The president called the college’s guidance “solid,” leaving punishment victims doubting that the college will alter
The blistering report how Bob Jones University has handled intimate punishment reports is still warm down the presses and some victims happen to be skeptical that the college is happy to acknowledge the severity of just just what it revealed. They state BJU’s reaction reeks of harm control.
The nonprofit Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment found that sex abuse victims on the Greenville, South Carolina, campus were often urged to find the sin behind their rapes, pushed to repent for any pleasure they might have experienced during their assaults, and encouraged to reach out to their abusers and express forgiveness or ask forgiveness from them in its two-year independent investigation. The college’s counselors had been unlicensed and had no training that is formal therapy.
Some pupils, the GRACE report found, had been penalized for reporting their punishment. Very nearly half stated these were advised not to ever go the authorities. The dossier that is 301-page paints a campus tradition where intercourse abuse victims had been meant to feel just like “damaged items.” Within the year that is past America Tonight has interviewed five previous Bob Jones pupils who reported their punishment to college officials and all sorts of state they will have yet to recoup from how BJU managed them.
Report: Bob Jones University shamed victims of intimate attack
A self-described fundamentalist Christian college, has urged sexual abuse victims not to go to the police and counseled them to repent for the blame it said they share, according to an extensive independent investigation published last week for decades, Bob Jones University.
BJU President Steve Pettit is appointing a committee to review the report on the next 3 months in which he publicly apologized to those that “felt they failed to get from us genuine love, compassion, understanding, and help after putting up with intimate punishment or attack.” However in a chapel solution Monday, leaked to your site BJU Information, he told pupils that the report was not a precise representation for http://www.besthookupwebsites.org/charmdate-review the college today.
“In appropriate viewpoint, i would like you to understand that many of those situations were items that occurred to individuals just before had been also created or whenever you had been a kid,” he stated, before urging pupils to reassure their own families once they’re house within the vacations that the college is safe.
“I became a rather current graduate and I became quoted at length into the report. Additionally the tradition from the time I happened to be pupil has not yet changed,” stated one rape target whom graduated within the last 3 years and asked to remain anonymous away from an anxiety about retaliation. “seriously, i am simply actually saddened. It results in like they will haven’t also browse the report, since the report very obviously states that it has occurred recently.”
Another previous Bob Jones pupil told America Tonight last year that whenever she reported her rape to administrators last year, she ended up being accused of lying after which expelled in the center of the evening.
Recent graduate that is BJU punishment target
Katie Landry, who reported her rape that is alleged to college, also discovered Pettit’s remarks offensive.
“I have always been 10 years eliminated, from a chronological-time point, but from the discomfort standpoint, that guidance nevertheless impacts me today,” she stated. “It ended up being the very first guidance we received. It absolutely was the only counseling We received for more than seven years. All we thought ended up being that I’d done something which caused my rape. for more than seven years”
GRACE reported occasions that are many BJU neglected to alert police force of punishment, in breach of mandatory reporting regulations. But inaddition it notes that the college has enhanced on that front side within the last few few years. Jim Berg, who had been dean of pupils and counselor that is chief three years, told GRACE detectives that their failure to report intercourse crimes to police in past times had been according to “pure lack of knowledge.”
But BJU’s guidance philosophy is not one thing associated with past that is distant Berg continues to be a faculty user. GRACE urged BJU to ban Berg from counseling totally and also to remove the campus bookstore of such a thing connected to him and lots of other leading thinkers that are BJU. It recommended the institution to mention all punishment victims to professionals that are licensed traumatization expertise.
In their current chapel message, Pettit said the institution had a “solid approach toward counseling people.” The institution recently hired a brand new women’s therapist, but she is alson’t certified, is not formally been trained in psychology and methods Bob Jones’ make of biblical guidance. She ended up being additionally trained by Berg.