The Scottish government is to establish a public tribunal for victims of child abuse in care homes, seminaries and independent schools over the past 60 years.
Ministers propose to hold a series of hearings similar to a truth and reconciliation commission, where former residents can describe their abuse and seek compensation.
The tribunal will have no formal legal powers, but allegations made against individuals still working with children or vulnerable adults will be passed to the police for investigation.
The scheme is being devised by Professor Alan Miller, chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. The first hearings will take place next year, involving 100 former care home residents who claim they were abused by staff.
Subsequent hearings could include claims against nuns, Catholic priests and teachers at private schools.
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Miller said a framework was being developed to "reconcile competing claims, expectations, and rights of survivors, institutions and individuals".
"It's about the rights of the survivors to redress and rehabilitation but it's also about learning the lessons from the culture that enabled these kinds of abuse to take place," he said. "We are talking about systemic and widely impacting occurrences which are not just buried in history."
The tribunal is being set up in response to the 2007 Shaw Report, which studied abuse in Scottish children's homes between 1950 and 1995. It recommended that a national support centre be set up for survivors of abuse, alongside a nationwide task force to stand up for youngsters now in care.
Earlier this year, a report into Scotland's biggest child abuse scandal at Kerelaw, a residential school and secure unit in North Ayrshire, accused Glasgow city council of "major failings" in its stewardship of the centre. A former teacher and a unit manager were convicted of abuse in 2006. The council later reported between 350 and 400 allegations from 159 people complaining of emotional, physical or sexual abuse.
There were also abuse scandals at Larchgrove, a council-run remand home in Glasgow, Blairs College, a seminary in Aberdeen, St Ninian's, a school run by the De La Salle Brothers, and Nazareth House, a chain of Catholic children's homes.
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Teachers have also been the subject of abuse investigations. In 2007, Jonathan Quick, 70, was sentenced to eight months in prison after admitting that he abused five pupils between 1977 and 1980 while teaching at the fee-paying Dollar Academy in Clackmannanshire. Police launched an investigation after one of his former students, David Young, 23, committed suicide in 2002 after claiming Quick had abused him.
In 2001, the Scottish actor Iain Glen revealed that he and other boys were sexually abused in the showers at Edinburgh Academy while studying there in the late 1960s.