- Personal experiences, but without naming names of individuals or churches.
- Thoughts about how we can make it harder for these things to happen in secret in our churches.
- Thoughts about the best way to handle accusations when they come up.
- Please do not accuse specific people or name names of people you strongly disagree with. A public internet forum is not the right place for a hearing.
- Please do not debate what "the true percentage" is, none of us knows what we do not know.
- Please do not confront other participants.
- Please do not focus on a particular kind of churches, such as conservative Mennonites or Catholics. It's not about the denomination.
- Please do not debate these guidelines in this thread. They are important for the kind of conversation I would like to see, there are other threads for other kinds of conversations.
Here's the problem as I see it.
Churches are built on trust, and we need to be able to trust each other. Ideally, you shouldn't ever have to think about the possibility that someone in a church might abuse your children, and when this kind of thing happens, our first instinct is denial. It reflects badly on us. We expect our churches to protect our children from the evil we see in the world, and when this kind of thing happens, we see that we have failed.
But churches are also human, and human beings do really bad things sometimes. Churches are meant to be a place where we walk with victims and stand up for them, but victims often face churches that do not believe them, and in some settings victims may even be kicked out of the church and have their friends abandon them. Churches are supposed to be a place of healing. What is our responsibility to victims?
Churches are also meant to be a place of redemption, but we know that many perpetrators do not repent and continue to be a risk to their communities. And we probably shouldn't treat all kinds of offenses the same way - a teenage boy who touches a teenage girl after she says no is pretty different from a church leader who uses his power and influence to groom children over a period of years. What is our responsibility to perpetrators? What does the path of redemption look like, and what boundaries do we need to be safe from perpetrators who are on this path?
Sexual abuse thrives on silence, and there's a real temptation to just blurt out every accusation as publicly as possible. But is that really good for the victim and the accused? Where and how should these things be discussed? Sexual abuse is usually done in secret, what kind of evidence do we need to know that a claim is true? How do we avoid demanding more proof from victims than a victim can possibly provide? How do we avoid believing false claims?