Woman Sues Church over Alleged Sex Abuse

By Janet Steffenhagen
Vancouver Sun
May 3, 2013

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Woman+sues+church+over+alleged+abuse/8338232/story.html

Alicia Koback's lawyer filed a lawsuit Friday alleging that her mother, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and two of its schools knew she was being sexually abused by her adoptive father throughout her childhood, but did nothing to protect her.

A woman who claims she was sexually abused by her now-deceased adoptive father throughout her childhood is suing her mother, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and two of its schools, alleging they knew about the abuse but failed to protect her.

Alicia Koback, who was adopted shortly after her birth in 1964 by Bob and Constance Heitsman of Aldergrove, says in a statement of claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court that the abuse began when she was a toddler and continued until she left home at 16, pregnant and traumatized. Her mother, church officials and teachers at two schools - Fraser Valley Adventist Academy in Alder-grove and Cariboo Adventist Academy in Williams Lake - knew about the abuse but did not try to stop it or report it to authorities, she claims.

The statement was filed Friday by lawyer Jim Poyner, but the allegations have not been proven in court and the four parties named in the lawsuit have yet to file a statement of defence. Contacted by The Vancouver Sun at her Aldergrove home on Friday, Connie Heits-man reacted with surprise but declined to comment.

Koback, 49, said her parents were deacons of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and she was raised in a devout household with two brothers, also adopted, and a younger sister who was the Heitsmans' only biological child. Family and religious rules were plentiful and included obeying elders, not questioning authority and distrusting non-believers.

The abuse began with sexual touching when she was two or three years old and advanced to rape several years later, the court document says. "Constance was aware of the many occasions on which the plaintiff was raped and sexually abused in many other ways by Bob but took no steps whatsoever to report or prevent the continuation of this behaviour," it states.

Furthermore, officials and employees of the two schools and the church became aware of the many times Heitsman abused his daughter but "failed to take any steps whatsoever to stop, prevent or report this unlawful behaviour," the statement of claim says. Some of the abuse occurred on a school bus after her father, a driver with the Fraser Valley independent school, had dropped off other students, it says.

Koback was born in California but taken to Kersley by her adoptive parents and lived on a farm there for several years, attending the public elementary school for a time before her parents withdrew her in favour of home-schooling using church lessons. She said she felt isolated, was often scared and hid in her room a lot. Through it all, she said, "I loved God and I was trying to be a good little girl."

Later, she attended Cariboo Adventist Academy and, after her family moved to Alder-grove, the Fraser Valley Adventist Academy. But whenever she timidly confided in Adventists about her unhappy home situation, she said she was called a liar and a troublemaker and told to pray for forgiveness for making derogatory comments about her father, a devout Christian man.

She concluded that she was to blame for everything and, desperate to leave home in her teens, she became pregnant by her boyfriend, married him and had a baby a few months later. "I was a 17-year-old lost, sick mother," recalled Koback, who had a second son 14 years later.

The death of her father in 1998 didn't ease her troubled mind or end her self-loathing, she said, and in 2012 she decided to take action. "I was so angry," she told The Sun. "I had thought it was all my fault because that's what they told me. But I didn't feel like that any more.

Poyner said he knows of no other lawsuit in Canada linking sex abuse to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, although there have been cases and settlements in the U.S.

Koback, who claims posttraumatic stress disorder and is seeking unspecified damages, said she is going public because she doesn't want any other child to have her experiences and she isn't confident Adventists have done enough to stop sex abuse.

The church and the schools did not respond to emails and telephone calls requesting comment on Friday. In 1997, the general conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church issued a statement, noting their community "is not immune from child sexual abuse. We believe that the tenets of the Seventh-day Adventist faith require us to be actively involved in its prevention. We are also committed to spiritually assisting abused and abusive individuals and their families in their healing and recovery process, and to holding church professionals and church lay leaders accountable for maintaining their personal behaviour as is appropriate for persons in positions of spiritual leadership and trust."

The statement calls on Adventists to respect children's dignity, provide an atmosphere where they can feel safe reporting abuse, watch for warning signs that abuse is occurring and encourage victims and their families to get the help they need. It also calls for guidelines to assist church leaders in treating with fairness people accused of sexually abusing children and holding abusers accountable for their actions.

Contact: jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com