UNITED STATES
Central Florida Future
By Kendra Semmen, Staff ColumnistOn July 6, 2014
Church is a place you should feel safe leaving your children at, but reports of child abuse go beyond the Catholic church to affect almost every religion.
People may want to think twice before sending their children to Sunday school, or any church activities, if parents aren’t in the vicinity to ensure protection.
In the U.S., 16,787 people have said that they were abused as children by priests between 1950 and 2012, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, as reported by PBS. However, child abuse within the church isn’t exclusive to the Catholic denomination.
A lawsuit was filed in May that stated that a missionary with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abused a woman in the mid-1980s, according to The Desert Sun.
And although Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t have Sunday school, child abuse still goes on. A woman was awarded $28 million by a jury after reporting being abused by a congregant in the North Fremont Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Northern California in 2012, according to The New York Times.
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