JOS (NIGERIA)
Christianity Today [Carol Stream IL]
December 10, 2024
By Rebecca Hopkins
y the time Barbara Jo Jones went away to a missionary boarding school at age six, she could speak two languages. But as a missionary kid born and raised in Nigeria, she didn’t have the words to describe the ordeal of a school employee sexually abusing her. And if she did tell someone, she knew she would get in trouble and risk her parents’ ministry.
So she stayed silent.
Now, 60 years later, that silence around the abuse at Hillcrest School in Jos, Nigeria, may be finally, fully broken. Eight Christian organizations have agreed to fund a third-party investigation of all the allegations against the school from its founding in 1942 to the present. Victor Vieth of the Minnesota-based Zero Abuse Project will lead the inquiry.
“It feels hopeful,” Jones said. “It’s in the open. There’s no pretending that it didn’t happen.”
Former Hillcrest students spent three years pushing for a trauma-informed investigation with a firm the alumni trusted. They negotiated with Hillcrest and the faith groups that sent students there. The eight that agreed to fund the investigation are the Church of the Brethren’s Global Mission, SIM Nigeria, the North American Baptist Conference, Pioneers UK, Resonate Global Mission, the Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
“We commanded a seat at the table,” Hillcrest alumna Letta Cartlidge told CT.
The alumni’s efforts started in 2021 when a group of 1,500 former Hillcrest students were reliving the good old days from Nigeria in a Facebook group. Jones’s brother, Dale Gilliland, knew a secret about frequent poster James McDowell, a former Hillcrest principal. Gilliland pressured McDowell to publicly confess on Facebook to molesting students. Soon other alumni shared their own stories of being abused.
Alumni formed the Hillcrest Survivors Steering Committee (HSSC). The group estimates that there were at least 50 abusers at the school and that hundreds of the 6,000 missionary kids, Nigerians, and expat kids from 40 countries were abused.
“They all deserve to be validated,” said Cartlidge, who is HSSC’s president and also an abuse survivor. “They all deserve to understand and let go of the shame they have carried and understand that the shame was not theirs. The shame is with the church. The shame is with the school. The shame is with the perpetrator. It had nothing to do with them. In no world does a child ask to be abused.”
Most of the children sent to Hillcrest had no say in their attendance at the school. Their parents felt they had a call from God to serve abroad. Missionary organizations arranged—and in many cases required—that children be sent to the boarding school, starting as young as age five.
“We were immersed in a culture,” Cartlidge said, “that gave no credence to the voice and choice of children.”
The results of the investigation remain to be seen. Survivors do not know what justice they can reasonably expect after so many years and after many of the people they accused of abuse have died. But they are already celebrating what their advocacy has accomplished.
“We are given agency,” Cartlidge said.
HSSC played a big part in determining the investigation’s scope. And HSSC members have negotiated for ongoing involvement as the investigation begins. If Zero Abuse Project sends out a survey, Hillcrest alumni can give input, Cartlidge said. HSSC also got the missionary agencies to agree to pay Accord—an advocacy, training, and coaching agency—for the services of a victim advocate. HSSC chose the specific advocate to support survivors, Grace Stewart, who has 16 years’ experience, including some in Africa.
All told, HSSC spent 15,000 hours on their efforts, Cartlidge said.
The alumni did not convince every group with historic connection to Hillcrest to fund the investigation, however. HSSC identified a number of additional mission organizations that sent students to the Nigerian boarding school, including SIM USA, SIM International, SIM Australia, Assemblies of God World Missions, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board (IMB).
Those groups say they did not have oversight of Hillcrest.
“All people deserve our unrelenting commitment to protection and compassionate care,” Somer Nowak, IMB spokeswoman, told CT in an email. “We have read the first-hand accounts of the abuses that were reported to have been committed by those in authority at Hillcrest Academy. We are not aware of any IMB personnel who have been accused of abuse at Hillcrest Academy or were serving on its leadership team at the time of the abuses.”
The investigation will also examine allegations of abuse at the school and look at how reports were handled by missionary organizations that sent children to Hillcrest, Zero Abuse Project reported. Cartlidge said investigators estimated the investigation would take nine months but the organizations are open to extending, if necessary. Zero Abuse will make a final report available to the public. It has also committed to working with law enforcement if investigators learn of crimes that could still be prosecuted.
While HSSC is encouraged by the terms set at the start of the investigation, some alumni say they’re struggling to believe that justice is still possible. Jones told CT she almost decided not to participate. It felt too hard to hope again after she tried and failed to get SIM USA to take action three years ago.
Jones, her brother, and four other adult missionary kids from Hillcrest School and Kent Academy in Miango, Nigeria, sued North Carolina–based SIM USA. The lawsuit argued that SIM USA, formerly Sudan Interior Mission, was one of the organizations that helped operate Hillcrest. The mission organization said it didn’t have oversight.
North Carolina superior court judge Robert C. Ervin dismissed the case in 2022. He ruled that a state law lifting the statute of limitations on sexual abuse cases for a two-year period did not apply to sexual abuse that happened outside the state.
Two of the plaintiffs were able to continue the case in North Carolina because plaintiffs’ attorneys argued the statute of limitations froze in Nigeria when they left the country before turning 18. They ultimately reached a settlement with SIM USA. But four plaintiffs—including Jones—had to drop out of the case.
For Jones, it felt like being silenced again.
The lawyers were able to put some of her allegations in the court document: how a male employee of Hillcrest “inspected” her private parts during showers and took her to his apartment at night to beat her with a stick.
But there was more it didn’t say: what happened in the dorms at night, how harshly the teachers disciplined her, and how her suffering didn’t end when she left the school, carrying with her all the things she couldn’t say.
“There was no escape,” Jones told CT. “It was devastating.”
But she decided, in the end, she would participate in the current investigation. The fact that so many mission organizations are on board makes accountability seem within reach, Jones said.
“It’s with the missions,” she said. “I just wish that we all hadn’t had to wait so long.”
Anyone with information about abuse at Hillcrest can contact Zero Abuse at Hillcrest@zeroabuseproject.org.