
Rappler’s Lian Buan discusses her investigation into a scam operation’s links to the Philippine government at a GIJC25 panel. Image: Samsul Said, Alt Studio for GIJN
Here are more tips from Buan:
OCCRP’s Paul Radu highlighted the challenges of investigating scams that operate as very wide criminal networks, and the importance of collaboration in reporting on them: “It takes a network to fight a network,” he explained. And to understand how that network is set up and operated, he suggested thinking like a criminal.
Questions to drive your reporting:
“For criminals, this is a business, and crime is a commodity. They can buy packages to conduct these kinds of crimes from the black market, such as stolen identities, fake personas online, and malware,” said Radu.
A key point: once criminals set up scamming centers, they start earning a lot of money, and will need to launder the money and access other criminal systems. In a rapidly growing business they’ll need police and politicians to look the other way, and if they expand, they’ll need that in more than one country, and a small operation will become a criminal network like the one OCCRP exposed with its partners in their transnational investigation, Scam Empire, a collaborative effort by dozens of media partners that looks into the heart of this dark industry.
Even if the data is financial, the stories are human. Behind each scam is a person who was psychologically abused, maybe even tortured, and whose money, sometimes their retirement fund or their life savings, was taken from them through blackmail or deceit.
The panelists urged the assembled reporters to use their coverage to demand better guardrails and accountability from governments, tech companies, and institutions that enable scammers through direct business support or overly lax regulations and policies. Also, to push for asset seizure operations that could restore victims’ lost funds. In many cases, the authorities know or can find out where these assets are.
If enough media outlets coordinate a worldwide simultaneous release of stories that shakes public opinion and discourse in the same way the Panama Papers did, maybe law enforcement, legislators, and companies will be forced to act, and accountability will come to bear on a pervasive criminal empire.
2025-11-28 16:00:01
Around the world, access to essential medicines often depends less on scientific breakthroughs than on the market power of a few companies. Highly concentrated pharmaceutical markets can keep prices far above production costs, block competition, and leave patients dependent on expensive brands. The consequences are visible in hospitals and homes: rationed doses, skipped treatments, and families spending a significant share of their income simply to stay alive.
At the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in Kuala Lumpur, investigative journalist Fabiola Torres offered a practical framework for exposing how these oligopolies are built and maintained. Torres, the founder of the Peruvian health investigations outlet Salud con Lupa, led the project Your Money or Your Health, which examined why insulin remains unaffordable in Peru despite the invention being more than a century old.
Her central message was clear: “Investigating oligopolies of the pharma is about people’s lives. It is about inequality. What they do may be legal, but it’s a scandal.”
Torres began the workshop with a case study familiar across the region: insulin. The original, 100-year-old, off-patent “human insulin” version of the drug should be cheap, widely available, and is recommended as the first-line treatment in international guidelines. But companies steer doctors and national guidelines toward newer patented “analogs” and device-based versions, making the original, affordable medicine harder to access.
Three companies, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi, control roughly 90% of the global market. Their newer, analog versions remain under layers of fresh patents and device protections, creating what Torres called a “modern patent barrier” around an old drug.
In Peru, insulin manufacturers and importers receive tax exemptions, but prices have not fallen. Public hospitals frequently experience shortages, forcing patients to buy insulin privately, often spending 10–20% of a monthly minimum wage. When hospitals run out, people ration doses or go without, leading to complications, disability, or death.
Torres’s team discovered that in 2024, a new clinical guidance was issued in Peru that made an insulin analog the first-line treatment. “The draft changed at the last moment… the description was for Novo Nordisk’s insulin analogs,” she explained.
A key contributor to the guideline was a leading diabetes specialist who also heads a Novo Nordisk–funded pediatric diabetes program, a financial connection not reflected in the documentation circulated to the public.
The case illustrated how market power, regulation, and medical guidance intersect, and how journalists can follow each thread.
The session in Kuala Lumpur. Image: Zahid Hassan for GIJN
Torres described how pharmaceutical oligopolies create a series of structural walls that determine who can access a medicine, and who cannot.
Torres said this concentrated market power allows a handful of companies to set the terms: which medicines enter the market, at what price. She explained how the oligopolies block cheaper, older, or biosimilar alternatives from reaching patients, who are ultimately paying the price.
When a drug patent is coming to an end, “companies file new patents on very small changes,” Torres said. This often allows them to maintain their lucrative patent rights with just minor modifications: altered doses, updated devices, or manufacturing tweaks.
Many countries lack complete frameworks for approving biosimilars, the lower-cost alternatives to complex biological drugs. In Peru, a biosimilar insulin has been approved since 2016, but remains constrained by regulatory gaps. Torres explained. Without clear guidance, Torres explained, doctors are less willing to prescribe biosimilar options.
Clinical guidelines adopted by each country are essential in shaping the prescribing habits and purchasing decisions. Peru’s guideline revisions demonstrated how undisclosed conflicts of interest can influence national policy, and shift markets toward corporate interest and higher-priced products.
Shortages, fragmented purchasing, and budget cuts make consistent access difficult. Torres documented long queues, reuse of syringes, and out-of-pocket purchases among families unable to obtain insulin through the public system.
Companies fund medical events, training, and donation programs, often without transparent disclosure. “Most of the medical events are funded by the companies,” Torres noted. Donation programs from companies can often act as a commercial strategy to influence doctors and create market preference for their patented products.
These relationships can subtly shape prescribing norms and delay the uptake of lower-cost options.
Pharmaceutical oligopolies shape access to life-saving treatments, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Torres emphasized that uncovering these structures requires attention not only to patents and regulations, but also to the “human impact” behind each barrier.
Torres offered practical steps for reporters investigating medicine markets:
For Torres, the lesson is that these markets can be understood and therefore challenged. With the right tools, journalists can expose the structures behind high prices and limited competition and help inform the public. The first step, she said, is simple: choose one medicine, follow its path through the system, and see where the trail leads.
2025-11-27 16:00:49
Religion is an intrinsic part of people’s lives — influencing communities, countries, and sociopolitical developments. But these very factors make reporting on religions and faiths challenging.
Journalists from New Zealand, Colombia, and Peru spoke at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) in a session titled “Uncovering Stories Connected to Religious Groups” about how to find stories and angles when reporting on issues linked with religious groups and faith-based cults.
A big challenge when reporting on religion is terminology, said Anusha Bradley, an investigative reporter with Radio New Zealand. “Learn the lingo of the religion. You have to understand what they are saying,” she explained. Religions tend to have their own terminology and words, with specific meanings that may be unfamiliar to someone trying to investigate them for the first time.
“Understand the top-down structure,” she added. Many religions operate as a business, and it helps to understand the hierarchy and the way the institution is constructed. It is also important to understand power, control, and coercion — and how they are linked with the religious institution.
Bradley cited her reporting on the impact of shunning and child protection policies among Jehovah’s Witnesses in New Zealand. Her investigation uncovered how the religious group controls access to justice for victims of various forms of abuse. “There would be victims of domestic abuse, and they were told to pray harder,” she said. “Sexual abuse would require the presence of two witnesses [to confirm that the abuse occurred]” — practices that effectively blocked accountability and justice for victims and protected abusers.
Colombian journalist Juan Pablo Barrientos has been facing harassment for close to a decade for his extensive reporting and investigation into reports of the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church in his home country.
Barrientos was attempting to analyze how the Catholic Church, as an important national institution in Colombia, handled cases of priests accused of pedophilia. The title of Barriento’s investigation, “The Secret Archive,” refers to a section in the Code of Canon Law — which governs the Catholic Church — that decrees the establishment of an archive that is to be locked up and “protected most securely,” containing records of what the Canon describes as “criminal cases in matters of morals,” including a brief summary of what occurred.
“This, to me, is a criminal confession,” said Barrientos. This archive was critical to his investigation. The Catholic Church blocked access for years, and Barrientos and another journalist took their fight to access these church records in Colombia to court.
“Article 44 of the Constitution of Colombia says that the rights of minors prevail over all other rights,” said Barrientos. “The court argued that this is private information. But [we] were not asking for medical records, for financial records, for the sexual orientation of the priests. [We were] asking for information on crimes committed against children,” he added.
In June 2025, the Colombian Constitutional Court upheld the journalists’ rights to access — based on the constitutional principle of child protection — information about priests in the context of investigations into alleged sexual abuse.
Paola Ugaz, the Peru correspondent for the Spanish daily newspaper ABC, has for years investigated allegations of sexual, physcial, and psychological abuse against minors by Sodalicio Christianae Vitae (SCV), a powerful Catholic organization founded in Peru in the 1970s. After a book she worked on with former Sodalicio member Pedro Salinas, titled “Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados” (“Half Priests, Half Soldiers”) was published in 2015, she experienced retaliation — including various forms of targeted harassment and a criminal defamation complaint by people associated with SCV.
In April 2025, the Vatican formalized the dissolution of SCV.
The “Aha!” moment can come at any time during investigations, the panelists said, and shared a few general pointers for investigating powerful religious groups.
Bradley suggested checking the document trail. “The congregation would document the meetings they had, and the secretary would file everything” about those discussions within the church, said Bradley. “Many members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who retired or left [the church], took these documents with them.” She also noted that “every victim has a story… so it’s important to show a pattern by exposing the system.”
Barrientos urged journalists not to be afraid to ask questions of the Catholic Church in their own cities: “Ask for that secret archive that is in every one of your cities… Every city that has a Catholic Church… they have these secret archives.”
