SOUTH CAROLINA
Bustle
By Seth Millstein @SethMillstein
At Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina, students are told by faculty that they shouldn’t report sexual abuse to the police, because doing so would be damaging to the body of Jesus Christ. Yup. In 2012, the school brought on an outside consulting group, Godly Response To Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), to help it reform its ways; apparently, simply abandoning this atrocious, victim-blaming attitude toward sex abuse was too straightforward of a solution. But even this modest effort amounted to nothing, because last week, just before the GRACE’s findings were released, Bob Jones fired the firm without explanation.
“This ‘notice’ took GRACE by complete surprise,” the firm wrote in an open letter to its supporters, “as there had been no prior indications from BJU that termination was even being considered. Furthermore, this termination occurred days before GRACE was to conduct the last interviews of this 13-month investigation and begin drafting the final report scheduled for publication in March.”
The allegations against BJU are pretty damning. Catherine Harris, who attended the university in the 1980s, was raised in a fundamentalist environment, and says that she was abused by somebody “from inside that bubble.” When she went to the faculty for counseling, they essentially told her that it was her fault.
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