I’ve been thinking about the Church’s response to the AP story about the sex abuse case in Arizona. In it, there’s a bit that says “Church teachings and handbooks are clear and unequivocal about the evils of abuse.” This is definitely a good step, but what struck me is that I think it’s hard for the anti-abuse message to get across clearly when the Church has organizational features and makes rhetorical choices that can actually enable abuse (and here I’m thinking of abuse more generally, not just in the particular Arizona case). There are four issues in particular that I was thinking of.
The first is the authoritarian power structure. In the Church organization, control and information are only supposed to flow in one direction. GAs periodically remind us that they’re too busy to listen to us individually. This is bad for the Church in that it makes it difficult for those at the top to get real feedback. But it’s also a bad family structure. It sets parents (and fathers in particular) up as authorities who are not to be questioned. I don’t know if being an unquestioned authority makes someone more likely to become abusive in the first place, but it seems like it’s definitely smoothing the path for them to continue if they start, as a potential brake has been removed.