The president called the college’s guidance “solid,” leaving punishment victims doubting that the institution can change
The blistering report on what Bob Jones University has managed intimate abuse reports is still warm the presses off and some victims seem to be skeptical that the college is prepared to acknowledge the severity of exactly what it revealed. They state BJU’s reaction reeks of harm control.
In its two-year independent research, the nonprofit Godly a reaction to Abuse within the Christian Environment discovered that intercourse abuse victims regarding the Greenville, sc, campus had been usually advised to obtain the sin behind their rapes, pressed to repent for almost any pleasure they may have observed in their assaults, and encouraged to achieve down to their abusers and show forgiveness or ask forgiveness from their website. The university’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. Very nearly half stated these people were advised never to get the authorities. The dossier that is 301-page paints a campus culture where intercourse abuse victims had been meant to feel just like “damaged products.” Within the previous 12 months, America Tonight has interviewed five former Bob Jones pupils whom reported their punishment to school officials and all sorts of say they will have yet to recuperate from just just how BJU managed them.
Report: Bob Jones University shamed victims of intimate attack
For decades, Bob Jones University, a self-described fundamentalist Christian university, has advised sexual punishment victims never to go directly to the authorities and counseled them to repent for the fault it said they share, relating to a thorough independent research posted the other day.
BJU President Steve Pettit is appointing a committee to examine the report within the next ninety days and then he publicly apologized to people who “felt they failed to get from us genuine love, compassion, understanding, and help after enduring intimate punishment or assault.” However in a chapel solution Monday, leaked to your BJU that is website News he told pupils that the report was not a precise representation associated with college today.
“In appropriate viewpoint, i really want you to appreciate that many of the instances were items that took place to people 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 happened to be a extremely current graduate and I happened to be quoted at size within the report. As well as the tradition from the time I became pupil has not yet changed,” stated one rape target whom graduated within the last 3 years and asked to stay anonymous away from a concern with retaliation. “seriously, i am simply actually saddened. It comes across like they will haven’t also browse the report, considering that the report very obviously states that it has occurred recently.”
Another previous Bob Jones pupil told America Tonight this past year that whenever she reported her rape to administrators last year, she ended up being accused of lying after which expelled in the center of the evening.
Recent BJU graduate and abuse target
Katie Landry, who reported her rape that is alleged to college, additionally discovered Pettit’s reviews offensive.
“we have always been 10 years removed, from the chronological-time point, but from a discomfort perspective, that guidance nevertheless impacts me today,” she stated. “It ended up being the counseling that is first received. It had been the counseling that is only received for over seven years. All we thought was that we’d done something which caused my rape. for more than seven years”
GRACE documented numerous occasions when BJU didn’t alert police of punishment, in breach of mandatory reporting legislation. But inaddition it notes that the institution has improved on that front side within the last couple of few years. Jim Berg, who had been dean of pupils and primary therapist for three decades, told GRACE detectives that their failure to report intercourse crimes to police within the past had been predicated on “pure lack of knowledge.”
But BJU’s guidance philosophy just isn’t one thing for the past that is distant Berg continues to be a faculty member. GRACE urged BJU to ban Berg from counseling completely and also to remove the campus bookstore of any such thing associated with him and lots of other leading BJU thinkers. Moreover it encouraged the college to 
refer all punishment victims to licensed experts with injury expertise.
In the current chapel message, Pettit said the institution possessed a “solid approach toward counseling people.” The college recently hired a women that are new therapist, but she isn’t certified, isn’t formally competed in therapy and methods Bob Jones’ make of biblical guidance. She has also been trained by Berg.