Abused by Baylor University when she had to courage to report being assaulted by "murdering minister" Matt Baker when he was a student there, Lora Wilson is still a target of reflexive abuse.
Blame the victim is a hideous American practice, not exclusively a Southern Baptist sin -- one at which Christa Brown fired back when Lora Wilson was maligned with Baker's words in a recent blog comment.
The smear continues in part because the Southern Baptist institutions which are at fault have failed to acknowledge their responsibility. Christa writes:
To this day, no Baylor official has made any public expression of remorse. No one at First Baptist of Waco, a church that had two reports of Baker’s abuse, has expressed any sorrow about letting the man move on without consequence. No one at the Baptist General Convention of Texas has offered any explanation for how someone with so many abuse and assault reports could move so easily through its affiliated churches and organizations. And no one in Baptistland has made even the feeblest of effort to reach out to the many more who were likely wounded by “murdering minister” Matt Baker -- the many who are probably still silent.
Not just femaie, either, but regardless of sex, there is still a penalty for "telling." And a higher price for silence:
While researching this piece, I spoke to a number of adults – men and women – who as children endured horrific sexual abuse at the hands of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers and female carers. Very few of them had ever had a chance to tell their story before, and the effect of keeping their experiences to themselves for so long has had a disastrous effect on their mental state.
Original poster for the 1968 film "Rosmary's Baby," directed by Roman Polanski
A celebrity then as now, three decades ago Roman Polanski drugged and raped a protesting 13-year-old girl during a photo session a lesser artistic light might not have been able to arrange.
Polanski fled to France in 1978 on the day of his sentencing, was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday and is predictably the focus of special pleadings on his behalf. For example, the French who protected him for years now argue that there is a case for mercy based on Polanski's "exceptional artistic creation and human qualities." Polish Filmmakers Association chief Jacek Bromski told the Associated Press that Polanski had paid for his crime "by not being able to make films in Hollywood."
They sound like Southern Baptist ministers seeking special treatment for a clerical sexual predator or star believer at sentencing time while the predator is in denial. Thomas J. Reese, S.J. at On Faith indicates the appropriate reaction:
Imagine if the Knight of Columbus decided to give an award to a pedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison. The outcry would be universal. Victim groups would demand the award be withdrawn and that the organization apologize. Religion reporters would be on the case with the encouragement of their editors. Editorial writers and columnist would denounce the knights as another example of the insensitivity of the Catholic Church to sexual abuse.
And they would all be correct.
And I would join them
As should we all. Special pleadings for Southern Baptist sexual predators, Catholic priest sexual predators and Academy Award winning director sexual predators are all “elite deviance” and when those pleadings succeed, their success tends to foster repetition of the kind of crime involved.
Sociologists Anson D. Shupe, David G. Bromley define elite deviance as:
…illegal and/or unethical acts committed by persons in the highest corporate and political strata of society who run little risk of exposure or serious punishment, even though their deviance poses danger to the well-being of many others.
The film industry and the French should fall into shamed silence and Polansky should go to prison. There is no special standing which should be permitted to excuse use of one's celebrity, authority as an adult and ability to manipulate to rape an adolescent who was placed in one's care.
Mollie at GetReligion conducts an fine, arch survey of the blog duel over Polanski's fate.
Along the way we were reminded that Polanski's plea bargain, three decades ago, was itself a clear example of “elite deviance.” Polanski was to be allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges - unlawful sexual intercourse - and have his sentence commuted to time served.
Polanski fled when the judge indicated he might reject the plea bargain - a worthwhile thought given Polanski's forcible rape of a 13-year-old - and sentence Polanski to prison.
Sex offenders are apparently unsurprised when Southern Baptist clergy seek clemency for them, as Raleigh, N.C., pastor Ricky Mill did last Monday for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.
The pastor's good faith not at issue, but the overall predictability of the behavior is a concern.
In 2003 a researcher [.pdf] was told by a predator:
I considered church people easy to fool ... they have a trust that comes from being Christians...They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people ... I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.
The court was unconvinced, and on firm ground the plea for clemency made by Mills and others. Whatever the personal history of that individual offender, a study of child pornography offenders at the Butner, N.C., federal prison by M.L. Bourke and A.E. Hernandez Journal of Family Violence found:
More than 85 percent admitted to abusing at least one child, they found, compared with 26 percent who were known to have committed any “hands on” offenses at sentencing. The researchers also counted many more total victims: 1,777, a more than 20-fold increase from the 75 identified when the men were sentenced.
That study suggests a risk to the community in releasing a known offender. The offender has a twelve-year history of "looking at images of children being molested and sexually abused," and according to the Charlotte Observer had accumulated "more than 3,400 images and videos of naked, molested boys and girls, toddlers and teens."
If the pattern of seeking leniency had not already been established in cases in involving crimes like and including sexual indecency with children, it might be overlooked. Instead, it should be corrected.
Analyzing of the criminal records and self-reported religious affiliations of 111 incarcerated sex offenders, researchers Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone at Australia's Griffith University found:
... that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, serve to deter sexual offending behavior.
Another study found evidence that sexual predators consider churches an attractive environment. In 2003 one predator told a researcher [.pdf]:
I considered church people easy to fool ... they have a trust that comes from being Christians...They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people ... I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.
Despite their limitations, these studies do suggest that predators who stay in church understand how to manipulate the environment in ways which permit them to continue their predatory careers.
Neither possibility is a surprise to either the victims of clerical predators or those who labor for reform of church practices.
GetReligion's tmatt has an interesting post on the Washington Post story about the Baylor University study which found pervasive sexual abuse of women by clergy.
She also correctly observes that the problem is larger than references to denominational policies and practices imply:
Meanwhile, the nation is filling up with totally independent, nondenominational churches with few if any ties — especially legal ties — to anyone or anything. Is anyone keeping track of the clergy who serve these churches? Is anyone accountable for them? We are dealing with a form of church government and tradition called the “free church” and, truth is, the clergy in these churches are very, very free indeed.
Toward the end, she gets around to the Southern Baptist Convention when she says:
The SBC, however, resembles the Roman Catholic Church in contrast with the totally disorganized, non-structured reality that is the post-denominational world. Trust me: There is another story here. Is that buried somewhere in the Baylor research?
Well-earned credit is given Stop Baptist Predators for coverage of the issue.
Thus far no Southern Baptist pastor has cranked up the nerve to make the standard argument that tmatt is wrong -- the SBC is somehow helpless to deal with predatory pastors. You see, SBC churches are autonomous, and that somehow produces hands-off approach.
That argument is contradicted by the SBC's hands-on approach when the issue is fellowship with "unrepentant" homosexuals, calling women pastors, providing pensions, health benefits to pastors, etc ... .
Not to unjustly single out the SBC. It is the largest non-Catholic denomination in the U.S. and earned its reputation for refusing to safeguard Southern Baptist parishioners against sexual abuse.
For example, the SBC won special Time Magazine attention last year for refusing to take effective action to safeguard Southern Baptist children against sexual predators.
Which brings us to a key unanswered question: Whether nondenominational sex abuse by clergy is a larger problem than clerical sex abuse fostered by SBC inaction.
What are the characteristics of the ministers, pastors, priests, rabbis and other clergy responsible for sexually abusing just over three percent of women who regularly attend religious services?
The perpetrators of this pervasive adult sexual abuse are likely to be charming, even charismatic and apparently self-assured while actually driven by an unquenchable need for attention, affection, admiration and control.
Baylor University's Diana R. Garland and Christen Argueta summarized [.pdf] the results of a study which involved interviews with offenders:
Offenders were male and had functioned in ministry for at least 25 years. Based on this sample [of 25 who had been reported for sexual misconduct] , [Mark] Laaser and [Nils] Friberg conclude that the most common offender is a man who is reasonably successful and has a combination of narcissism, sexual compulsion, and need for affirmation.
In their book, Before the fall: preventing pastoral sexual abuse, Friberg and Laaser explain that six were identified as having full-blown personality disorders. 15 others had "patterns of personality problems not strong enough to be considered a full-blown disorder," with narcissism as the primary issue. Add "coexisting anxiety disorders and dependent personalities."
The result, they explain, is someone who is in fact brutally unconcerned about others;
This creates a need for affirmation and validation on the one hand, but an exterior appearance of not needing anyone, even to the extent of being blatantly unconcerned about what others think of them.
Case studies reveal a process of seduction is as ruthlessly exploitative as descriptions of the narcissistic personality type imply. Clerical sexual abusers first avail themselves of the emotional environment of the church. There is a carefully cultivated trust in the sanctuary of the church, and as a result the target trusts her (or in rare cases his) religious leader. The predator exploits that trust and the power of his position as her religious leader, and sometimes his dual role as religious leader/counselor, carefully grooming his victim [.pdf]:
Grooming is essentially seduction in a relationship in which a religious leader holds spiritual power over the congregant.
Using religious language to "frame" the relationship is apparently commonplace. P.L. Liberty writes in the Journal of Religion & Abuse:
You are an answer to my prayer; I asked God for someone who can share my deepest thoughts, prayers, and needs and he sent me you.
The grooming process is gradual, typically involving the well-practiced alteration of the victim's sense of what is and is not appropriate. In general concept, the predatory grooming of adults is not different from the predatory grooming of children. Cold-blooded opportunism is used to build deceptive trust and to entrap. Consider the Baylor case study account of a Lutheran woman named Carolyn, below :
You can see that the church environment is remarkably well-suited to the needs of predators, who carry out a form of rape. Dr. Gary Schoener, Executive Director of the Walk-In Counseling Center in Minneapolis which serves both offenders and victims of clergy sexual abuse, told the St. Petersberg Times that "17 states see even adult relationships with priests as a type of statutory rape. The victim can't possibly consent because the power relationship so clouds the issue."
It is also a crime in more than one sense, to permit further preventable incidents by failing to bring the full power of the church to bear on the problem.
Clerical sexual abuse of adult parishioners is widespread.
Baylor University's School of Social Work found in a nationwide, cross-denominational study to be published later this year "that 3.1 percent of adult women who attend religious services at least once a month have been the victims of clergy sexual misconduct since turning 18."
Christa Brown says the number is understated:
The study doesn’t reflect the women who were sexually abused by a religious leader and who completely stopped going to church. Nor does it reflect the women who were sexually abused by a religious leader and who now go to church only sporadically.
Case studies on Baylor's Clergy Sexual Misconduct site bear searing testament to the harm done by clerical abuse, but it is Ms. Brown's documentation of the case of Southern Baptist pastor Daryl Gilyard that is most compelling. Her account demonstrates how, with the complicity of denominational leaders, a predatory clerical career can roll across decades, harming scores of trusting church members.
This disturbing vignette has no hopeful conclusion.
Key leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. non-Catholic denomination, not only failed to stop a predator who began his career in a Texas, one of two states whose law explicitly forbids pastor sexual victimization of parishioners, but they also played an enabling role.
SBC leaders fostered, defended and continue to nurture conditions which resemble those identified by Diana R. Garland and Christen Argueta of the Baylor School of Social Work [.pdf] as creating conditions which permit clerical predators to flourish.
The resulting harm to the victims, almost inevitably acute.
Garland and Argueta write [.pdf]:
Reports based on case studies and on clinical intervention with the offended suggest that the results for the offended include self-blame; shame; loss of community and friends if forced to relocate either to escape the community’s judgment or to escape an angry offender who has been discovered or reported; spiritual crisis and loss of faith; family crisis and divorce; psychological distress, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; physiological illness; and failed or successful suicide attempts.
Concern in the SBC about those effects is still too weak to support effective, denomination-wide action against predatory clergy. Instead the SBC takes refuge in the argument that each church is autonomous in these matters, although that is plainly not the case for churches which welcome homosexual Christians into fellowship or which call woman pastors.
Religion Clause reports:
The Los Angeles Times reported today that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles has begun a grand jury investigation into the responses by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, and possibly other top Catholic Church officials, to reports of sexual abuse by priests.
The rest is here.
Gently clarifying the nature of payments made by New Life Church to a young church volunteer who had a problem with fallen fundamentalist star Ted Haggard, the New York Times writes:
DENVER — The New Life Church, a nationally known evangelical institution that fired its founding pastor, Ted Haggard, in 2006 over accusations that he had had sex with a male prostitute, made payments starting in 2007 to a young male church member who had a relationship with Mr. Haggard before the dismissal, the church’s pastor told worshipers on Sunday.The payments — part of a confidential legal settlement in 2007 that included money for counseling and college expenses — came from insurance money, not donations from members, the senior pastor of New Life, Brady Boyd, said in his sermon at the church in Colorado Springs.
Mr. Boyd said in an interview on Monday that the payments, and what has now amounted to second body blow of scandal, were kept quiet for two years partly because of legal constraints, and partly because of ministerial confidentiality rules, since the man had sought out church authorities for counseling about the affair. Mr. Boyd declined to identify the young man, but said he is now in his 20s and was over 18 at the time of the relationship. Mr. Haggard is now 52.
Mr. Boyd said he had decided to break the silence because the young man called a few weeks ago and said he was thinking of going public himself.
Grant Haas, now 25, sees matters differently:
Silence and abuse do seem to have robbed the victim of his church family.
Thus far we have heard no evidence that the church provided the emotional support and reassurance a victim requires to fully recover.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in support of slavery in 1845 and waited until 1995 to offer an oblique apology for “condoning and perpetuating individual and systemic racism.”
In his letter smuggled out of Birmingham jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mourned of his fellow clergymen how, “too many have been more cautious than courageous.” He wrote of how he had watched "churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”
Christa Brown of Stop Baptist Predators says today in her memorial to Dr. King:
Much the same could now be said about Southern Baptist leaders’ lack of courage in stepping up to the plate to effectively address clergy sex abuse. Instead of taking action, they stand on the sideline, mouthing “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities” about “autonomy” and “polity” … as if any of that could possibly be more important than protecting kids against clergy who molest and rape them.
If Southern Baptist leaders expect others to view them as champions of morality, then they need to start acting like champions and go to battle to clean up the mess in their own ranks.
Where are Southern Baptist leaders when standing up for those oppressed by their own clergy would mean actually doing something?
Where, in the face of very large numbers of active predators and as a result rapidly growing numbers of victims? Where are they, indeed? And why do they believe present and future victims can somehow wait?
How many Baptist pastor sexual predators and victims? Christa Brown at Stop Baptist Predators answers:
Most people who sexually abuse kids have multiple victims, often dozens. But again, let’s calculate this on the conservative side. Even if you count only the currently active 3,030 Southern Baptist pedophile ministers, and even if you only count 3 victims for each of them, that’s still 9,090 kids who will be molested and raped by Baptist ministers.
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