Due to unrest regarding mismanagement of sexual abuse incidents in the greater Bob Jones University constituency (BJU operates much like a denomination among its supporting churches), the school commissioned GRACE to comb through the school's response to sexual abuse, since it was apparent that some of these victims had studied and graduated from BJU. Bob Jones University is more than a university, it is a boarding school with strict standards for living and a faculty/staff/administration that seeks to involve themselves in the spiritual development of each student. Naturally, many students accepted BJU's offer to seek spiritual help for a wide variety of issues.
BJU was to be congratulated for initiating the GRACE report, until it unexpectedly fired the GRACE team just before the results were published. An immediate uproar by interviewed victims and their caring church leaders motivated BJU to re-hire GRACE to finish the report. What the report found was not a rare two or three incidents of alleged mismanagement of abuse victims, but a devastating trail of tears from dozens of interviewed victims that sought refuge in the counseling staff at BJU and received verbally gruff counseling that made the victims feel at fault for the abuse that they received. GRACE made many specific recommendations, as was stated in their job description and as they had done for ministries in the past.
Steve Pettit communicated the administration's standing on the GRACE report by handily refuting each recommendation that the GRACE team had carefully offered. Pettit asserted that BJU's own qualified team had rendered GRACE's recommendations to be over the top. In a personal letter to a confused sexual abuse victim, Pettit declared,
"Please know that higher educational institutions are held to a variety of state and federal laws, including Title IX and Clery, which GRACE did not take into account at times in several instances where they said we did not report. During the interview phase, GRACE represented to BJU employees a greater responsibility for reporting instances of sexual abuse/assault than the law requires—or even permits. Because of this representation, there were instances in the report where employees were made to believe their responsibility to report was greater than what the law required—when in fact, they were in compliance with the law... GRACE comes from the perspective that we have a 'moral obligation' to report every instance; however, to do so would put us in violation of the law."
The GRACE team was made up of a former prosecutor with over a decade of professional experience; "a mental health professional [with] over 30 years of experience in the field of psychology and sexual abuse"; a seminary professor and pastor with 20 years of experience dealing with matters of sexual abuse in a church context; a project coordinator; and a project director. The BJU administration put together their own team immediately after the GRACE report went public with the perceived intent to make amends for the relational sins uncovered in the GRACE report. Instead, according Pettit's words in his public announcement and in the personal letter above, BJU was held to a great standard than was fair. GRACE's objective, external assessment, according to Pettit, was not so objective and accurate as was the assessment made by BJU's internal team of lawyers and constituents.
The one glimmer of hope in Pettit's announcement on March 11, 2015, was BJU's admission that "our system of discipline created barriers with many of our students." The loyal constituency of Bob Jones University has a long history of defensiveness whenever they perceive organized attacks against the school. Some argue that this small morsel of an apology is very telling, as an apology in the smallest doses would prove unsatisfactory to BJU's more hyper-loyal constituents.
This whole situation is extremely tricky to process. Pettit handily moved the issue away from obstructing justice (telling the occasional victim to NOT report) and emotionally damaging counseling to the insinuation that everyone expected them to run all accusations of sexual abuse straight to the police without anyone's consent. This was a brilliant yet tragic PR move to put BJU back into victim status, as it had done in the days when BJU lost its tax exemption status for its ban on interracial dating among the student body. Pettit's interpretation of GRACE's recommendations are that they are ill-informed, thus they are mostly irrelevant and untrustworthy.
The science of Spiritual Abuse (SA) is in its infancy, and professionals are learning that SA comes at the hands of intentional abusers as well as unintentional abusers. The intentional spiritual abusers apply great energy to control their followers and are more easily detected. But sometimes intentions are somewhat wholesome, and those unwittingly guilty of SA look to a greater cause for the justification of harmful actions against a few. Regardless of intentionality, SA is at its root a release from the obligation to obey the greatest commandment: to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Who is my neighbor, you may ask? Your neighbor is the one you meet on the side of the road, beaten, bruised, and avoided by the spiritual elite of your day. Your neighbor will sometimes be a friend you know, but he/she may also be someone you just met, socially a bit outside of your comfort zone.
BJU judged its behavior by its own set of moral obligations and the justification that its attorneys found would easily hold up in a court of law. The administration does not intend to further harm their neighbor, they just fail to involve themselves in the needs of those whom GRACE revealed had been poorly helped (the report found that many victims had been re-victimized by austere counseling measures).
"One method of manipulation [in cases of SA] is in challenging an individual's perception of reality. A common experience is the distortion of personal experience by the abusive individual attempting to alter the perception of a negative experience or encounter. This results in the 'retelling' of the incident to portray the abusive individual in a positive manner and the target of abuse as negative, weak or inaccurate, thus placing the abuser in a position of control... It is suggested that individuals' own reality testing becomes damaged in the abusive context and this damage is seen to result in an inability to be objective, critical and analytical... Thus, the individuals report their perception of an abusive event and this perception is denied and an alternative, often altruistic, version is provided by the abuser. This results in confusion for the individual and self-doubt which often results in acceptance of the alternative reality. Benyei (1998) suggests that the distortion of reality is a fundamental part of the abusive system rendering individuals unable to define reality and therefore unable to challenge the abusive process" (Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond, Breaking the Silence on Spiritual Abuse).
The process under discussion looks like this. A young lady confides in a counselor that she has been sexually abused, but her abuser is in a position of prominence in the greater BJU constituency. This young lady is told that she must keep silent for the greater good of the BJU constituency. This hypothetical is not so hypothetical, as the GRACE report reveals. The victim is forced to conform to this "alternative, altruistic" perception of her abuse. This "alternative perception" continues with the affirmation of harmful counseling practices as having helped many, according to the BJU administration, and that the confused sexual abuse victims must conform again to this "alternative, altruistic perception."
The BJU administration would further have us conform to the "alternative perception" that the GRACE investigative team is not to be trusted, that they were poised to hold BJU to a higher "moral obligation," that GRACE themselves forced their own "alternative perception" whereupon "employees were made to believe their responsibility to report was greater than what the law required." Perhaps, given GRACE's credentials and experience, that "higher standard" was not one which sought to mercilessly beat down God's servants into unreasonable reporting standards, but to hold a group of Believers to God's standard of loving one's neighbor as oneself. Perhaps, given GRACE's credentials and experience, GRACE sought to introduce BJU to a world that was wildly foreign to them, a world where victims are those little ones, the ones who were made to stumble, that ought to move us beyond any normal dose of compassion with the result that we lay aside all personal agendas to tenderly uplift that trembling soul with love, a love generous with speechless, tearful hugs.
BJU's own investigative team proved itself vastly more qualified than GRACE. GRACE brought the perspective of law AND Christlike compassion. BJU trumped GRACE with their own limited perspective of law and public image. In this contest of apples (Christlike compassion) and oranges (legalese), oranges won out.
To the victims who are further confused by Pettit's attempts to force upon you an "alternative perception" of your tragic memories, consider yourselves victors. You have survived and re-survived ugly circumstances, and you are still standing. As more and more organized religious camps in the United States flex their institutional muscles and add to the congregations of disenchanted former-church goers, you will find a new and powerful grace to love your neighbor in ways you know they need to be loved into the Kingdom. While you wait for this grace to flourish, look away from the Bob Jones University constituency to the thousands behind you who want to hear your story and shower you with love and compassion. Forgive us for holding back our compassion until this day.
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