As archdiocese builds new system to address clergy sex abuse, trust grows

I am more than willing to concede that assaults took place at BJU. Hopefully not many, but even one is too many. I agree that counsel offered was at best unwise, and at worst, self-serving in the sense that protecting the reputation of the school was often deemed more important than the welfare of the victim or the legal punishment of the offender. I am thankful that there seems to be no evidence that BJU employees assaulted someone and were protected from facing legal investigation and prosecution. I am willing to concede that reporting the offense to the proper legal authorities was not as strongly advocated as it should have been. I am thankful that BJU is not guilty of the same scandal as ABWE, namely knowing they had a prominent employee committing multiple assaults over an extended period, and covering it up. I do think much of this caught BJU off guard, and it took a while for them to learn how they should deal with these situations. With that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for a good discussion.

GN, page 278 and 280 list BJU staffers who are alleged to have committed sex crimes and no police reports were filed, including one case where children were molested. I really don’t get how you argue that it’s a different thing than ABWE in this regard—OK, Ketchum’s offenses were heterosexual and the BJU staffer’s homosexual, but that’s hardly an argument that BJU’s offenses are less significant in my view. There are also dozens of witnesses who are saying that BJU specifically discouraged them from making police reports, and there are several confirmed examples of BJU not filing required police reports. Sorry, but this is the exact same kind of thing as ABWE did, just with BJU looking the other way at more perpetrators.

What you’re doing is something very dangerous; you’re trying to minimize the problems BJU had, and you’re asserting without evidence that people might be lying.

In doing so, you’re really doing the same thing that John Strampel and the MSU Board of Trustees, along with President John Engler, have done. Those same people are giving a textbook lesson in how NOT to handle this kind of thing; DO NOT EMULATE THEM.

OK. You have convinced me that BJU was more guilty of misconduct than I formerly believed. I thank you for that. But I think you are naive to accept every accusation as true. (statistics notwithstanding) Potiphar’s wife is a prime example. Our local newspaper often reports similar accusations that are later withdrawn. When people have shameful conduct to cover or an ax to grind, they often resort to false sexual allegations because most of these are notoriously difficult to prove. It’s “he said, she said.” Such accusations, once made, stain and linger even if the charges are later withdrawn. So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. BJU performed more shamefully than their supporters believed, and the Grace report brought this to light. It was a season of humbling. Some accusers probably made false claims or embellished reports to inflict harm on individuals or an institution they wanted to punish. I trust we have all learned valuable lessons. Hopefully, this problem will become less common as conservative Christians come to grips with a higher level of sexual assault that has permeated American culture, and from which our churches and schools have not been spared.

GN, the generally accepted estimate of false allegations is 2-8%. You can keep saying what you’re saying all you want, but all you are going to achieve is the end of any effective ministry to those who have been abused.

There are several reasons for the low rate of false estimates. You’ve got the shame of being assaulted, the near-certainty that people (like you) are going to accuse you of coming forward with ulterior motives, and the “scorched earth” approach many defense attorneys use in such cases. It’s bad enough that a lot of victims characterize it as a second rape, really.

Moreover, if you’re found to have made false accusations, you face civil and criminal liability, and at the same time your name will be known by HR all over as someone doing so. One of the quickest ways to get your resume thrown in the circular file, really. Overall, making a false accusation will tend to ruin a person’s life.

And every decent counselor, plaintiff’s lawyer, and prosecutor knows to warn complainants about that. So the real landscape isn’t a morass of false accusations, but rather something even worse; real victims who are silenced by fear of what will happen if they come forward. You will do well to act on this knowledge, GN, and stop coming out on the wrong side of the equation.

I thought we had come to a satisfactory end of this discussion, but apparently not. Statistics on false reports can only document those that are proved false, as when the accuser admits guilt or evidence proves it. Most of the time it is impossible to know. I wonder how Egyptian statistics would have categorized the accusation of Potiphar’s wife against Joseph? She did not admit her guilt. No one witnessed the actual transaction. Potifar believed his wife’s accusations, and an innocent man went to prison. My wife is less believing of many accusations than I am. We read the stories from our local university. Girl attends party, gets drunk, undresses, goes to bed with a young man. Some days later, she reports that she was raped. The man says it was consensual. She claims she said “no” at the very last moment. Hmmm. Who’s telling the truth? Today’s culture will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume the man is guilty. In truth, only the two individuals know, and if sufficiently drunk, neither of them may actually know. Only God’s knows for sure. Statistics will never list this as a false accusation, but in many cases, that is no doubt the case. So no, I am not ready to jump on the “me too” band wagon, and I would caution you against doing so either.

Drunk people cannot consent, GN. It’s the law in all 50 states. Now we might quibble that the situation you describe differs from what we classically define as forcible rape, and I would agree, but if indeed she was three sheets to the wind, it was illegal to have sex with her whatever she did or did not say. All you need to convict the man is (a) evidence sex occurred and (b) evidence she was drunk.

And yes, Title IX reports (university reports of sexual assault) just might plunge if you got it through peoples’ heads that you don’t have sex with someone who is drunk, and that if your inhibitions go down that much when you’re drunk, you might do well to limit how much you drink.

Again, you need to learn something about this subject, because (a) you’re getting it dead wrong in many ways and (b) you’re extremely likely to come into contact with the victims of this sort of thing.

The situation above isn’t the only example. If an 18 year old man sleeps with his 17 year old girlfriend in most states, it’s considered rape even if both parties claim it was consensual. Why? Age limits and state laws. I’m not going to get into the morality of that, but in the state’s eyes it is a crime and people have gone to prison for it.

Are we going to start discussing what ‘rape - rape’ is now, a la Whoopi Goldberg? Really?

Hmmm. Then can drunk people assault? Who was it who said, “The law is an ass.” Let’s leave alcohol out of the illustration. A college girl goes to bed with a college man. Some days later, she claims she was raped. He insists it was entirely consensual. Who to believe? Today’s cultural climate tells us to always believe the woman. Common sense tells us that’s nonsense. Perhaps she consented, but became angry when word got around that he was bragging to his friends about scoring with so and so. She claims rape to punish him for talking about it. Who to believe? What statistical category does that situation fall into? Or, suppose she goes to bed with him because she wants to become his girlfriend, and thinks that’s the way to do it. He, however, considers it simply a one night stand, and is not interested in pursing a relationship. As we know, hell has no fury like a woman scorned. She claims rape to punish him. How do we sort that one out? We live in a climate where the women must always be believed. It’s a “men are always liars and women always tell the truth” world today. Again, that’s nonsense. In many of these situations, the truth cannot be known with any degree of certainty. Welcome to the sad consequences of the sexual revolution! In a hook-up culture, bad consequences abound.

Bro. Barkman wrote:

A college girl goes to bed with a college man. Some days later, she claims she was raped. He insists it was entirely consensual. Who to believe?

You’ve just described the frustrations of every single law enforcement investigator in the country who works in a college town or on a military installation. My personal favorite was a sexual assault case where all participants; alleged victim, alleged suspect, alleged witnesses, were all too drunk to accurately remember anything.

Nobody argues that there are cases that are more difficult to try. That noted, the best studies we’ve got indicate that the median man who has committed sexual assault has six victims, a statistic that works pretty well with the notion that 20-25% of women suffer some form of sexual assault.

And if the perpetrators are a small minority of men committing multiple crimes, it also precludes the notion that it’s often about “women with an agenda” or “regret sex.” It should then go without saying that if our rhetoric suggests that we believe it’s mostly, or even significantly, about agendas or regret, we can just kiss our ministry to victims good-bye.

There is nothing to gain from speculation one way or the other. Where we have data, we have data and where we don’t, we don’t. Even where we have data, it’s gathered from humans by humans and is subject to bias and other factors that later result in the ol’ “New Study Finds More/Less …. than Previously Thought!”

It’s how science works, and it’s never perfect.

The continual drum-beating on this topic (with the attendant extrapolations and speculations and insinuations and other unprovables) by certain people in forum discussions isn’t actually contributing to solving any real world problems.