The president called the college’s guidance “solid,” leaving punishment victims doubting that the institution will alter
The blistering report on what Bob Jones University has managed intimate punishment reports is still warm off the presses and some victims happen to be skeptical that the college is prepared to acknowledge the seriousness of just what it revealed. They do say BJU’s reaction reeks of harm control.
In its two-year separate investigation, the nonprofit Godly a reaction to Abuse when you look at the Christian Environment discovered that intercourse abuse victims regarding the Greenville, sc, campus had been usually urged to obtain the sin behind their rapes, forced to repent for just about any pleasure they may have observed throughout their assaults, and encouraged to attain down to their abusers and show forgiveness or ask forgiveness from their store. The college’s counselors had been unlicensed and had no training that is formal therapy.
Some pupils, the GRACE report discovered, were penalized for reporting their punishment. Very nearly half said they certainly were encouraged never to get the authorities. The dossier that is 301-page paints a campus tradition where intercourse abuse victims had been built to feel just like “damaged items.” Within the previous 12 months, America Tonight has interviewed five former Bob Jones students whom reported their punishment to college officials and all sorts of say they usually have yet to recuperate from just just how BJU addressed 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 on the next ninety days in which he publicly apologized to people who “felt they failed to get from us genuine love, compassion, understanding, and help after enduring intimate abuse or attack.” However in a chapel solution Monday, leaked into the site BJU Information, he told pupils that the report was 
not a precise representation regarding the school today.
“In appropriate viewpoint, i really want you to comprehend that many of those instances had been things that happened 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 a really current graduate and I became quoted at size in the report. Together with tradition from the time I became pupil has not yet changed,” stated one rape target whom graduated within the last few 36 months and asked to stay anonymous away from an anxiety about retaliation. “seriously, i am just actually saddened. It results in like they will haved’t also browse the report, as the report very plainly states that it has happened recently.”
Another previous Bob Jones pupil told America Tonight this past year that whenever she reported her rape to administrators last year, she had been accused of lying then expelled in the center of the night time.
Recent graduate that is BJU abuse target
Katie Landry, whom reported her rape that is alleged to college, additionally found Pettit’s remarks offensive.
“we have always been 10 years eliminated, from the chronological-time point, but from a discomfort viewpoint, 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 more than seven years, all we thought was that we’d done a thing that caused my rape.”
GRACE reported many occasions whenever BJU did not alert police of punishment, in breach of mandatory reporting rules. But it also notes that the college has enhanced on that front within the last few years. Jim Berg, who had been dean of students and counselor that is chief three years, told GRACE detectives that his failure to report intercourse crimes to police within the past ended up being centered on “pure lack of knowledge.”
But BJU’s guidance philosophy just isd’t one thing of this remote past and Berg stays a faculty user. GRACE urged BJU to ban Berg from counseling completely and also to strip the campus bookstore of any such thing associated with him and lots of other leading BJU thinkers. It encouraged the institution to mention all punishment victims to professionals that are licensed traumatization expertise.
In the current chapel message, Pettit said the college had a “solid approach toward counseling people.” The college recently hired a women that are new therapist, but she is alsod’t certified, is not formally been trained in therapy and techniques Bob Jones’ make of biblical guidance. She has also been trained by Berg.