UNITED STATES
International Business Times
By Zoe Mintz
Melissa Tanis knows the “abstinence speech” very well. She heard it at home, in church and in high school. And it didn’t stop when she reached college.
“Ladies, you’re princesses, and when you give pieces of your heart away to boys, you only have half a heart left. And what kind of prince wants half of a heart? No, you need to keep yourself pure. You need to keep yourself whole. Because you can’t get those pieces of your heart back. So think twice before you kiss a boy,” Tanis, 25, said, remembering the sermon she heard as a student at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri.
On conservative Christian campuses across the U.S., the refusal to admit that their students have sex is hurting victims of sexual abuse.
According to a recently released report by an independent watchdog group, Bob Jones University, a leading conservative Christian university in South Carolina, discouraged victims from filing police reports, rarely punished the abusers and blamed victims for their “involvement” in the crime. “Deal with your own sin” and do “not be selfish” were some of the comments students said they heard from school counselors when denouncing sexual assault.
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