At a Southern Baptist mega-church in Memphis, pastor Andy Savage admitted to having a “sexual incident” with a 17-year-old girl twenty years earlier. The congregation’s response? Silence? Boos? No, a standing ovation.
The admission came after the now-grown woman, Jules Woodson, posted a January 5 #MeToo account on social media,
“A sense of safety is vital to a child’s ability to reach his or her full potential.”
One of the most shocking revelations of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements has been the death of Kentucky State Senator Dan Johnson. The 52-year-old first-term legislator and ultra-conservative preacher took his own life two days after it was reported that he had sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the basement
Where does your place of worship stand on the issue of corporal punishment of children? If you attend a conservative church, synagogue, or mosque, especially if it’s in ons of the southern “bible belt” states, chances are it supports hitting children as a form of discipline.
When the school district
There’s a lot being said about Roy Moore, the 70-year-old Christian, gun-toting hothead of Alabama who recently won the US Senate primary and has been accused by numerous women who say Moore sexually abused them when they were in their teens and Moore was 32. The youngest alleged victim was
The entertainment industry seems to get it: Harvey Weinstein couldn’t have sexually abused so many women without help from the enabling culture of Hollywood. Why is it so difficult for religious organizations facing abuse scandals to come to a similar realization?
Many in the entertainment industry know that the movie mogul Harvey
Cases of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are so prevalent, we tend not to pay much attention to them. But child advocates are keeping a close eye on one case that could mark a new beginning in how the church and outside authorities hold high-ranking church officials accused
Telling constituents it’s acceptable to deny children needed medical care doesn’t seem like something that would get a politician re-elected. But that’s what’s happening in Idaho.
Child advocates have been imploring lawmakers there to change laws that prevent adults who deny children needed medical care from being prosecuted. The laws
When I began writing my book, Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment, the term religious child maltreatment or RCM did not exist (and numerous searches proved that Google had never heard of it.)
This dearth of information indicated that there hadn’t been much study on the negative impacts of