Kanakuk Kamps Abuse Reexamined In New Report

The Frenches do some good work here—it’s horrifying, but praise God for them shining this light—and it strikes me that Kanakuk did a lot of what ABWE, New Tribes, and others did. The big failure here is that they had a lot of indication that crimes were occurring, and they tried to handle it inside instead of reporting it to the police.

I don’t believe one can prevent these things altogether, but what we can do what we can to take good action on them. Report it to authorities—they’ve got a (in general) more finely honed sense of reality vs. nonsense(fertilizer detector), subpoena power, huge resources they can access, the ability to collect and process circumstantial evidence, and….a big portion of the blame if they drop things or mess it up.

And if it’s not yet a crime, take action on the violations of policy that are found that aren’t yet crimes. Let’s remember that Christian sexual morality is—or at least ought to be—quite a bit stricter than that of the law, and hence we can, theoretically, separate problem individuals from situations before they’re clearly criminal. In Newman’s case, that included helping campers violate curfew, ignoring anti-nudity rules, and teaching kids contrary to Scripture about sexual ethics.

A final note from French’s article is that sometimes we have too strong a view of what can be achieved through marriage—it helps many, yes, but that doesn’t mean we can let down the barriers we put in place to avoid compromising situations. Kanakuk did, and a lot of young men suffered as a result. One has even taken his life.