After scathing sex abuse report, Bob Jones calls it self ‘very safe’

The president called the university’s guidance “solid,” leaving punishment victims doubting that the institution will alter

The blistering report how Bob Jones University has managed intimate abuse reports is still warm down the presses and some victims are usually skeptical that the college is happy to acknowledge the severity of exactly just 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 formal trained in therapy.

Some pupils, the GRACE report discovered, had been penalized for reporting their punishment. Nearly half stated they certainly were encouraged never to get law enforcement. The dossier that is 301-page paints a campus tradition where intercourse abuse victims had been meant to feel just like “damaged products.” Within the previous 12 months, America Tonight has interviewed five previous Bob Jones pupils whom reported their punishment to school officials and all state they will have yet to recoup from just 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 examine the report throughout the next ninety days and then he publicly apologized to people who “felt they would not receive from us genuine love, compassion, understanding, and help after enduring intimate punishment or attack.” However in a chapel solution Monday, leaked to your BJU that is website News he told pupils that the report was not an exact representation regarding the college today.

“In appropriate viewpoint, i really want you to understand that a lot of of the 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 became an extremely graduate that is recent I happened to be quoted at size when you look at the report. While the culture from the time I became a learning pupil hasn’t changed,” said one rape target whom graduated within the last few 3 years and asked to stay anonymous away from an anxiety about retaliation. “truthfully, i am simply actually saddened. It results in like they will haven’t also browse the report, as the report very obviously states that this has happened recently.”

Another previous Bob Jones pupil told America Tonight this past year that whenever she reported her rape to administrators in ’09, she had been accused of lying after which expelled in the middle of the evening.

Recent graduate that is BJU punishment target

Katie Landry, whom reported her alleged rape to the school, additionally discovered Pettit’s feedback 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 counseling that is first received. It had been the only guidance We received for over seven years. For over seven years, all I was thinking ended up being that we’d done a thing that caused my rape.”

GRACE documented occasions that are many BJU neglected to alert police force of punishment, in breach of mandatory reporting rules. But inaddition it notes that the institution has enhanced on that front side within the last few years. Jim Berg, who was simply dean of students and primary therapist for three years, told GRACE detectives that their failure to report intercourse crimes to police into the past had been centered on “pure lack of knowledge.”

But BJU’s guidance philosophy just isn’t one thing of this remote past and Berg stays a faculty user. GRACE urged BJU to ban Berg from counseling totally and also to remove the campus bookstore of such a thing associated with him and many other leading thinkers that are BJU. In addition it suggested the institution to mention all punishment victims to professionals that are licensed upheaval expertise.

In their current chapel message, Pettit said the college had a “solid approach toward counseling people.” The institution recently hired a brand new women’s therapist, but she is alson’t licensed, is not formally been trained in therapy and methods Bob Jones’ model of biblical guidance. She has also been trained by Berg.