Bob Jones University Helped Cover up Sexual Abuse, Fires Investigative Group

Daily Kos
February 12, 2014

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/12/1277113/-Bob-Jones-University-helped-cover-up-sexual-abuse-fires-investigative-group

Newsflash: the folks that run Bob Jones University are horrible people.

For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.

Bob Jones hired an outside Christian consulting group to look into how its students were being "counseled" by its staff. Now it's fired that group, apparently because they were not conducting the investigation in the manner the university expected they would, and we can all read whatever we like into that:

On Friday, Stephen Jones, president of the university and great-grandson of its founder, addressed students and employees, saying, “We grew concerned that in the process, Grace had begun going beyond the originally outlined intentions,” but he would not elaborate.

The apparent short circuiting of the investigation has led to victims going public.

“Nearly everyone at Bob Jones grew up in a fundamentalist environment, so if you were abused, your abuser probably came from inside that bubble, too, which is what happened to me,” she said. “The person who supposedly counseled me told me if I reported a person like that to the police, I was damaging the cause of Christ, and I would be responsible for the abuser going to hell. He said all of my problems were as a result of my actions in the abuse, which mostly took place before I was 12, and I should just forgive the abuser.” [...]

Erin Burchwell said that when she accused a university employee of sexually assaulting her in the late 1990s, “their idea of an investigation and counseling was to ask me what I was wearing and whether it was tight, and to tell me not to talk to anyone about it because it wouldn’t look good for me.”

So here's a hearty fuck you to Bob Jones University, and if you're looking for anymore analysis than that I can't really help you out on that one. All of the most evil people I have ever known have also been the most ostentatiously, pompously religious, holding it up as a supposed shield that renders all of the malevolent things they gleefully do invisible or justifiable. While those people might be a small percentage of people of faith, the Bob Jones Universities of the country attract them like flies to a carcass, and politics attracts them like a dozen carcasses, and people who use Jesus to justify or cover up or shift blame for sexual abuse really ought to just be beaten until bloody, that being one of the few good uses of corporal punishment I have ever been able to think of.