As SBC Abuser Database Is Put on Ice, Advocates Are out of Patience and Executive Committee Is out of Money
“ ‘It’s the end of an era,’ said Tiffany Thigpen following the announcement that the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Executive Committee is no longer pursuing the implementation of an abuser database.” - C.Leaders
Also…
- It’s official! Messengers were monumentally stupid in their sex abuse actions - SBC Voices
- Abuse database is no longer a priority for Southern Baptist leaders - RNS
- In his mission and calling, Dalrymple aims to mobilize the SBC in abuse prevention - Baptist Press
- SBC Executive Committee proposes plan for budget woes - Baptist Press
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Our church significantly curtailed our CP giving this year.
The SBC Voices post is really hard on the decision of the Messengers to do ARITF and the database, etc. I look at more as part of the unavoidable process of learning how to solve a problem you haven’t tried to solve before.
Sometimes you just have to throw ideas at it and see if something will work. It doesn’t look like “idea 1” is going to work out. Well, if you try things there will be fails. Kudos for trying.
(Edit to add: This sometimes turns into nothing more than “Just do something!” … which isn’t wisdom either. I get that. But you might have to try things you have less than full confidence are going to work.)
But I don’t have much for ideas on how you solve this problem in a network of independent churches.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I'm not an SBC man. I pastor an SBC-affiliated church, but I have no desire to get involved in SBC politics.
That said, there was a failure to deal appropriately with sexual abuse situations occurring in SBC churches in the past. However, it wasn't as widespread and endemic as the media and SA advocates wanted the public to believe. Any large organization that deals with children, religious or non-religious, will have its share of sexual predators. The question is how can these organizations best weed out the perps.
Given the nature and structure of the SBC, there is really no good way to "enforce" a specific solution. The best the SBC can do is determine that a church is not in cooperation with the SBC. Developing and maintaining a database of perps is fraught with legal exposure. Witness the current lawsuit from J Hunt. Everyone knows the legal risks involved. SA advocates believe the SBC should move forward anyway.
The feeling now is that the SBC swung the pendulum too far (because of "emotional blackmail") and is now in legal and financial jeopardy.
At my church, I'm the "grand poo bah" of Sunday School, and what we're moving to is this:
- Background checks, starting with all male volunteers. Unfortunately, we need to watch costs.
- Check volunteer names for free here. https://www.nsopw.gov/search-public-sex-offender-registries
- Serious reference checks.
Regarding what the SBC was proposing, my view is that it would be something to augment records of who's been convicted of crimes, and there is a plus and a minus there. Plus is that things that are not prosecutable, like adultery, could be listed there. Since the Biblical category of "porneia" includes a lot of this, it would be a valuable addition to reference checks--nobody puts a reference on their resume that will tell bad things about them.
The down side is that if you do so with an insufficient standard of proof, you open yourself up to a lot of legal liability. So if you're going to create a database, you need to discipline people to (a) list any legal documents involved and (b) keep things to clearly known facts. Even that can be a bit dangerous.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
The down side is that if you do so with an insufficient standard of proof, you open yourself up to a lot of legal liability. So if you're going to create a database, you need to discipline people to (a) list any legal documents involved and (b) keep things to clearly known facts. Even that can be a bit dangerous.
If someone has been convicted, that will show up on a background check. The database isn't needed for that.
If someone has only been "credibly accused" or someone has only "confessed," that is where the legal and financial exposure is. By publicly naming these individuals as "accused" or "suspected" abusers, molesters, rapists, pedophiles, etc. you are opening yourself up to defamation and invasion of privacy civil suits that will cost you tens-if-not-hundreds of millions to defend, settle, or lose. No organization, religious or non-religious, can sustain open-ended legal and financial liabilities like this.
The abuse survivor community and their advocates don't care. They'd rather see the SBC burned to the ground.
Tom, we probably ought to parse things out. Agreed 100% that in cases of criminal sexual or violent conduct, we ought to hold to the legal process and not say "guilty of rape" when the court hasn't found that.
What we might find, however, is that the vetting of such allegations will often reveal behaviors that are not in themselves criminal, but are yet disqualifying for ministry, especially for childrens' ministry. A classic example would be the case where both accuser and accused admit to sex, but insufficient evidence exists to convict for sexual assault. Worthy of jail? Listen to the jury, but we can simultaneously say "definitely not worthy of the pastorate."
Another kind of case would be where a childrens' ministry volunteer gets "handsy" with teen girls (or kids of other ages), or has a pattern of violating rules regarding being alone with kids.
One other note is that this kind of thing becomes incredibly difficult because it appears that a strong majority of sexual assault allegations do not get a good basic investigation including "investigator assigned", "secondary interview of accuser conducted", "possible witnesses identified and interviewed", and the like. So there's a huge gap between what we'll see in conviction records and what actually happened--for convictions, exonerations, and (!) findings of false accusations.
So there is a huge opening here for "we can't convict on this in a court of law, but these are behaviors we do not want to see in our pulpits or childrens' ministries."
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
What we might find, however, is that the vetting of such allegations will often reveal behaviors that are not in themselves criminal, but are yet disqualifying for ministry, especially for childrens' ministry. A classic example would be the case where both accuser and accused admit to sex, but insufficient evidence exists to convict for sexual assault. Worthy of jail? Listen to the jury, but we can simultaneously say "definitely not worthy of the pastorate."
Another kind of case would be where a childrens' ministry volunteer gets "handsy" with teen girls (or kids of other ages), or has a pattern of violating rules regarding being alone with kids.
Publicly describing someone as "handsy with teen girls" instead of "suspected child molester" doesn't really remove the legal liabilities. This kind of database would be a plaintiff attorney's dream. You have defamation, emotional distress, reputational harm, loss of income / livelihood, etc. After suing the SBC (which housed the database) and the local church (which provided the complaint info to the SBC) into bankruptcy, the attorney and his "handsy" client would enjoy a nice 7-or-8 digit windfall.
Let's see how the Hunt $100M lawsuit ends. If the SBC loses or settles for big $$$, the database will be permanently shelved.
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