A casual reading of the news would lead you to believe the Catholic church has a monopoly on sex abuse cover-ups. Experts have long known that to be false. The Catholic church simply has a mechanism and the means to move around predator priests on a grand scale.
Other religious organizations also protect their own, including the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE). The ABWE is a governing organization for Baptist Christian missionaries.
Since 2002, a group of women who were sexually abused as children by fellow missionary and surgeon Dr. Donn Ketchum, have been demanding an investigation and justice of the handling of sexual abuse in the missionary field. This particular set of victims were all daughters of other missionaries serving with Ketchum. Children of missionaries refer to themselves as MKs.
This month, the results of a three-year investigation were finally released. The 280-page report details the failure of the organization to meet the needs of the child victim who came forward, and provide a safe environment for other children. Almost 20 child victims of Ketchum were identified.
As reported on the Bangladesh MK blog, and in Christianity Today, Ketchum’s tenure with the organization which began in the 1960s was marked from the start with sexual impropriety. In the beginning, it was extramarital affairs.
The first reports of sex abuse of children surfaced in 1989 when a 14-year old MK visiting the U.S. from Bangladesh, reported to her pastor that Ketchum abused her the previous year.
Her pastor did not report it to the police.
As detailed in the report, the pastor instead told the leaders of ABWE who responded in ways that have become all too typical in cases involving religious organizations. The internal investigation focused on the perpetrator and the reputation of the organization with little to no regard for the victim.
- The girl was interrogated for two days about the sex abuse by the leaders of the organization in order for them to determine the validity of her accusation.
- She was forced to confront her accuser in person with her parents, who heard about it for the first time there, and Ketchum’s wife, in attendance.
- She was considered a willing participant and had to ask forgiveness for herself in addition to offering forgiveness to Ketchum.
- Everyone was forbidden to ever mention the incident–a defacto gag order about the abuse.
The investigators who prepared the report determined that these actions, and many more, created a culture where abuse could thrive.
In a letter to supporters of ABWE, interim president Al Cockrell responded to the results of the report by outlining the changes it has made.
“We have been building safeguards and oversight to guard against this lack of accountability in the future, including implementing much more comprehensive, stringent and ongoing oversight for the protection of all of our missionaries and staff, particularly our children. We have also adopted a new best-practices Child Protection Policy and will be launching a top-tier mission-wide training and educational program about child protection later this year.”
Ketchum was expelled from ABWE in 1989, surrendered his medical license in 2012, but has not faced criminal charges.
Watch Al Cockrell speak about the investigation here.
Featured image by Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
