Religious institutions a playground for abuse

By Kendra Semmen
Central Florida Future
July 6, 2014

http://www.centralfloridafuture.com/news/view.php/778966/Religious-institutions-a-playground-for

Church is a place you should feel safe leaving your children at, but reports of child abuse go beyond the Catholic church to affect almost every religion.

People may want to think twice before sending their children to Sunday school, or any church activities, if parents aren’t in the vicinity to ensure protection.

In the U.S., 16,787 people have said that they were abused as children by priests between 1950 and 2012, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as reported by PBS. However, child abuse within the church isn’t exclusive to the Catholic denomination.

A lawsuit was filed in May that stated that a missionary with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abused a woman in the mid-1980s, according to The Desert Sun.

And although Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t have Sunday school, child abuse still goes on. A woman was awarded $28 million by a jury after reporting being abused by a congregant in the North Fremont Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Northern California in 2012, according to The New York Times.

The same paper reported child molestation in a Jewish ritual bathhouse. Sun Sentinel wrote of a teacher at a Hindu temple who was sentenced to life in prison for child sex abuse in 2010.

Monks have also been getting away with sexually abusing children at places such as the Theravada Buddhist temple in Chicago, according to a 2011 article from the Chicago Tribune, and incidences of physical and sexual abuse were found in Muslim religious institutions, Mail Online (a British publication) reported in 2011.

Douglas Myers, as of 2012, is serving a seven-year prison sentence for sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy in Eustis, Florida, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Jurors blamed the Florida Baptist Convention for not doing an extensive background check on the former pastor and church planter. Additionally, John Langworthy, a former youth music minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church, admitted to molesting a student in 1989, according to WFAA.

The Southern Baptist Convention should, but refuses against, “report[ing] all reports of abuse to the police (not only the ones the churches themselves unilaterally find ‘credible’) and make public the names of those about whom they have received reports already,” according to an article by FindLaw.

There are many incidences of child abuse that have flown under the radar due to powerful churches’ desire to maintain a pristine reputation. I witnessed harassment among women by a children’s pastor in Orlando, which resulted in him being suspended but failed to make the news.

The SBC ranked No. 6 in Time’s list of the top 10 underreported news stories in 2008, for rejecting “a proposal to create a central database of staff and clergy who have been either convicted of or indicted on charges of molesting minors.” This makes tracking past allegations of abuse hard, if not impossible, only endangering potential victims even more.

StopBaptistPredators.org, which is no longer being maintained, served as a database for past abuse cases. It was run independently and not affiliated with the SBC, which is not interested in this type of record-keeping.

Upon the release of child sex allegations involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky, Penn State hired former FBI director and federal judge Louis Freeh to investigate. Is this what the modern church needs?

Churches trying to cover up sin and disregarding allegations of witnesses can be compared to ignorant bystanders who don’t report witnessed bullying in schools. “Students who passively participate in bullying by watching may come to believe that the behavior is acceptable … Research indicates that witnesses to bullying develop a loss of their sense of security,” according to the California Department of Education.

In this case, it’s dangerous not to report observed wrongdoing. If intervention and reporting such incidents are encouraged in schools as solutions to bullying, why aren’t they encouraged within churches?

“[Schools should] conduct assessments … to determine how often bullying occurs, where it happens, how students and adults intervene, and whether your prevention efforts are working,” according to the website stopbullying.gov.

Failure to report child sexual abuse is a misdemeanor offense. Yet it goes on too often, in the places people least expect, such as churches. None of the churches mentioned support of such harassment in their doctrines, but corruption has seeped in to religious institutions in a greater way today than ever before.

Of course, there are good and bad apples everywhere. It’s important to be strong and stand firm in whatever one believes in, despite hypocrisy.