How the Duggar Family’s Over-the-top Beliefs Created an Environment That Fostered Child Sex Abuse

By Jenny Kutner
Salon
May 26, 2015

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/26/how_the_duggar_familys_over_the_top_beliefs_created_an_environment_that_fostered_child_sex_abuse/

Josh Duggar (Credit: Reuters/Brian Frank)

Several outlets have noted in the past week that the Duggar family has been outspoken in its support of Bill Gothard’s home-schooling program, which includes lessons on sexual assault that blame and shame victims for their “immodesty” and for contributing to their own abuse. (Gothard happens to be no stranger to problematic sexual behaviors; he was accused of sexually harassing his female employees last year.)

Mother Jones posted a sample of the sorts of lessons the Duggar family advocates, originally cited by blogger Samantha Field, and the takeaways for children are horrifying:

These lessons do not just teach girls and women to blame themselves. They teach boys and men to blame them as well. They reinforce the notion that men should be allowed to act violently with impunity. They erase the detriment of sexual violence and portray it as something else entirely — an accident, not a crime.

But there’s so much else going on here; the homeschooling lessons reveal only a small segment of an even more intricate, scarier belief system. The Quiverfull movement — to which the Duggars not only subscribe, but also support mightily on their now-shelved reality TV series — promotes exactly the sort of retrograde, misogynist ideas that allow sexual violence to flourish. Gawker has a handy guide to some of the movement’s basic principles, which taken together create a perfect storm for rape and sexual assault to occur, and then for the burden to fall squarely on female victims’ (modestly covered) shoulders. Via Gawker: