God is not an abuser: Responding to Daughters of Promise

January 30, 2019February 7, 2019

by Rosemarie Miller and Stephanie Krehbiel

Updated 2/6/2019: In the time since the publication of this interview, the editors of Daughters of Promise have retracted the essay that we discuss here in all platforms where they are able to do so. In a Feb. 6 email to Into Account, they accepted full responsibility for their mistaken judgment in publishing it, adding, “Your interview gave women in our readership the ability to articulate what was disturbing about the article. ” They are preparing their own public statement. Into Account deeply appreciates their acceptance of accountability and their desire to learn.

Rosemarie Miller is a survivor advocate, speaker, and writer who works to raise awareness about the prevalence of child sexual abuse in faith communities. Raised as a Plain Mennonite, she now works with survivors from a wide range of church backgrounds, including many from conservative and plain-dressing Anabaptist groups.

We published Rosemarie’s personal narrative of abuse on Our Stories Untold last November. Several week ago, I did an interview with her about her anti-abuse advocacy.

Recently, Rosemarie contacted me again, and what she showed me led to the following discussion. –Stephanie Krehbiel

Rosemarie, let’s just start with the tough stuff: You and I both read an essay that disturbed each of us so much that we decided together that we need to talk about it publicly. It’s in the most recent issue of a conservative Anabaptist women’s magazine called Daughters of Promise, and the author of the piece is writing about her marriage to a man who had what she labelled as an “inappropriate relationship” with a girl who was living in their home.

More accurately, we later learned, her husband had sexually abused a teenage girl for two years before being caught, prosecuted, and convicted of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. (Content warning: the hyperlinked definition contains explicit descriptions of sexual assault. The source is a defense attorney’s website, which may be triggering for some readers.)

We also agreed on the reasons for publishing our conversation: not because we want to shame the author of the essay or cause damage to the magazine, but because we’re seeing and experiencing the suffering that this piece is causing to sexual violence survivors, and we don’t want anyone who is having similar feelings to suffer alone. And also because the essay follows some recognizable and troubling patterns that both of us are committed to fighting.

You received a copy of this piece from a friend who was devastated by it. Talk to me about that. Why did she share it with you? What did she object to in the essay?

Yes, this has been a very tough thing to process. I personally felt physical pain after reading this article, even though it took me some time before I could really begin to articulate well what was disturbing me so much. Of course, it was clear on a fast, first reading that we were dealing with a case of a minor who had been sexually abused. The survivor who shared it with me was so deeply impacted that she was reaching out for support to process the article. She saw the minimization of the abuse of a child in the use of the term “inappropriate relationship”, rather than correctly labeling it “abuse and a crime”. She noted many other things as well, such as the wife seeming to equate unreservedly trusting her husband with trust in God, as well as her evidently allowing him full and free access to their own minor children as fast as she was legally allowed, including him moving back into their home with the children once he was out of jail.

I had a very similar reaction. And one of the things that most disturbed me was the degree to which the author didn’t even seem to see the victim as a person. She was one of the “town girls,” which struck me as a way of making her seem less valuable, less worthy, than the “Godly” people in the author’s family and community. There’s one part in particular where she writes, “God reminded me that, more than my husband had sinned against me, he had sinned against His Heavenly Father.” But if we’re going to use the language of sin, we need to point out that he sinned against the victim. That victim being a young teenager who came into his home to escape another situation in which she was raped and abused.

Right! The “town girl” reference was something that my survivor friend and I had both noticed. Since I grew up in a culture that would have used the phrase “worldly girl”, it didn’t fully impact me on my first reading as much as it did my friend who had exposure to the phrase in her childhood. She said it well: “Then there’s the phrase town girls. That is code for ‘ lesser in value’. There’s an underlying mentality that the girl is expendable. She’s never mentioned again after he comes clean. What happened to her? She’s the victim. Not the husband.” Also we both noticed after the wife’s initial reference to the victim, the narrative from then on only focuses on how hard things were for her and her family, and then how ultimately wonderful in the end, with God working all this out for good. I get that the wife was writing this from HER perspective, but at a minimum, it would have been helpful if the editorial process at Daughters of Promise had caught this concern and addressed it somehow.

I’m going to quote the author more extensively here, from the end of the piece, because it sounds like this is the part your friend is talking about: “My favorite verse is Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love the Lord, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” I know that we may have a love-hate relationship with this verse. I think when we understand its true meaning – that all things work together for the good of God’s Kingdom, not for our earthly pleasures – this verse truly becomes a comforting verse in the valleys.”

The author seems to be invested in the idea of this as something that happened to her family, not something that her husband actively did to another person. I’m thinking of a number of cases I’m familiar with or have been involved with in which victims are pitted against the perpetrator’s family.

Yes, I too have noticed over the years that the greatest concern is often for the perpetrator and his or her family, not for the victim and their family. I am somewhat at a loss to explain this when it comes to the church and community in general. In this specific situation, I am going to guess that since the wife evidently was hit by this disclosure out of the blue–having had no inkling, she felt, previously–that her sense of helplessness and events being out of her control–is reflected in this re-telling of events. I can only hope and pray she will receive effective and knowledgeable counseling to help her properly process and heal. While I am a victim’s advocate first and foremost, I am also deeply concerned for the families of perpetrators, and realize they are victims of the crimes and sins, and need much support and help. But in our concern for them, we must NEVER EVER neglect the primary victim. I hope and pray that the support and concern for the young victim in this case was clearly shown by the community and church, even though there is no evidence of it in this article.

At some level, I think this is about symbols, and what Christians claim to hold sacred. The idea of family is sacred. The idea of heterosexual marriage is sacred. But sexual violence victims are rarely seen as sacred; they’re much more likely to be seen as inherently suspect. They’re seen as people who destroy marriages, families, and communities. So of course churches side with the people who represent what is sacred to them.

I would guess that there is a lot of truth to that observation, Stephanie. I also have observed over the years that the idea an adult would molest a child is so reprehensible and unimaginable to some people, that they must always find some way to blame the victim. “They must have wanted sex!” “She must not have dressed modestly!” “Well, we always KNEW she was ‘troubled’!” And in this case, she was a “town girl”. We need to begin accepting the sad reality that there really are ravening wolves among us who actually are so evil that they prey on vulnerable, helpless people, who are absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. And further, we must fully recognize and accept that the adult is ALWAYS 100% the adult, and the responsible party. NOTHING a child does EVER excuses an adult victimizing them. As long as we justify, excuse or in any way try to minimize the seriousness of sexual abuse crimes against others, we are party to the crimes and sins. We make it harder for the offenders to ever get the help they need, and we make it easier for new crimes to occur against vulnerable people. This is really serious stuff, both from a spiritual and legal perspective.

Let’s talk about the legal perspective for a second. Both you and I know of dozens and dozens of these crimes that never make it to a courtroom, but this one actually did, and the offender–the author’s husband, David Dwight Stoltzfus–was in prison for five years. We read the media coverage of his crimes after reading his wife’s essay. How did you feel when you read that coverage?

I was disturbed when I read the article in Daughters of Promise because I recognized so many areas of concern. But when I read the news coverage of the situation, I was literally staggered. It was extremely hard to read. This man took a child, who had already been victimized sexually, into his home to allegedly provide a safe haven for her, and then sexually violated her nearly every day for two years, while threatening to return her to her home where she had previously been traumatized. My heart broke completely anew for the victim and all she has gone through in life. I can not stop thinking about her. I pray, oh I pray, that she is now finally truly safe and loved, and surrounded by the support system she needs to heal and function in life. Such a betrayal to a child even ONCE is devastating, let alone to be taken in by people alleging to love Jesus and His Holy ways, and then to be abused again under threats.

My other concern is for this perpetrator’s children who he clearly has access to. I pray the perp has people in his life who are truly effective and knowledgeable about child molesters who are helping him be fully honest with God and himself about the desires for power and control that he used as his justification to abuse this precious child. If he does not have that, if he does not have help, we both know that studies show that offenders are highly likely to reoffend at some point again in their lives. Clearly the judge was concerned about this as well, after having reviewed all the facts of the case, including the reports from the psychologist and others, that he sentenced him to be placed on the sex offender registry for life.

And as gentle as I want to be with his wife, due to the extreme pain he caused her, I have to admit that reading she tried to defend the perp in the courtroom was very hard for me as well. Where were her instincts as a Christian to defend and protect the child who had been entrusted into her care, in her home? Reading the news account, in conjunction with her own article, just made me even more concerned for her, and her need for knowledgeable support. There are major things to wrestle with in a situation like this, and it takes a lot of safety and support to be able to do so effectively. I pray she will find that kind of support system.

What do you think a spiritually mature response to this essay would be? What would you do if someone submitted it to you, as an editor?

Stephanie, I hope I would have godly wisdom to respect where this woman is at right now in her journey, while still realizing that publishing an article that has these errors in it helps to perpetuate the cycle of abuse by failing to clearly identify the situation as that, and advocates for blind trust and no boundaries with a sinful, criminal spouse who had not earned the right to have blind trust, let alone with children. Further, the fact that she is lamenting that law enforcement got involved–when a person who is truly repentant should turn themselves in to law enforcement and freely confess their crimes–does readers a disservice. We need to be teaching how to respond appropriately to abuse cases. I know that is our desire in this interview and that because we both DO care and DO want to raise awareness and provide education, we are committed to sending this interview to the publishers of Daughters of Promise.

I think one thing I want these editors and publishers and others like them to understand is that publishing something like this is not actually a kindness to the author. It is enabling. She has been terribly hurt already; she deserves a community that is able to tell her the truth.

I absolutely agree. The truth is hard, but the truth sets us free. And uncompromising honesty is the best course in life to follow. We can not have one type of injury in our physical lives, have it misdiagnosed and mishandled medically, and expect to heal well. The same is true in our spiritual and emotional lives. Injuries must have accurate diagnoses, and treatment, for full healing.

There’s one more thing I want to talk about in relation to this case, and that’s the witness intimidation. The news coverage mentions that the perpetrator’s mother received two years of probation for trying to stop the victim from reporting the rapes to the police. What were your feelings when you read that?

Stephanie, I think my first reaction was grief for the victim who was subjected to that on top of everything else! My second reaction was deep relief that the evil of witness intimidation was caught, called out, and dealt with in a public and legal manner. I pray that it serves as a strong warning and deterrent to others who would be tempted to fall into this sinful and criminal practice!

Yes, it was an unspeakably cruel thing to do to a kid. I was thinking, too, that it was a completely recognizable behavior, in terms of what you and I both see as advocates. Usually it’s too subtle to be criminal witness intimidation, but there’s still an implicit threat. “If you don’t let this go, you’re going to destroy the church.” “Are you really willing to ruin this man’s life?” “You’re going to get a reputation, you know.” “Are you sure you’re not enjoying all this attention?” At the heart of all of this is an existential shaming that, in our culture, I think works especially well on women and other marginalized people. The message is: “How dare you prioritize your body and your safety? How dare you believe you’re important enough to be worthy of respect?”

And that takes me back to the essay, in which the author–who, again, is married to a rapist–talks about how she used her faith to stop herself from certain kinds of thoughts. She wrote, “God clearly laid on my heart to never be my husband’s policeman or mother. I was called to walk beside him as a loving wife. I didn’t want to be a suspicious, untrusting wife. It is hard to have a happy marriage if a couple can’t trust each other.” And then later, “I often hummed the song ‘Then sings my soul, ‘My Savior God…how great thou art’’, when unforgiving thoughts wanted to come to my mind. I had to remember how great my God is, how much He gave to save me and not let my mind harbor bad things.”

For me, this was the most disturbing aspect of the whole thing. Because the language she’s directing at herself is the language of spiritual abuse. Her personal spirituality is her business, but publishing her essay promotes the kind of denial that endangers other people, including children. God is not a gaslighting narcissist who demands that we ignore reality.

As you said earlier, the statistical reality is that this man has probably abused more than one victim and will probably abuse again. No one in their right mind should be trusting him with kids or teenagers. And yet his wife isn’t alone in convincing herself that trusting an abusive person or an abusive system is somehow analogous to trusting God. That’s the most effective form of witness intimidation, right there: a theology that teaches victims to trust abusers.

You summed that up well, Stephanie! “That’s the most effective form of witness intimidation, right there: a theology that teaches victims to trust abusers!” I have certainly seen that over and over in my work as an advocate as well. People feel that because the abuser has offered a verbal statement of repentance that it must be accepted fully, at face value, whether or not the offender goes on to show any effective fruits of repentance. These would include things such as removing themselves voluntarily from access to vulnerable minors, accepting without complaint all logical consequences, getting themselves into professional counseling with someone who is highly trained in child abuse cases, reporting themselves to law enforcement, and so on. I have heard expressions such as, “I feel so sorry for him–he’s really hurting!” and “We shouldn’t throw stones–we are all just a step away from doing like he did but for the grace of God!” I’m sure as an advocate, you have heard similar statements.

I have, although to be honest, I think you hear them more often, because the communities you relate to on a regular basis are more fundamentalist. Certainly, I hear a lot of empathy for perpetrators expressed at the expense of victims. But this notion that everybody is just a stone’s throw away from committing sexual violence seems to be particularly powerful in plain Anabaptism and other fundamentalist traditions. And it’s used as a means of minimizing and normalizing sexual abuse when it happens.

I have a thought that I’d like to share about the belief that we are all just a step away from molesting a child, except for God’s grace. Because that statement can be confusing if we don’t use godly discernment on it–it sounds kind of humble, kind of Biblical–and I’m sure that is the reason it gets used! But we need to stop and really think through the fact that portraying sexual abuse of a child as something we can just sort of tip and fall into, without much warning, is dangerous territory and false teaching. Because the truth is–we FALL close to where we STAND. If I choose to stand within mere inches of the edge of the Grand Canyon, I will almost certainly fall over the edge, and likely to my death, were I to have a sudden bit of vertigo or a slip or fall. But if I choose to stand well back from the edge of the Canyon, I will still fall, but not plunge into the Canyon to my death. I think it’s important to realize that if we are not standing right up at the edge of child abuse, we aren’t going to just “fall” into it. It is a series of choices, a series of decisions, and steps, that leads someone right to the edge of the Abuse Canyon. They didn’t just wake up one morning, and just step or fall right into abusing a child.

That’s true. I think it also reveals a really deep confusion about the difference between consensual sex and sexual abuse. Like, you don’t fall into Abuse Canyon unless you enjoy using sex as a weapon of power and control against other people. You can be completely interested in consensual sex, enjoy it regularly, and never have the slightest temptation to be sexually violent or wield sex for power and control. The problem isn’t sexual desire. The problem is a desire to manipulate and dominate other people. And there is no cheap form of grace to make that go away.

You are so right, Stephanie! While I absolutely believe in the power of God to redeem the worst sinner who comes to Him in full and complete repentance, the sad truth is that way too many abusers never get to that point. Even if they stop abusing children sexually, they often continue to relate to others with power and control in dysfunctional, abusive ways. This is something I have seen first hand, and it just creates a strong desire in me to see pastors, churches, community leaders, spouses and really, everyone, educated on how to respond with wisdom and great discernment to abuse cases. The victims need help to recover and find healing, the secondary victims need help, and the predator certainly needs help. We can’t ignore anyone in an abuse situation and think we are doing things right. This is too serious of a matter to continue stumbling around as has historically happened!

Rosemarie, thank you for bringing this essay to our attention, and for this discussion. Somehow, I don’t think this is going to be our last interview.

Sexual abuse in Plain Anabaptist Churches: An Interview with Rosemarie Miller

January 10, 2019January 10, 2019

After publishing Rosemarie’s personal narrative of abuse on Our Stories Untold last November, we knew we wanted to spend more time talking to her about her current work, and particularly about the prevalence of sexual violence and other forms of child and domestic abuse in Plain Anabaptism. –Stephanie Krehbiel

Rosemarie, tell me about what’s happening in Plain Mennonite churches right now in terms of sexual abuse. Have things changed at all since you were a child?

Stephanie, thank you for asking. I would say that in some small measure, there may be some cases where child sexual abuse is being taken more seriously, here and there. But my general observation is that there are still massive issues with child abuse of all kinds–not just sexual abuse–being minimized and not dealt with transparently, or very wisely.

How is it dealt with?

In my own story, as you are aware, it was “dealt with” by blaming me, and forcing me to apologize to the abuser for my alleged “part in it”. I have seen similar patterns continuing.

Are there more recent cases that you’re able to talk about?

Yes. I’m aware of other cases that are far more recent than mine where blame has been assigned to the victim as well. In one sickening situation, the church decided that the victim had to have wanted a sexual relationship with the abuser. They were shipped out of the church and community to “get counseling”. The offender was allowed to continue attending the church without any restrictions or accountability from the church, even though there were other minor, vulnerable children the abuser still had access to.

So the victim who was “shipped out” was a minor?

The victim was a minor, at the time of the abuse, yes.

What does “get counseling” mean in a situation like this?

In many instances in the very conservative groups, the only “counseling” is provided by the Bishop or minister. Many of the very conservative groups do not allow any counseling beyond that which is provided by the leadership, who are not trained or educated about trauma, abuse or any other topics of importance like that. Most have nothing beyond an 8th or 9th grade education in their own church run schools. In “less conservative” groups, they may send off a victim to a Mennonite or Amish run “counseling center”. Typically, these are staffed by people who feel “called” to help others. Many times, they have no real counseling background or training. There are frequently issues with the staff understanding the real depths of trauma, abuse and other things that are crucial to really helping victims.

What happened to the victim in this case after they were sent there?

The victim was given a few months of “counseling”. They did not return to live in their home community but relocated to a new area and new church. This is a common thing I have seen–the victim often is who has to find a new life and place, while the abuser is embraced and allowed to remain in their home community. While this is not always the case, it is frequently. In one case I know about, with a teen girl, she continued to live in her home with her parents, and the offender (who was single) was sent to live in a different community with a family. The father of the teen victim wanted to go file a police report for statutory rape, but was absolutely forbidden by the church leaders to do so. The female victim was excommunicated from the church and told to make a public confession, just as the adult, male offender was.

What would have happened to that father if he had defied the church and filed a police report anyway?

The father would have been excommunicated for having been “rebellious”. Because he was employed by a business that was very deeply involved with the church, he would have lost his job as soon as he was excommunicated. He would have also lost the support he had for any medical expenses because in that group, they eschew all forms of health insurance and depend only on the church for help with expenses beyond their own ability to pay. His church run car “insurance” program would have been gone, since he was no longer a member. Any children attending the church run school would have been at risk of being removed from the school, and on the list goes. While it’s easy to say that he should have reported the offender anyway, it’s also important to realize the level of change a decision like that would have entailed for his family, made it hard to make a decision to go contrary to the leadership’s directives.

So what you’re describing, it seems, is a set of church practices that make people economically dependent on their congregations, as well as socially dependent on them.

That’s right, Stephanie! While the level of dependence varies, depending on where a congregation is on the “conservative” spectrum, the very thing that is seen as a plus–the close community and deep involvement in each other’s lives–becomes a horrible weight when abuse exists, and churches are not doing the right thing by victims! It makes it excruciating to break free and stand by the victims if the church doesn’t take that stand, because you are risking losing everything–your social, spiritual, family, and financial support systems can all be wiped out. If you are a victim, or a victim’s family, you can see how hard it would be to stand up to that level of pressure and fear.

It honestly sounds like the ideal setup for fostering abuse, and the sense I get from you and other current or former Plain/Conservative Anabaptists is that the scale of the abuse in these communities is far beyond what is making it into the public eye. What would you like to see happen?

Yes, the level of abuses that go on in some of the homes and churches is so hard for me to even know how to express, because it grieves my heart so deeply for those who are experiencing it. I know first hand the amount of damage it can and does do. I think more education could be useful for some situations, especially in the really insular communities who have cut off so much access to others–I think there are people in those communities at times who really may be unaware of the law, and how abuse cases should be properly handled. I also believe that when it comes to some of the less isolated communities–those who freely listen to the radio, read the news, have the internet etc.–the issues with abuse being badly handled, not properly reported to the authorities and so on, goes beyond a lack of education and into willful hiding of abuse. I don’t think that will stop until either they have a genuine revival of their hearts, or there are such consequences from legal authorities that they fear to continue hiding and covering for the abuse of children.

With a few exemptions in some states, federal mandatory reporting laws for child abuse usually include religious leaders. Are you saying that leaders in conservative Mennonite communities are willfully and knowingly breaking those laws?

I think it is possible some leaders do not genuinely know. I also know there are some who are willfully putting their heads in the sand and who know what the laws say, but try every creative way they can to circumvent the law. They make excuses about how they would never report a “repentant” abuser–as if they can determine on the basis of short term contact with an abuser who has been outed that he or she is repentant. Typically they “determine” that the abuser is repentant, based on the tears and statements of the abuser, so there is not a report made. In some cases, a report is made, but is so vague as to be essentially worthless. In other cases, the church members are forbidden to discuss the situation with each other or others outside the church, so the leadership can control the narrative, possibly going so far as to threaten God’s judgement and excommunication if the membership disobeys. There are all sorts of ways that leadership attempts to control the situation that I am aware of, not only in cases I have first hand knowledge of, but also in stories others have shared with me about things they have witnessed in their own congregations.

You talked about your experiences with abuse as a child in your Our Stories Untold narrative. I know that you’ve also experienced the dynamics you’re describing here as an adult whistleblower in your church. Can you talk about that experience at all?

It was a very difficult experience. I fortunately had the full support of my immediate family, as well as a good support network outside of the church, so that helped a lot. But it was still not a fun experience to need to take a stand when there was an attempt to hide abuse in our own church. Some years before, after long soul searching, my husband and I had determined that we would never again sit by while abuse was covered up or hidden. We had seen it happen over and over in churches, and seen the fallout for the victims and their families. So in that sense, when it came to the test, there was no decision to make, and that made it easier. We knew we couldn’t be complicit, and we weren’t. We lost a lot due to our decision, but as things work in God’s economy, we gained more than we lost. We don’t regret our decision to take a stand at all.

And now you’re part of a larger network of people, both inside and outside of churches, who are trying to bring more attention to abuse in Plain communities. How did that start?

Well, that would be a LONG story! But in short, because of my own history, I obviously had a huge interest in supporting victims and learning to understand better what the dynamics were for abuse situations. I’d done a lot of self education, and learned to know others who had a heart and passion for protecting children and helping victims heal over the years. Fortunately, I was able to identify and connect with safe people who are also working in this field. They are a blessing to stand shoulder to shoulder with, working on this important task! And I find the connections just continue to grow as awareness about child abuse grows! I think the more we connect, the greater strength we are gaining as we join our voices together. We have more ability to network, and create changes that are for the good of victims! And I can’t emphasize enough that what are “best practices” for stopping abuse, and protecting and healing victims, are ALSO for the best good of our churches, homes and communities! While they may seem to create “more pain” in the short term, in the long run, these are best for everyone.

One small example would be supporting a victim in getting effective counseling and genuine support for healing. The ripple effects from that one person becoming more personally healed and healthy will ripple out to affect so many, many more people. For example, co-workers, a spouse, children, the church and on it goes. On the other side, the effects of a hurting, broken person also ripple out to impact others in negative ways. So which do I want to be a part of? Healing and wholeness, or dysfunction and pain? If we want to empower our families, churches and communities, we need to stand against abuse, practices which enable abuse, and start the process towards health and wholeness.

What you’re saying sounds so incredible and needed, and yet I know you’ve faced some pretty intense pushback. You have a movement here that isn’t dependent on instruction from church leaders. How are church leaders responding to that?

Well, it depends. It ranges from church leaders (some plain, some not) blessing me, to some in leadership positions, and some who are not, really pushing back. I’ve been told I’m going to face God’s “judgement”, people have been warned about me and so on. I think some people feel very threatened by what I am doing. On the other hand, many people are eager for information, education and support! I know what God has called me to do, and my heart’s desire is to follow Him no matter the cost to me personally. Children’s lives are at risk, the future of our churches and communities are at stake, and I cannot stand idly by.

When I look at the movements against sexual abuse in evangelical and Catholic contexts, it’s pretty common to see church leaders who seem to understand that some gigantic ship has sailed, but don’t seem to understand that it’s too late for them to get control of the ship. So they end up organizing big events to educate about sexual abuse, talking about the importance of helping survivors to heal, and positioning themselves as experts for congregations seeking help with abuse prevention. But I also see lots of survivors critiquing those actions. Do you see similar patterns in conservative Anabaptist circles?

For years, what I saw mostly was individuals here and there in some of the “mid-level” conservative groups (for lack of a better term) position themselves as people with a desire to help people heal. Some have done some great good. Others (based on survivor stories being told to me personally) have done some good, and some great harm. Many times these individuals have very little understanding of trauma and the long term impacts on the brain and body, and feel that some specialized prayers are going to heal the victims. When it doesn’t work as they think it should, they blame the victims. I know of one “healer” who has gone so far as to state that he wishes he could give these balky, unforgiving victims (as he views them) a good sound spanking to cure them.

More recently, there has been a bigger movement by some in the plain community to bring “awareness” to the sexual abuse crisis among plain churches, and some of the patterns you referred to, with people positioning themselves suddenly as “experts” and wanting to hold big events. However, I’m also noting that the voices of survivors are so far very lacking in events like that–and the survivors are the real experts, truth be told. Concerns which have been expressed about the omission of survivors at events have been met with a plethora of excuses, ranging from the alleged inability to find survivors who are “healed enough” to speak at events, to remarks about “overly emotional victims” who would cause more harm than good and so on. So it’s clear that there are still real issues with those who profess to want to help, not having a clear understanding of what best practices in this type of work look like.

Do church leaders ever listen to you? Do they ever consult you as an expert?

At this point, there has been a limited amount of that. I would say victims, those concerned for victims, and other victim advocates are where the bulk of my time and energy are going currently. I also spend a lot of time educating on prevention of abuse with parents who are concerned that they do an effective job protecting their children, as well as others concerned about child safety. And that is an area I am very passionate about, so I enjoy that work.

Are there other cases that you’re dealing with right now that you can talk about?

As you know, in work like this, discretion and confidentiality are extremely important, so I can’t talk freely about any case generally. However, I do have permission to share the following. A former victim who has been emotionally impacted by hearing about a current case, recently reached out to me for support and a safe place to talk. I can share that this was a case of abuse of a minor, who is now an adult, and they initiated a lawsuit against the man who abused them as a child, and the church the adult was a member in. There is allegedly a very wealthy church member who was able to take legal action, which resulted in the church itself being dropped from the suit. However, the suit against the individual is still ongoing. I am definitely keeping an eye and ear on the case, as well as seeking to be a safe place for this former victim, who needs a place to talk about the emotional impact on them of the legal proceedings.

Wow. That’s horrifying. In my experience as an advocate, it’s really difficult and scary for survivors to pursue lawsuits, even outside of closed communities like this. There’s all the public judgment that comes with suing, and then there’s the retraumatizing aspect of the legal proceedings, and the financial risk. I can’t imagine how much some of these things would be amplified for someone going up against a separatist Anabaptist community. Do you think there will be more abuse-related lawsuits against Plain churches?

I don’t know, but it would not surprise me. I believe as survivors are realizing more and more that they are not alone, that there are large numbers of us who were abused as children in one way or another, whether by older juveniles and/or adults, and the abuse has been repeatedly ignored at best, or actively covered up by churches at worst, and that some of us were abused further by the church in one way or another, there is a bigger and bigger outcry rising up. As The Plain People’s Podcast is making clear, these cases of abuse are not isolated incidents here and there. They are happening over and over in a variety of plain communities.

While you and I both know that child abuse is NOT just a problem in Anabaptist communities–it’s very present in all kinds of communities and churches–what I personally am very knowledgeable about is the Anabaptist communities. And while my heart breaks for any child being abused, I know first hand how unable to access any outside support and help I was as a child. I was surrounded in every facet of my life by the same people–I went to the church run school, my friends were part of families who went to the same church group, my father was employed at a business that was church affiliated, and on it went. It made accessing help to escape the abuse very unlikely, and as you know from my story, it did not happen.

Rosemarie, thank you so much for sharing with us and for the incredible work you do. I have one last question for you: If you could share any advice with Anabaptist church leaders, what would it be? Pretend you have a captive audience!

First of all, I would like to tell them there is incredible freedom in walking in the Light of God and honesty. That Satan is who brings fear–which leads to control, and then to abuse. God’s love sets us free and empowers us to walk with integrity and honesty in our relationship with Him and others. When we are living in a right relationship with Him, and know how much He truly loves us, and feel that love in the depths of our hearts, we are equipped to love people wisely and to relate to them without behaving in controlling and abusive ways. Secondly, I would like to tell them that strong people understand that they can only truly control themselves, not others. By setting others free to be who God wants them to be, we most empower them. And third, I would like to point out to them that children thrive best in safe, loving and gentle environments, and children who grow up thriving, become adults who thrive. If we want to see our churches, homes and communities strong and healthy, we must take seriously stopping this toxic cycle of abuse and control. This is my genuine heart cry for the Anabaptist homes and churches–and for all homes, churches and communities.

Surviving R. Kelly and My Moment of Realization: When naming your assault takes time

January 8, 2019January 8, 2019

by Alicia Crosby

On Thursday, January 3rd I found myself sitting on the couch in my mother’s living room watching Lifetime. For two hours, I bore witness to unconscionable stories of abuse and assault as my mother and I watched the 6-part docuseries by dream hampton entitled “Surviving R. Kelly”.

I’m a Black American millennial with an affinity for slow jams so my (mostly pirated) music library as a teenager had its fair share of cuts of songs sung or written by R. Kelly. As a 32 year old woman, I can no longer listen to anything produced by this man because as this documentary made clear, not only is Kelly unrepentantly violent and exploitative, some of these songs reflect his sexual and relational engagement with girls.

Allow me to rephrase. These songs document Kelly’s sexual assault of minors who are unable to offer consent because they are children. Children who are the age of my oldest godchild and – had I lived in the city that I know call home – children who could’ve been me or my friends.

I shed tears on that couch for the women speaking of unspeakable acts of violence that occurred during their girlhood and when I turned the TV off I wept for those whose stories go unheard and unbelieved. I cried for myself as something in me clicked and I recognized that something that happened nearly 20 years ago was clearly predatory and constituted assault.

Alicia Crosby, age 16

I was fifteen and to this day I’m not sure how old he really was but in our meeting he said he was seventeen. We met as I was walking home from the train and dated for maybe two or three months. We’d go to the mall and to the park and to the random myriad of places kids in NYC go. I remember he was always free to pick me up after school. That’s what tipped me off to something being wrong. Even if he was an upperclassman schooled elsewhere it didn’t make sense to me that this person could always make it to spend time with me especially given the varied nature of my schedule. I figured out that my boyfriend was an adult the last time we visited Manhattan Mall. There was a hiring fair on the lower level and I remember him asking someone about things my parents talked about like salary and benefits – words no ordinary teenager I knew used.

That event taking place made me ask to see his ID and I remember that turning into a fight. He gave some excuse or another but I persisted and this turned into a days long argument. Eventually I think I came across something of his that indicated he was in his mid- to late 20’s and I cut things off. Around this time I also found out he was seeing another girl who was even younger than me. When I realized this person who lied about their age to have access to me and to my body was seeing someone even younger, I tried to intervene. I don’t remember how I got her contact info but I do remember warning her about this adult man who was trying to prey on us. What made me sad then and what grieves me now is that he had been sexually assaulting her for nearly two years by the time she and I talked. That’s not how she framed it but that’s what it was because children can’t offer consent to adults to engage with them in amorous and/or sexual relationships.

Watching Surviving R. Kelly made me remember this experience and name what happened to me as an assault. It’s taken me seventeen years to identity this as an abusive encounter and I’m going to have to sit with that reality because it’s all so fresh. What my reflection over these last few days has done is make me think about how language can impact how we view encounters. Being in my thirties and committing to work that aims to dismantle and disrupt violent systems and relational frameworks means that I now have words to name something that I couldn’t really explain in another season but that I knew didn’t feel right.

It’s that access to language and the framing it helps me build that allows my adult self to name R. Kelly and all who coerce and lure teenagers into romantic and sexual relationships with them as being predatory and abusive. I am now able to name to the ways that these people engage with these young ones as assault and violence. I now understand that the inability for these young people to offer consent means that they are not having sex but being raped. I can see that Kelly or others recording their trysts with minors is not a production of sex tapes but the creation of child pornography and documented sexual assault.

Work like Surviving R. Kelly is revelatory. For some, watching a series like this helps them connect dots in their own stories and make sense of things that happened in their lives or the lives of those close to them. For others, the values and beliefs of those they are in community with comes to light. Regardless of what is revealed many of us are left holding questions and complex emotions in light of what we have come to know. And sometimes it’s hard to know what to do with what has surfaced for us.

After watching or hearing about Surviving R. Kelly, what are you left holding? What has come up for you? I personally have questions and grief that I’m processing through for myself, for my friends, for the women whose stories I bore witness to in the documentary, and for the countless others who’ve dealt with assault that they recognized as such then or are coming to understand as such in their adulthood.

I don’t have any answers or know what’s next for you but if you need someone to journey with you as you sort things out, reach out to the team at Into Account. They can point you to contextually appropriate resources that may be of help to you.

Alicia Crosby is a writer and a co-founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Center for Inclusivity. You can follow her work and support her on Patreon, which we enthusiastically recommend.

Our rock is the truth

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018

by Stephanie Krehbiel, Executive Director

It began with an email that several faculty members from a small liberal arts college shared with me. It was from their school’s Title IX Coordinator, shared with all faculty and staff of their school, informing them about the school’s mandatory reporting policy* for sexual violence. The pitch of the letter was pretty simple: “If you see something, YOU MUST REPORT. If you hear something, YOU MUST REPORT. If a student tells you something, YOU MUST REPORT.” That was the message to faculty and staff.

“Does this seem right to you?” they asked me.

***

One challenge with working in sexual violence advocacy in 2018 is that no matter what specific thing I’m trying to get done, 2018 just keeps happening. 2018 is the gift that won’t stop giving. As I processed my thoughts about that email and its injunctions, the backdrop was the brutal spectacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and the public treatment of the women who came forward with stories about their experiences with Kavanaugh’s sexual violence.

On the subject of reporting sexual violence, let me speak briefly about what has been done to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who truly had no good options. Her anonymous report to her congresswoman was leaked and ultimately reported by The Intercept; she came forward with her name only when it became clear to her that nothing meaningful would happen if she didn’t. She also came forward because she felt a responsibility to do so. She wanted to prevent further harm being done. In that latter quality, she reminds me of just about every survivor who has ever come to Into Account for help.

I saw that he had this job with kids and I knew he was going to hurt them.

I knew if I didn’t say something and he raped again, it would be on me.

I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

Ultimately, Ford testified in front of the Senate—and the American public—with far fewer legal and personal protections in place than would be tolerable in a courtroom, despite the attempts of her lawyers to secure them for her. And at the end of that, the Senate demonstrated how little they cared by burning through every chance for investigation and due process and confirming Kavanaugh anyway. The outcome she risked her life to prevent came to pass, and her life is still at risk.

Americans have endlessly debated her credibility. Her personal life has been made public. She receives hate mail and death threats, and at such a volume that she and her family have essentially been forced into hiding. Her story and her personhood have been cruelly mocked from pulpits, in news rooms, and most shamefully, by the sexual predator who currently occupies the Oval Office.

The collective laughter of vicious boys and men, the thing that Ford has testified most powerfully marked her trauma, is haunting all of us right now. My own survivor trauma involves such laughter. I was a child, and the boys who assaulted me were my age, not more than seven or eight. My memory is patchy and I have no clean narrative of these incidents. But I have clear memories of the laughter, of how amused they were by my anger and my efforts to fight them off. Indelible in the hippocampus.

***

Reporting doesn’t put a stop to the laughter. Ask Christine Blasey Ford. Ask some of our clients. Ask any woman who has gone public and then endured the taunting of men who debate the veracity of her story by assessing her perceived physical attractiveness.

There’s the laughter, and then there’s the outrage, the how dare she. Ford has been accused of ruining Kavanaugh’s life, of inventing her story to serve a nefarious political agenda. She’s been called a liar, but by the insidious abuser logic that grips so much of our public discourse, she’s also been accused of making too much out of a thing that may well have happened but that she should have gotten over. It didn’t happen, but if it did happen, it wasn’t a big deal. She’s a liar, but if she’s not a liar, she’s being oversensitive. Legions of conservative white women on social media endeavored to be offended by her on behalf of their boys and men, whose lives, they speculated, could be so easily ruined by conniving women like Dr. Ford. At the reeking floor of this cultural cesspit is the assertion that all boys do this, all men do this, and it’s the job of the rest of us to put up with it. If we can’t, there’s something wrong with us.

The day of Ford’s testimony, one of our former clients posted her story on social media, about her sexually abusive ex-boyfriend, whom she reported through a university Title IX process:

People I had always liked and admired, people I thought were decent and level headed, sided with my ex. I was “crazy”, “wanted to ruin his life”, and “why hadn’t I said anything earlier”?

It was devastating. I had been taken to the court of public opinion, then executed in the town square. Of course, some people did ask for my side of the story, and it was exhausting to have to retell and relive my personal hell over and over again. But I did it, I felt like I needed to.

So often, when we report, when we come forward, this is how it goes. Yet we’re told that we must report. The responsible thing to do is report. If we report, people can do something about it, and if we don’t report, we can’t blame people for doing nothing.

We’re told that it’s our responsibility to make people do something other than nothing. For that, we should be willing to risk being blamed for everything.

***

Which brings me back to that Title IX email. Which I hated.

It’s not that the policy itself was a surprise to me. I’m used to dealing with reporting policies like this, and they’re not the fault of the relatively inexperienced Title IX coordinator who wrote this email. She may well have had the fear of God put into her about the school’s vulnerability to lawsuits, should they not be able to prove that they are receptive to reports of campus sexual assault. At colleges and universities across the U.S., policies that require all personnel to report any suspected sexual violence to the school’s Title IX Coordinator have become standard. In defiance of the accumulated wisdom of professional victim advocacy in the fields of sexual, intimate partner, and domestic violence prevention, these policies require such reporting regardless of the actual wishes of victims.

I’ll put this in the starkest terms I can think of. Imagine you are a trusted faculty or staff member for a student who confides in you that her boyfriend is hitting her and raping her. She wants to leave him, but he’s threatened to kill her if she does. Like many abusers, he has isolated her from her friends and family, and she doesn’t know who she can trust. She’s terrified, and she needs to talk through her options with someone who can help her find resources without triggering an administrative process that she could lose control of.

This is a student whose life is in danger. This is a student who desperately needs help that doesn’t strip away her own agency or decision-making power. She likely knows better than anybody else what actions–her own or the school’s–might set off a fatal response from her abuser. This is a student that a lot of empathic women faculty have had in their offices. This is not an occasion for YOU MUST REPORT. It is unconscionable to ask a faculty or staff person sitting in front of such a student to make a choice between risking that student’s life and risking their own job.

Contrary to popular belief, federal law doesn’t technically require these blanket reporting policies. Reporting campus sexual violence involves two broad areas of relevant law: one is civil rights law (Title IX) and one is campus safety law (Clery Act). Title IX regulations require mandatory reporting from “responsible employees,” a category whose federal definition is so ambiguous as to almost be circular. The Clery Act requires it from “campus security authorities.” For a variety of reasons–the ambiguity in these categories, for instance, and the newly vast for-profit industry of products aimed at helping campuses achieve compliance with these federal laws–blanket mandatory reporting policies have become the default setting in higher education, even though they are not legally required.

I’ve read and heard many perspectives on these policies from people in academia. They aren’t popular policies with faculty, for instance. I have faculty friends who routinely receive reports of sexual or domestic violence and flat-out refuse to comply with the mandate to forward these reports to their Title IX office, because these faculty friends cannot in good conscience take away a victim’s agency and would rather risk their jobs. I’ve also heard multiple people–people who are probably less likely to receive reports of sexual violence–refer to these policies as a “sex panic.”

But this isn’t a sex panic. It’s a liability panic. From a legal perspective, blanket mandatory reporting policies at higher ed institutions make perfect sense. The most cynical interpretation, which I believe is operative on some level in pretty much every institution that has these policies, is that the policies help to legally absolve schools of responsibility for any sexual violence that isn’t officially reported, while at the same time making it less likely that survivors will talk about sexual violence at all.

YOU MUST REPORT. If you don’t, that says, you’re not our problem.

***

In the weeks after the client I quoted above went forward with her report of her abuser, the blowback against her was gut-wrenchingly awful. This is when my fortitude as an advocate is always tested: I see the suffering of our clients at the outcome of an action they’ve taken, and I fight off the temptation to fantasize about omnipotence. If I indulge that fantasy, then I can believe that there might have been an alternative I could have encouraged that would lead to justice without all the trauma. I wish I could learn how to be a better advocate from that fantasy, but I know I can’t.

I remember one particular phone conversation with this client and Into Account co-founder Jay Yoder. Jay recounted to her the mantra that carried Jay through a similarly grueling period of communal attacks. It went like this: What happened is real. What happened is true. I am standing on a rock, and that rock is the truth.

It’s this mantra I come back to when I sit in the pain of all my collected experiences and observations about what happens after survivors come forward, whether through formal processes or informal disclosure. There is all that pain, and then there is the reality that I still want survivors to speak, when they can. I still want survivors to come forward and say what has happened to them.

Because truth is a rock. That’s why. Not because I believe that individual survivors bear the responsibility to protect their communities from their perpetrators, or because I believe that the legal and bureaucratic processes available to survivors are truly designed to produce justice. It’s not because I believe I can save anyone from the re-traumatization that these processes so frequently deliver.

It’s because I’ve seen the power of the truth to heal. Lies may spread like wildfire, but truth is like a geological miracle. When survivors tell the truth about what happened to them, even as the flames burn around them, they’re standing on rocks that are expanding, searching, merging. Our rocks become a mountain range. We become summits, together.

I categorically refuse to concede the power inherent in the truth. I can’t control any community’s collective denial about its own sickness. But I can stand with you on your rock. I can bring you water. If you’re too tired to stand, or don’t have standing legs, we’ll sit. If you need to lie on the ground, we’ll lie on the ground. We’ll feel the solidity beneath us. We won’t know what comes next, but that’s okay. That’s the way of things.

What we will know, what I will remind you of when you need to hear it, is that all of our truths together have more power than we can fathom.

*What we call “mandatory reporting” at a college or university is materially different from mandatory reporting laws for child abuse. When you are a mandatory reporter as a result of a job that puts you in regular contact with children, you’re legally obligated to report any suspected child abuse to law enforcement, and failure to do so puts you at risk of arrest. When you’re a mandatory reporter at a college or university, you’re required to report any suspected sexual violence against a student to your school’s Title IX Coordinator, and failure to do so puts you at risk of losing your job.

Why Abuse Survivors Still Think Twice Before Telling their Stories: Retaliation At Goshen College

by Stephanie Krehbiel and Hilary Scarsella

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Documentation:
Introduction to May 5 event from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Anneliese Baer
Victim Impact Statement from Rachel Stoltzfus
Update Statement from Erin Bergen (July 2018)
Goshen Signed Resolution Agreement with U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights
Facebook Live Stream video of statements by Anneliese Baer and Rachel Stoltzfus, recorded at Goshen College, May 5, 2018

“There are many survivors who would like to be present today, but are restricted by time, financial burden, and the ever-present weight of Goshen College’s past inaction and silence surrounding our abuse. Let us not forget the voices that are not present today, and the implications of who has the most access to this space. As we take in these stories, remember that this meeting is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening after 6 years of constant silencing, and that affects how the information is presented today.”
–Anneliese Baer, May 5, 2018, Goshen College

On May 5, two courageous women who were abused in the Goshen College women’s soccer program, Rachel Stoltzfus and Anneliese Baer, spoke on the Goshen College campus about their experiences. Their stories included testimony about sexual harassment, racial misconduct, homophobia, stalking, financial manipulation, emotional abuse, housing and food deprivation, and life-threatening physical conditions. The stories began with the 2011-2012 school year, spanned the tenure of two different coaching teams, and implicated multiple current and former members of the Goshen administration and Athletic Department. Rachel and Anneliese spoke in front of Goshen President Rebecca Stoltzfus, a select group of students, the president’s cabinet, and other invited members of the larger Goshen community.

At the behest of other victims of abuse in the Goshen athletic department who could not be present or were legitimately fearful of retaliation if they showed up at the May 5 meeting, Anneliese and Rachel made their statements accessible to fellow victims and their supporters through a public Facebook Live video. In the time since that meeting, a number of Goshen leaders have tried to discredit the survivors who spoke, focusing on their decision to do so publicly. These survivors agreed to a physical meeting with a restricted guest list, but contrary to some of the recent assertions made by administrators and Goshen board members, there was never any agreement about containing these victim impact statements behind closed doors. Accusing these women of wrongdoing for publicly streaming their own words has operated as a convenient pressure valve for an administration that is clearly facing the heat from multiple directions.

We are sympathetic to the pressures administrators and board members face when confronted with the failure of their institution to adequately respond to abuse, but managing such pressures is well within the job description for administrators, and well within the expected commitments for board members. These women are not asking Goshen leaders to do anything but their jobs, and even that request, they make at great personal risk to themselves. It’s the responsibility of Goshen’s board and administrators to negotiate the difficult dynamics of their positions without passing the burden of that difficulty on to survivors calling the college to account for abuse they experienced at Goshen as students.

One of the most harmful things a college president can do, after revelations of systemic abuse in an athletic department, is to attack the integrity of survivor whistleblowers in front of all the students and personnel in that same department. When administrators and boards try to take pressure off of themselves by criticizing victims, the only people who really benefit, ultimately, are abusers.

And yes, that has already happened at Goshen, since May 5.

Survivors’ fears of retaliation have not been unfounded. As Into Account has continued to work with survivors at Goshen, they have brought us extensive documentation and evidence of recent retaliation. Due to confidentiality and our concerns about further retaliation, we are not sharing all the details we have at this point. However, it is our confident opinion that Goshen administration and Board of Directors share responsibility for responding to abuse revelations and May 5 victim impact statements with tactics that have fomented further abuse against current students.

On a related note, Goshen College is currently in a mandatory agreement with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, due to multiple failures in Goshen’s Title IX protections against sexual harassment. Those failures were found by OCR investigators after our client, Erin Bergen, filed a federal complaint against Goshen for mishandling her own case of sexual assault.

Title IX forbids retaliation against students who report abuse. Title IX also demands that schools take preventive action to protect students from hostile environments. Since May 5, in our opinion, Goshen has already failed on both counts. Those failures have caused terrible harm in individual lives. Furthermore, these failures are undermining what we had dearly hoped was some concrete progress in Goshen’s approach to race and sex discrimination.

As victim advocates representing current and former students who have experienced both, we are in the difficult position of receiving multiple reassurances from Goshen officials that we feel unable to trust, due to duplicitous actions that have intimidated and retraumatized our clients.

Not only are administrative attacks on victims unethical, immoral, and frequently illegal, they are also ultimately self-defeating. The past fifteen years of revelations about sexual assault cover-ups and high-profile administrative resignations at colleges and universities across the country should have taught this to all of us by now. The repressive tactics that worked for previous generations of leaders in higher education do not work any more. Social media is a large part of the reason why.

As of today, that Facebook live video of victim impact statements delivered to Goshen on May 5 has received nearly 3500 views. For a school as small as Goshen, that is a lot of views. There will be more. And these will not be the last Goshen survivors to come forward on social media and say #metoo.

Goshen owes these women. We need to be clear about that: the debt is flowing in one direction. There are far more victims from these soccer teams than those who spoke on May 5, and Goshen can never begin to repay them what they are owed. We are not going to entertain talk of our clients owing yet more gratitude to Goshen leaders for their willingness to listen to stories of abuse that happened in the recent past at Goshen. These women have been more than courteous. They deserve far better than to be treated like naughty children by officials from a school that is still struggling to meet minimal compliance standards related to the kinds of abuse that they suffered.

Survivors use social media because social media is the best way to reach other survivors. With the international #metoo movement, this is more the case than ever before. Social media allows us to organize while at the same time protecting us–albeit imperfectly–from physical and psychological peril. It gives us tools to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics we encounter from institutions. Survivors’ power is amplified through the people that we reach with our stories.

And thus, when college officials decry survivors’ use of social media, it’s time to pay extra attention to the content of what has been posted. To that end, we’re sharing the Facebook live video here, as well as printed versions of Anneliese’s and Rachel’s comments from the video.

We’re going to keep sharing their words. Into Account makes no apology for our role in disseminating their stories. Goshen cannot afford to attack these women; the news they carry is too important. When student athletes make up half of the student body, and when the bulk of recruiting of students of color happens through the athletic department, nothing is more important than making sure that the leaders and coaches of that department are people whose first priority is the health and safety of students. Not administrators’ egos. Not institutional reputation. Not fundraising goals. Right now, holding the health and safety of students as the first priority means practicing nondefensive solidarity with those who are asking for accountability, apology, and change.

To quote the refrain of thousands of wise activists over many years of struggle: People are more important than institutions. We understand the loyalty that can lead people to want to believe the best of their alma maters, particularly when they had good experiences there themselves, or know people who work there and work hard. But a college that builds its economic survival on the backs of abused students is undeserving of such loyalty. If you want the colleges and universities that you love to survive in a way that is worthy of your support, hold them to these high standards. Anything less is a betrayal of your trust.

ACTION ALERT: We’re asking folks to send email of support for survivors to Goshen College’s president and board. It can take a little as 30 seconds to amplify survivors’ voices.

Better Reporting for Bethel: Student Leaders Discuss Their Resolution to Promote Callisto

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017

For too many college victims, reporting an assault to campus authorities is a scary, obstacle-laden process. At small colleges, where it can seem like everyone knows everyone, reporting can be particularly fraught.

What if, for instance, your rapist is related to the Title IX Coordinator? (Yes, unfortunately, we’ve seen that.) What if someone on the investigative committee goes to your church? What if your abuser has threatened to retaliate if you tell anyone? What if your abuser is popular and has lots of friends? What if your college has a real “we’re all one big happy family” vibe going on and you’re worried you’ll be punished for raining on the parade with your rape story?

Most victims don’t report. At big schools and small schools alike, that’s still the reality.

There’s no reporting system that is a panacea for these problems. But the best online system we’ve seen so far, in terms of its sensitivity to the reporting issues faced by survivors, is Callisto, a platform designed by sexual violence survivors in the tech industry. Callisto does several important things that other systems do not. For instance, Callisto allows victims to make time-stamped reports of their assaults that they can wait to submit until they are ready—a feature that is particularly useful for victims fearing retaliation. They can also choose to submit their report only on the condition that another person names the same perpetrator. Reports can be anonymous. (Watch Callisto’s founder, Jessica Ladd, describe the system in this Ted Talk.)

Callisto has only been around since the 2015-2016 school year, but at the thirteen colleges where it has been adopted, the results are astounding. In the 2016-2017 school year, survivors who used the system were five times more likely to report their assaults than survivors who did not. Ninety-seven percent of Callisto’s users say they would recommend it to other survivors. Even during the pilot year of the project, when they worked with only two colleges, the sexual assault reports on those campuses quadrupled. (That’s a good thing, by the way. It doesn’t mean that the rate of assaults is increasing; it means that there’s a reporting system in place that victims are finding more approachable.)

On October 29, the Student Government Association of Bethel College (North Newton, Kansas) unanimously passed a resolution in support of Bethel adopting Callisto as its online reporting system for sexual violence. Into Account spoke with Kiley Varney, a senior biology major and the Bethel student body president, and Rebecca Schrag, a junior graphic design major, student government representative, and president of Bethel’s feminist collective Femcore, about the reasons for the resolution, and the current state of sexual violence reporting and education at Bethel.

If you’re part of the greater Bethel community–an alum, faculty or staff member, parent, and/or donor–Bethel students need your help right now. There’s one simple thing you can do to help student government bring Callisto to Bethel: Go to the Callisto website and fill out the form entitled “Bring Callisto to Your School.” You can fill this out as a student, alum, parent, staff/faculty/administrator, or “other.” Let Callisto know you’d like to see them at Bethel. And watch this space: we may have more actions related to Bethel and Callisto for you to take in the coming months.

If you’d like to advocate for Callisto at another school you’re connected to, you can also fill out the form for that school. Student activists interested in Callisto can download Callisto’s activist toolkit. Contact us here at Into Account if you need help getting started.

Into Account: Tell us about the reporting system that Bethel has right now. What options do students have for reporting? What are the issues with that system?

Varney: Bethel currently has a platform via our online campus infrastructure (ThresherConnect) that allows students to report student life-related concerns. When a student fills out this form, there is space for them to describe the event they are reporting as well as a space to describe their desired outcome of the situation. There is space for students to fill out their name and contact information if they wish to, but this section is optional.

I see a few problems with this system.

First, the form is called a “Student Life Concern Form”. This wording does not make it clear that the system can be used to report issues of sexual violence. Nowhere on the form does it explicitly say that it can be used to report sexual violence cases either. Even though this system is set up to handle reports of sexual violence, it is also used for a variety of other things such as roommate issues. The form even includes specific instructions for what to do if the concern is related to a class/professor. If a student were going to use this form to report a case of sexual violence but then saw these instructions for reports about a class, they might be deterred from reporting, for fear that this would not be the right place to do so.

Second, when a student does submit a concern via this system, it is unclear what happens to the information afterward. Based on the information given on this platform, a student would not know who their report got sent to and whether or not the information would be kept confidential. Not knowing who would see a report and what actions would be taken because of it might keep someone from reporting a case of sexual violence.

The third problem I see with this system is that a large number of students on our campus do not know that it exists. If students do know that it exists, they may not know that it exists to serve as a reporting system for issues of sexual violence among other issues on our campus. The system is not well-advertised a place to report sexual violence cases. Sexual violence is an issue that deserves its own reporting system that is separate from other student life concerns, and students should be better informed of what the system is for and how to use it.

Into Account: What are some of your biggest concerns about sexual violence on the Bethel campus?

Varney: My biggest concerns would be: 1) we don’t have an adequate reporting system, and 2) we do not do enough to educate students on issues of sexual violence and how to prevent them and report them. I am pleased with some of the work being done at Bethel to provide resources for survivors. We have a local organization called SafeHope with trained professionals that come to campus once a week and provide a space for people to talk about things that have happened to them or someone they know even if the occurrence was a long time ago. We also have a licensed counselor on campus that can provide regular counseling services to students. We are making progress in providing these services to survivors, but there is still more that can be done to improve education, awareness, and resources available to students.

Into Account: Tell us about your interest in getting the Callisto reporting system. How did the student government association get involved in promoting Callisto at Bethel? What led to your resolution? What are you hoping for?

Varney: This summer, I was informed about Project Callisto by Dwight Krehbiel (Professor of Psychology at Bethel, father of Stephanie Krehbiel, Into Account’s Co-Founder/Executive Director). Dwight also introduced me to two community members who are willing to put forth resources to help implement Callisto at Bethel. I learned about what the Callisto is and brought it to the entire student government to discuss.

At first, I was hesitant for SGA to support Callisto because of its high cost. It seemed like there would be better ways to use the money that the community members were willing to put forth to implement multiple educational/awareness tools and resources for students regarding sexual violence, instead of spending it all on a reporting system. After discussing these concerns at length with the Senate and seeing that many Senate members felt that Callisto would be worth the money and worth our support, I wrote a resolution that established official SGA support. The resolution, which states that SGA officially supports the college to pursue the implementation of Callisto, was passed by the Senate a few weeks ago.

With the passage of this resolution, we hope to continue to be in contact with everyone involved in influencing the College to implement Callisto. We have also reached out to the Title IX Coordinator and hope to meet with her and possibly other members of the committee after the new year to discuss Callisto as well as SGA’s other goal of implementing Bystander Training on campus. The resolution establishes SGA’s support (and by extension, the student body’s support) for the College to actively pursue Callisto, and we hope that that support will have a lot of influence on those making decisions about the implementation of Callisto. The resolution also lays the foundation for SGA members to continue to encourage the implementation of Callisto in whatever ways we may see necessary in the future.

Schrag: What I really love about Callisto is its emphasis to empower survivors of sexual violence. It would help resolve issues that our reporting system currently faces by giving victims options and support as well as a match system that safely connects victims of the same perpetrator together to validate each other’s experience and take action.

Into Account: Besides a better reporting system, what kinds of changes would you like to see in the way that Bethel approaches sexual violence?

Varney: I think that education about sexual violence and issues surrounding it can be improved. SGA is actively working on trying to bring Bystander Training to our campus. Bystander Training would be a great start to educating people about situations of sexual violence and how to intervene when they see dangerous or potentially dangerous interactions occurring. I would like to see Bystander Training implemented by next fall, and I hope that more education and awareness programs, as well as more availability to resources for survivors can be increased in the future too.

Schrag: I would like to see Bethel prioritizing these issues more. Last year, Bethel released a video spreading awareness of sexual violence and assault that specifically college students face. It was a step forward for Bethel to be aware that we have a problem but now it is time for us to create programs that combat this epidemic.

A Manifesto on Ass-Grabbing*

November 21, 2017November 21, 2017

by Stephanie Krehbiel

“It’s a no for me.”

*(-slapping, -patting, -squeezing—honestly, if you’re parsing the distinctions by order of offensiveness, you’re already in hot water)

The two most salient points I have to make about ass-grabbing are a) It is not trivial, and b) It is ubiquitous.

Ass-grabbing is just this thing that we’re supposed to live with. It’s fun, people say. It’s no big deal, people say. Take it as a compliment. I know this person who gets offended if people aren’t regularly grabbing their ass! Honestly, there are just so many rules these days, I can’t keep up with all these rules, everyone’s so sensitive now.

Is it really so difficult to not grab people’s asses? If you really value that sensation, could you maybe get yourself some sort of squeeze toy? They sell them in the pet store.

But that’s not as fun, is it? And the reason it’s not as fun, for the ass-grabbers among us, is that ass-grabbing is first and foremost a display of dominance. The aggressively sexual ass-grab in a bar and the grandfatherly ass-pat that George HW Bush is apparently so fond of—these are both displays of entitlement to another person’s body. It doesn’t matter if the intention was “affectionate.” If it weren’t meant, on some level, as a display of dominance, that expression of affection would not involve someone’s butt.

The person on the receiving end of that display may be accustomed to that kind of thing; they may be completely acculturated into thinking of their own body as something that exists for the pleasure of others. They might laugh it off, or not react, or try to be “game” about it. None of this means your ass-grab was harmless. It means your ass-grab was just part of a larger cultural context in which some people feel entitled to do whatever they like with other people’s bodies, regardless of how those other people feel about it.

Your ass-grabbing may be the least of the regular physical/emotional/sexual violations that your target is already experiencing on a regular basis. That doesn’t exonerate you; it just makes you one of a whole bunch of other entitled jerks.

Mostly, we put up with sexual harassment like ass-grabbing because we have no idea what kind of immediate hell might rain down on our heads if we stand up to it in the moment. Some men will go from “hey girl, love that ass,” to “I’m going to kill you, you f___ing b__ch” in less than a minute. If you’re getting off on inciting the fear of that response in another person, you need to re-examine your life.

“Hard nope.”

Some people deal with constant ass-grabbing, every day. They go to work and people grab their butts while they’re doing their jobs. It’s just one of the courses in the daily diet of sexual harassment. Ask nurses; ask women who do housekeeping and maintenance work; ask restaurant servers and kitchen staff. Ask women in any industry that is dependent on the labor of undocumented people. You won’t last long in a lot of jobs if you won’t put up with ass-grabbing. You are disposable to your employers in jobs like that, especially if you are being paid under the table and/or have no legal rights or no way of enforcing the rights that you do have. Ass-grabbers generally understand the overall shape of that situation.

Ass-grabbing is frequently a surprise. It’s fun for people who like to display dominance because it’s a stealth act that hits its target from behind. You catch them off guard. If you take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, ass-grabbing is for you.

If you take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, something is wrong with you and you need to be stopped. If you don’t take pleasure in scaring the crap out of people for no productive reason whatsoever, then you have absolutely zero reason to be non-consensually messing with another person’s butt.

(But, for heaven’s sake, just a little pat! That’s not “messing with another person’s butt”! You’re just so sensiti—NO. GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200. NO PATS.)

If you like butts—and why shouldn’t you?—you can do consensual grabbing and whatever else with your partner/s of choice, or you can grab your own, if your arms are long enough. That is not an expression of dominance. That is fine. This is not about having something against butts. This is about having something against being an asshole.

Men and boys grab women’s and girls’ asses, a lot. But there is plenty of other ass-grabbing happening as well. I’ll take a few specific patterns that I’ve heard about consistently from friends and clients. This list is not comprehensive, obviously.

A lot of white women, for instance, have a bad habit of assuming that Black men want their asses grabbed by white women. This is stupid. Cut it out. Black men are people, and thus their asses should not be viewed as available for general grabbing. There is not some super-special, white woman/Black man thing that makes this OK. The script you re-enact, as a white woman grabbing a Black man’s ass, is “We owned you before, and we can own you again.” It doesn’t matter if that was the furthest thing from your mind. (Whatever was in your mind was also nonsense.) That script was written before you ever showed up.

Gay men also put up with a maddening amount of ass-grabbing from other gay men (and ostensibly straight ones too). Toxic masculinity is not just for straight people. Most of the young gay men I know are as embattled and wary about sexual harassment as women are. If you are a gay man who grabs other men’s asses, you are as much of a dickhead as straight people who do that. If you are a gay man who grabs women’s asses because you think it doesn’t “count” because you don’t have sex with women, sorry. It counts. You don’t have to want to have sex with us for us to perceive it as an act of dominance over our bodies.

Then there’s the ass-slapping in football. I would probably need another blog post to even talk about that. Like, where do I even begin with football?

: Seriously. Walk. Away.

And finally: don’t slap/grab/pat your kids’ butts. Don’t let other people touch your kids’ butts. It may seem like nothing, but it isn’t nothing. Allowing that to happen is one way that kids learn that their bodies are not theirs, that they have no right to refuse consent. Teach kids not to grab each other’s butts. They will probably try it, because kids are little humans and they imitate what grown-up humans do. Don’t shame them for it. Teach them.

Teach them so this is the last generation of thinkpieces explaining why everyone deserves a butt free of unwanted touches. Let’s stop ass-grabbing before it begins.

Education is Power: Your Three-Part Guide to Campus Sexual Violence and Title IX in a Time of Crisis

July 24, 2017September 27, 20173 Comments

by Stephanie Krehbiel

Series Introduction:

With all the drama to choose from in the news, a person could be forgiven for not following the latest Title IX developments in the U.S. Department of Education. A lot has been going on there, though, and unfortunately, none of it is very encouraging to those of us who are passionate about ending campus sexual violence.

But if education is power—and I know that it is—we have resources in abundance, and we plan to use them! One of our long-term organizational goals at Into Account is to help students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni be as well-informed as possible when they encourage/push/demand change related to the sexual violence in their schools. This post is the first of a three-part series on Title IX, sexual violence, and higher education. In part one, I’ll talk about why Title IX exists. In part two, I’ll walk you through the current threats to the movement against campus sexual violence, and how students and advocates are fighting them. Part three will discuss the particular challenges of Christian colleges, and how the conservative movement for “religious liberty” has made campuses less safe for students vulnerable to sexual violence (particularly LGBTQ students).

You don’t have to become an expert on landmark federal legislation to care about this stuff. But information about existing laws can give you the confidence to advocate from your deepest values. Here’s one of ours: regardless of who you are, your body belongs to you and you alone, and you deserve to go to school, and to learn, without having to live in fear that someone will violate it. If all the laws changed tomorrow, we’d still fight for that. Every bit of activism that Into Account does around Title IX enforcement stems from that unshakeable conviction.

Part One: When Freedom from Sexual Violence Became a Civil Right

Regular readers of our blog may remember Erin Bergen’s account of her own experience with the Title IX complaint process at Goshen College after she was sexually assaulted there as a student. In the fall of 2016, before the U.S. presidential election, Erin filed a complaint against Goshen with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. The OCR notified Erin in December 2016 that they would be investigating Goshen as a result of her complaint.

Before talking about what has happened with Erin’s case since December, it’s worth reviewing why Title IX is relevant to campus sexual violence, and why complaints like the one Erin made to the OCR are integral to enforcing it. Title IX became federal law in 1972, as an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. (The HEA is a landmark bill that increased federal funding for colleges and universities and financial aid for students.). Title IX’s purpose is to prevent discrimination based on sex in all federally-funded educational institutions. In language and intent, it reflects the precedent set by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” in voting, public accommodations, public education, and employment. (I’m glossing over a lot of detail and nuance in that 1964 legislation. So your civics assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to go read the whole law. It’s a good thing to do in these times.)

With this federal protection against sex-based discrimination in place, the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence at colleges and universities became a civil rights issue. For the first time, the federal government recognized what many women in higher education already knew: that the prevalence of rape, abuse, and sexual harassment at colleges and universities constituted a serious educational access barrier. (Sexual violence isn’t just cismen* abusing and assaulting ciswomen, but when Title IX first became law, no one in government was talking about other forms of sexual violence in relation to campus policy. More on that, and Title IX’s particular relevance to LGBTQ students, later in the series.)

Title IX regulations stood in defiance of a mess of narratives reinforced by religion, institutional practices, and patriarchal logic: That women lie about sexual assault. That some women deserve to be raped. That men’s sexuality is beyond their own control and women are responsible for keeping it in check. That the sexual dominance of men over women is the natural order of things. That the education of women is less important than the education of men.

And yet as monumental as this defiance was, and as far-reaching as the implications were, the passage of Title IX did not lead to a glorious, new, violence-free era for women in higher education. For many women students, victim-blaming narratives and misogynist stereotypes have been more powerful than the protection afforded by the law. When I was a college student in the nineties, I had no idea that Title IX was related to anything but women’s athletics. In that era, my ignorance of its full reach was more the norm than the exception.

Today, almost two decades since I graduated from college, people know a lot more about Title IX. This is thanks in large part to the Obama administration’s attention to civil rights issues generally, and campus sexual violence in particular. Under Barack Obama and his appointees, the Department of Education aggressively promoted a proactive approach to sexual violence in colleges and universities. This meant reviewing and changing policies, and addressing weaknesses with education and training, rather than secrecy and intimidation. Being proactive even meant doing what was almost certainly counterintuitive for many administrators: encouraging victims to report, with the near-certain knowledge that their school was no dazzling exception to the dismal statistics.

A lot of positive change came out of those eight years. Had things remained as they were before then, it’s unlikely that either Erin or Beth would have had the resources to come forward and ask for accountability from their schools. The number of student victims who filed complaints about their schools with the federal government skyrocketed during the Obama administration. Some people look at this fact with suspicion, but as an advocate, I see it as a sign that something was giving victims hope, that the benefits of coming forward were finally starting to outweigh the risks.

In spite of all of that, one of the enduring challenges of Title IX legislation is its dependence on victims reporting their grievances. Unfortunately, the evidence still suggests that the overwhelming majority of victims do not. For victims, pursuing a Title IX complaint means submitting to a process that requires a great deal of faith in the school’s ability to listen without judgment, to maintain confidentiality, and to protect them from retaliation. If a school’s policies and culture are such that survivors can’t be assured of those things, they are likely to stay quiet.

That very silence can be used as evidence that the school doesn’t have a sexual violence problem. But when 23.1 percent of college women and 5.4 percent of college men nationwide experience sexual assault, the reasonable assumption isn’t that zero reports means zero assaults– the reasonable assumption is that something is wrong with the reporting system. A college that reports zero sexual assaults in its Clery statistics may as well be waving a red flag of warning.

Erin’s complaint went through the OCR in a moment of transition, between a U.S. administration with unprecedented interest in fighting campus sexual violence, and an administration led by a president with a storied history of sexually abusive behavior towards women and a general disdain for federal regulations. Perhaps that’s why, over seven months after hearing that the OCR was investigating her case, Erin still hasn’t heard anything new. Goshen College hasn’t heard anything new, either. According to Ken Newbold, the Title IX Coordinator and Interim President at Goshen, nothing has changed in relation to the investigation since Erin’s story came out in April, at which point Goshen made the following statement: “In regards to the current Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigation, we have already responded to the requests and are fully cooperating with the investigators.”

In an email to me, Newbold added the following, however: “Regardless of the OCR’s current approach to enforcement of Title IX, we are committed to campus safety for all of our students and continuing to improve the development of proactive initiatives related to sexual violence and misconduct education, prevention and response. One example I would like to highlight, is that by early September at least 75 percent of our student body will have received bystander intervention training — led by students in our Prevention Intervention Network — to be equipped with skills to respond when they observe unhealthy situations.”

The reforms that Newbold lays out here are straight out of the Department of Education’s 2011 guidelines for Title IX enforcement, issued in the form of a “Dear Colleague” letter that is now under considerable fire by Trump appointees. If Goshen is currently taking those guidelines more seriously than ever before, student activists like Erin deserve a large portion of the thanks. And while changing the campus culture through student-led initiatives is transformative and necessary, seeing a survivor-centered policy audit and subsequent overhaul of institutional policies and practices would be a tangible indication of a shift from business as usual.

Goshen has publicly committed to a policy audit in the past. They should follow through on that commitment–not because of any federal investigation, but because it’s the right thing to do for Goshen students and survivors.

We face a strong likelihood that the federal government is about to renege on its responsibility to survivors. If that happens, college students who are vulnerable to sexual violence are going to need their schools’ constituent communities more badly than ever, to apply some of the pressure that won’t be coming out of Washington anymore.

So this is no time to get complacent. Ask questions of your administrators. Push for concrete answers and follow-through. Support the students, faculty, and staff who you know are affected. Help your school live up to its best aspirations.

Part Two: Betsy DeVos and the debate over due process and standards of proof

*The prefix “cis” refers to people whose gender presentation and identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Committing Sexual Violence No Impediment to EMU Social Work Degree

April 22, 2017July 10, 20172 Comments

“Launch Your Future,” EMU’s website shouts in bold capital letters, as they prepare to hand a social work degree to a student who has – by EMU’s own finding – committed sexual violence.

Continuing Eastern Mennonite University (EMU)’s culture of staggering mishandling of sexual violence, EMU student Joel Wheeler is days away from graduating with a social work degree, despite the fact that EMU determined he committed “non-consensual vaginal intercourse,” “on at least one occasion.”

From the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, here is the legal definition of the word “rape”: ““The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

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