Understanding Sexual Abuse Cases in the Church

Listened to this interview early this morning. If you don't know who Tim Kosnoff is, and you have children in the Church, you really need to hear what he has to say about our sexual abuse reporting process

He's an attorney who has handled criminal cases of sexual assault victims, specifically when those cases involve the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members. He has also done litigation for victims whose cases involve the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.

Tim Kosnoff has been representing sexual assault victims for decades. He has, out of necessity, had to work against the Church for most of that time. His experiences are reasoned and measured, and unapologetically honest.

I can't hope to summarize his entire message and all of his experiences in a thread. But what I wanted to share today was what I learned about the sexual abuse reporting process in the Church, and how I intend to handle myself in response to it from now on.

When accusations of abuse or sexual assault is brought to the attention of local leadership, they are taught by policy not to contact police. Even when local laws mandate the report of sexual assault to law enforcement by clergy. The Church, by policy, doesn't respect those laws. Instead, local leaders are instructed to contact a Church hotline for sexual assault, which they claim will field them to mental health professionals and legal counsel, to know how best to help the victims. 

However, the process doesn't focus on victims at all. Not one bit. 

Instead, the hotline exists solely to determine and mitigate the legal liability of the Church in these cases. And with the victims Tim Kosnoff has represented, the Church's priority has been to protect and defend the perpetrator, as a means of legally defending themselves.

The real salient message here from Tim Kosnoff is that the Church cares so much about protecting themselves and their capacity of forgiving and atoning for predatory men, there is no victim they will not throw under the bus in the process. He has observed, having worked cases involving both institutions, that the LDS church is no different from the Catholic Church in its issues with sexual assault. If anything, he suggests we're worse because our power is more consolidated into a single governing entity. 

The only place Kosnoff shows unjustifiable bias is against the general membership of the Church. Many church members don't understand the magnitude of this problem, and wouldn't have the institutional access to address it if they did. He underestimates how much many of us would care if we only knew, how much we would want to change things if we could.

I don't have kids in the Church and may never have that experience. But knowing what I know now, I still gotta look out for me first. Which I suppose is the first take-away message. Don't assume the institutional Church has your best interest at heart on this issue.

Secondly, the last person on earth I would go to if my kid told me someone molested them is the bishop. Not for all the money in the world. I would go directly to the police myself because the Church just isn't going to do that reliably. Period.

Lastly, the most important thing I can do to confront and stop this kind of behavior in the Church is not through internal messaging or pressure on Church leaders, or external confrontations in court. That simply doesn't work. It hasn't worked for decades now.

What would make a huge difference would be to change the mandatory reporting laws in states like Utah and Idaho, where they're ridiculously lax. Those are the laws the Church uses to avoid being fully legally accountable for their actions, which Kosnoff details in-depth. Clergy in Utah and Idaho are not legally required to report sexual abuse, even when it involves children. This is not normal, and many states have much stricter laws than that. And even when there are laws, there need to be stricter punishments for institutions who break them.

I would personally love to see state laws that revoke the tax exempt status for any institution who habitually and knowingly endangers children through failures to report and punish abusers.

Punishments for covering up sexual assault need to go beyond writing a check and making victims sign NDAs so they can never tell their stories again. Of all the heinous activity that goes into this, that's the one that bothers me the most. Perpetuating the silence of sexual assault victims through NDAs is wrong. It is an act fully devoid of compassion. It is moral and institutional cowardice. And I'm openly ashamed to know my church engages in that behavior.

So if you care about this, add it to the pile of letters y'all write to your elected officials. Contact your state-level legislators about how to get the laws changed in your state. We are not powerless to protect our kids from abuse. We can hold our own institutions responsible.