CALIFORNIA
GetReligion
You may have read last week about a California jury awarding $28 million in damages to a Candace Conti, a woman who said the Jehovah’s Witnesses allowed an adult member of her congregation to molest her when she was a child.
The media tend to highlight stories about random predators, even though almost everyone abused as a child was abused by someone in a position of trust. This usually means a family member or someone in a relationship with a family member. But it also happens in schools or other institutions of trust. We’ve seen most of the media interest in this topic focused on the Roman Catholic Church, although there’s no evidence that it had a greater incidence of abuse than the general population. What it does have, however, is bigger pockets than most. It’s much harder to get millions of dollars from your mom’s ex-boyfriend or your math teacher from the 7th grade than it is from large, centralized entities.
This story deals with another church. It’s a huge settlement and one of the keys to the large award was a church policy. Here’s how the Associated Press put it:
Ms. Conti also said in her lawsuit that the Christian denomination’s national leaders formed a policy in 1989 that instructed the church’s elders to keep child sex abuse accusations secret. Congregation elders followed that policy when Mr. Kendrick was convicted in 1994 of misdemeanor child molestation in Alameda County, according to Mr. Simons.
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