This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In recent weeks, the Mormon media battle has entered the territory of child sexual abuse. I have been involved in Mormon women's and LGBTQ activism since 2010. My primary impetus for involvement has been to assist in maturing the community dialogue until child sexual abuse could become a topic of public conversation. I am pleased to see that Mormons and former Mormons are now more openly discussing this critical issue. The safety of our most vulnerable population is paramount.
Child sexual abuse is especially difficult to address because children are often unable to adequately report harm. Adults who were victims of childhood sexual abuse are more capable of addressing the subject, and even of doing so publicly, but it can be difficult for adults to provide reliable evidence of events that may have happened decades earlier. Memories of early childhood abuse are often inadequate to prove guilt and can sometimes be incomplete and even inaccurate.
Perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse work diligently to ensure they will not be caught. Children are exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation and silencing. Perpetrators work to keep their victims quiet and to minimize the chances that children will report. Perpetrators seeking easy access to victims will work to gain trust in church communities. Great harm comes to children as predators seek to achieve their objectives.
Adult and child victims of childhood sexual abuse deserve to be believed and supported even when their reports cannot be proven or seem unbelievable. Perpetrators and potential perpetrators should immediately be reported to proper authorities, efforts should be made to protect victims from any further contact with potentially dangerous individuals and treatment should be sought. Predators can be male or female, married or unmarried and can be childless or have children. Sometimes they work alone; sometimes they work together.
That said, sometimes false public accusations of child sexual abuse are made. False or manipulative accusations or accusations made for the purpose of directing attention away from one's own guilt are destructive to communities and further harm victims. They happen.
The politics and media battles of recent years have taken a toll on Mormon families and communities. Whatever one thinks of recent changes, there can be no argument that working to ensure the safety of Mormon children is a priority to anyone who is not invested in harming children for personal gain.
Focus should be placed both on helping victims receive appropriate treatment and support and on preventing potential future child abuse. Child abuse prevention is most effective when communities are educated and appropriate child protection policies are instituted.
The church has implemented specific policies it says are sufficient. Others disagree; rhetoric surrounding child protection policies is not always convincing, and children continue to be harmed. Every possible measure should be taken to prevent perpetrators from using the church to gain access to victims.
The Mormon church is large enough to act as its own insurance company. It does not buy insurance to cover its liability should a child be harmed, and it pays for any settlements out of its own funds.
This practice of self-insuring has allowed the church to develop child protection policies that differ from policies required by major insurance companies. While one could argue that as long as policies are effective it does not matter if they differ from what would be required by an outside insurance provider, one could also argue that the church selects policies that may be less effective because it has the ability to cover damages. If policies are, in fact, inadequate, the fact that they might not be acceptable to outside insurance providers is concerning and could even demonstrate that the church is not sufficiently committed to protecting its own children from sexual predators.
Whether or not the church chooses to purchase outside insurance is not necessarily the concern of its members. Whether or not the church's child protection policies are strict enough to make the church insurable most definitely is.
Parents should feel comfortable that the church is doing at least as much to protect children as standard insurance providers require. Any current child protection policies should be immediately altered to meet the highest standards demanded by outside insurance companies.
Anne McMullin Peffer has a bachelor's degree in human development and family studies from the University of Utah and is a master's candidate in clinical psychology at Harvard University Extension School. She is a sixth-generation Mormon and no longer believes in Mormonism.