I have some family members that are Mormon and they gave me the following podcasts to debunk the claims of sexual abuse and this mysterious “hotline” - I haven’t finished them yet but I’d like to get
@Android raptor and
@doodoocaca ’s opinions on them:
Mormon debunking 4 sexual abuse claims postcast breakdown. It looks like they have a video as well:
Video is archived but the site is struggling right now. I’ll post it later if this is hastily deleted.
5:08 - Jennifer Roach starts breaking down the relative statistics of rate of abuse among Mormons vs other religions. Openly admits she has no data but she trusts "her intuition" that the stats are basically the same. She also admits that the reason the church would want to hide something like that is to protect the reputation of the church. Since there's the same pressure on other victims in other churches, there's no reason to single out the poor widdle Mormons.
@Android raptor is gonna love this reasoning.
6:30 - an in-depth dissection of the Boy Scouts "P-files" - you know what the P stands for. It turns out almost all of the boy scouts are chartered by churches. IDK how this makes the P-files less embarrassing. Mostly men abuse. 30% of the total Boy Scout troops are LDS but they're only responsible for 5% of the abuse, allegedly. She goes out of her way to add that 1% of the abuse instances were done by Jews. No mention on which of these churches is the nigger of churches that abuses the extra children. This is actually the part that made me stop the podcast and pull up the video to see if she was presenting slides to substantiate this claim. She wasn't.
This sparked my curiosity, so I looked into the BSA P files: There are a total of
92,700 cases of abuse in the BSA. Hurler McKenna & Mertz is a therapy-chaser law firm that has represented roughly half of these victims and "several hundred" of these victims are Mormon,
according to this jounro who doesn't provide details. If we assume "several hundred" is something like 500, then get you the "despite being 30% of the BSA, Mormons only raped 5% of the boys" figure. So, their claim could be true... or the journo just had a "confidential source" in the Mormon church that fed them the bullshit statistic.
14:02 - Moving on to background checks. The Mormons don't do universal background checks for anyone working with youth. Why not? Well, they plan to jump through the hoop if it's required to by the government... then they kinda drop the thought. There are 3 issues with background checks: 1) delayed disclosure, most people report abuse in their 50s... they forget to mention the 2 other issues. "It's a crime that someone almost always gets away with."
24:25 - They finally get to their main gripe with background checks. The danger is if they call someone to oversee Primary (a Sunday service where a church member is assigned to babysit your kids while you do your other church meetings), parents may trust them too much. But a background check
only checks if they're on the sex offender registry, terrorist watchlist, and haven't committed a crime in the last 7 years. You see, we can't expect the Mormon church to conduct background checks without a government directive because parents might have an undue sense of security. Makes perfect sense.
29:10 - Moving on to the helpline. They are aware of the criticisms that have been reposted to this thread. It is "very clear" from the court documents that the Bishops only found out about the sexual abuse from the newspaper, apparently from their sworn declarations.
32:51 - Why do they have a help line? What is so hard about calling CPS? The help line exists to help them navigate the legal intricacies of 20 yr olds fucking 16 yr olds and 13 yr olds fucking 13 yr olds. This is a tacit admission that the help line just connects them to the Church lawyers.
40:26 - Wow, they just straight up admit that the helpline only exists to help the church get out of legal trouble. But... the best way to stay out of legal trouble is to follow the law
I guess this thread shouldn't exist then. Also, normies don't have access to this help line, so don't try calling it. Just trust the Mormon church that this gaggle of lawyers aren't encouraging their Bishops to suppress evidence of abuse, which could damage the reputation of the church.
42:38 - They talk about best practices to avoid abuse. The minimum is as follows: Screen volunteers (per their own admission, they do not; no background checks and the Bishop just gets a "revelation"), train volunteers (
surprisingly, they actually do this), report abuse promptly (see: the rest of this thread), always have two adults (I can confirm this as an ex-Mormon), inform parents of private conversations, adults don't transport or communicate with kids alone, have windows on classroom doors (Mormon churches all have solid doors), parents take their own kids to the bathroom (can confirm this as well). In conclusion for this section, the Mormons meet
some best practices but fail in the three critical areas of reporting abuse, screening volunteers, and having windows.
47:54 - What does the Mormon church do to go above and beyond the minimum standard they already don't meet? They talk about the calling process here, which is where the Bishop receives a "revelation" about who should be "called" to certain positions. The Bishop, in turn, is called by the Stake President and so on. This is why I refer to Bishops as essentially randomly selected - the Stake President points to a member and says "congratulations, you're now a Bishop." Well, the Bishop does that to other people and this random selection of youth leaders somehow constitutes going "above and beyond." They also point out that members are "sustained" - this is where the entire Church raises their hands to show support for a new calling that's announced on Sunday. (Note: this isn't really an election because the outcome is already decided but I suppose an ultra-concerned member could meet with their Bishop after to ask them to reconsider.)
54:30 - They also talk about making an annotation on the member's # system. This confirms the church keeps records on all its members that a Bishop can edit. However, only Bishops, Membership Clerks, and higher ranks in the church have access to these records. No one in the public can access them like, say, the sex offender registry. They then have the audacity to dis on the Southern Baptists for maintaining their "secret sex offender list" as if that's any different from the secret annotations on their member # system.
1:00:22 - The LDS church ex-communicates convicted pedophiles. The most persuasive part of the video but I have reservations about their ability to cooperate with Law Enforcment to achieve those convictions.
1:04:05 -
They admit that the help line instructs Bishops not to contact law enforcement when sexual abuse is reported to them in "confessional."
The second, 20 minute podcast is pure cope about the AP video where a Bishop talks about his experience with the help line and being told to not report the abuse. I don't consider it necessary to archive or summarize. Imagine two Mormons seething about the church's bad PR for 20 minutes.
tl;dr - Public schools enjoy some child abuse protections that Mormon churches do not enjoy and visa-versa. I'd peg your kid about as safe during Mormon Sunday school as in public school. Where Mormons fall short of the minimum standard to prevent abuse, that neither Mormons nor public schools fully meet, is their inability to screen people on the sex offender registry and their "helpline" that discourages reporting abuse. This means your kid is extra fucked if they go to a WWASPS because the WWASPS itself won't report the abuse, the parents won't believe the abused child, and even if the abused child confides in their Bishop, the helpline will just tell the Bishop to sweep it up.
