The president called the college’s guidance „solid,” leaving abuse victims doubting that the college can change
The blistering report on what Bob Jones University has managed intimate punishment reports is still warm the presses off and some victims already are skeptical that the college is ready to acknowledge the severity of exactly what it revealed. They do say 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 discovered, had been punished for reporting their punishment. Very nearly half stated they certainly were encouraged never to get the authorities. The 301-page dossier additionally paints a campus tradition where sex abuse victims had been designed to feel just like „damaged items.” When you look at the year that is past America Tonight has interviewed five previous Bob Jones pupils whom reported their punishment to college officials and all sorts of state they’ve yet to recoup from just just how BJU managed them.
Report: Bob Jones University shamed victims of intimate attack
For many years, Bob Jones University, a self-described fundamentalist Christian university, has advised intimate punishment victims to not ever go directly to the authorities and counseled them to repent for the fault it stated they share, based on an substantial separate investigation posted the other day.
BJU President Steve Pettit is appointing a committee to examine 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.” But in a chapel solution Monday, leaked to your BJU that is website News he told pupils that the report was not a precise representation associated with college today.
„In appropriate viewpoint, i’d like you to comprehend that many of those situations had been items that took place to individuals you were a child,” he said, before urging students to reassure their families when they’re home over the holidays that the school is safe before you were even born or when.
„I happened to be a extremely graduate that is recent I became quoted at length when you look at the report. Therefore the tradition from the time I became student has not yet changed,” stated one rape target whom graduated within the last 3 years and asked to keep anonymous away from an anxiety about retaliation. „truthfully, i am simply actually saddened. It results in like they 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 year that is last whenever she reported her rape to administrators during 2009, she ended up being accused of lying after which expelled in the center of the evening.
Recent BJU graduate and abuse target
Katie Landry, who reported her alleged rape towards the college, additionally discovered Pettit’s feedback offensive.
„we have always been ten years eliminated, from a chronological-time point, but from the discomfort viewpoint, that guidance nevertheless impacts me today,” she stated. „It ended up being the very first guidance we received. It had been the counseling that is only received for over seven years. For over seven years, all I ended up being thinking was that we’d done something which caused my rape.”
GRACE reported occasions that are many BJU neglected to alert police of punishment, in breach of mandatory reporting guidelines. But inaddition it notes that the college has enhanced on that front side within the last years that are few. Jim Berg, who was simply dean of pupils and main therapist for three years, told GRACE detectives that www.besthookupwebsites.org/blackplanet-review their failure to report sex crimes to police into the past ended up being according to „pure lack of knowledge.”
But BJU’s guidance philosophy is certainly not one thing associated with the past that is distant Berg stays a faculty user. GRACE urged BJU to ban Berg from counseling totally and also to remove the campus bookstore of any such thing associated with him and lots of other leading thinkers that are BJU. It encouraged the institution to refer all punishment victims to licensed experts with traumatization expertise.
In their current chapel message, Pettit said the college had a „solid approach toward counseling people.” The institution recently hired a women that are new therapist, but she isn’t certified, isn’t formally been trained in therapy and techniques Bob Jones’ model of biblical guidance. She has also been trained by Berg.
