Bob Jones, Samuel Bateman, Healthcare and Cults
RNS: 10 years after GRACE abuse report, survivors fear too little has changed at Bob Jones
Salt Lake Tribune: A Utah couple infiltrated a new polygamous sect and helped put its abusive leader behind bars
Cult Chat: Healthcare and Cults Part 1 with Gina Catena
" ... [A] 22-month investigation that included over 100 interviews, roughly 50 of which were with self-identified abuse survivors. The resulting 300-page report, released on Dec. 11, 2014, found the school's emphasis on discipline and approach to biblical counseling was harming student abuse survivors.
"What was the most damaging was how they used faith, theology, Scripture, to silence victims, to shame victims, to scare victims," said Tchividjian, an attorney advocate for abuse survivors. "The victims were being revictimized, while the offenders were being forgiven and restored."
According to Bob Jones University, the school has significantly strengthened its response to abuse disclosures over the past decade."
Salt Lake Tribune: A Utah couple infiltrated a new polygamous sect and helped put its abusive leader behind bars
"Samuel Bateman faces decades in prison after admitting that he took 10 girls as his "wives," and sexually abused nearly all of them.
Colorado City, Arizona • Squeezed into the back seat of a Bentley, Christine Marie was sitting with three young wives of self-proclaimed prophet Samuel Bateman.
She couldn't believe what he was revealing.
Bateman was describing how he "gave away" the three "wives" sitting next to her — two adults, the other a 12-year-old girl — to three male followers and ordered them to have sex with the wives while he watched. He called it "The Atonement," explaining it as a religious ceremony.
Marie recognized the actions that Bateman described as something else: A man raping a child.
And the reaction of the two women made her wonder whether they had felt coerced.
"Sam kept revealing more and more and more and the young ladies were clearly in distress as he was talking about it," Marie recalled. "I was in absolute shock. I was mortified. And to think that he thought this was somehow from God was just mind-blowing."
For months, Marie and others had been trying to alert local police to their fears about Bateman, the leader of a small offshoot of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The sect's traditional home is in the state border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, a historically tight-knit region known as Short Creek. People there had told police they suspected Bateman was having sexual contact with girls he referred to as his "wives," the youngest of whom was 9 years old when they "wed."
But police told her they needed evidence, Marie recounted, and calling someone his wife doesn't prove that he had committed any crime.
Sitting in that back seat, Marie grew angry as Bateman kept talking. She wanted "to assault him," she recalled, and to pull the girls out of the car with her.
Instead, Marie calmly listened as she quietly pulled her phone out of her purse.
Then she hit record.
"All I could think was I have to save this girl next me, who was a child," Marie said. "... I was absolutely obsessed with doing whatever I needed to do to get the evidence needed to get this man behind bars."
That recording from inside Bateman's Bentley was the first piece of evidence Marie sent to local police, and later the FBI — but it wasn't the last. Marie and her husband, a professional filmmaker, had already been documenting Bateman and his followers. They had filmed him at barbecues and picnics. They were rolling when Bateman's followers bore lengthy testimonies about him.
And after that pivotal day in the Bentley, they kept recording as Bateman again described ordering his followers to have sexual contact with his young wives. The leader expressed in that second recording that it was a "great personal sacrifice" for him to watch, according to court testimony. But he said it needed to be done to appease God."
Cult Chat: Healthcare and Cults Part 1 with Gina Catena
"Caz interviews Gina, a nurse practitioner & midwife from California. Gina grew up in a cult which discouraged mainstream evidence-based health treatments, in favour of non-scientific treatments. Gina talks about growing up in the group and watching people die to suicide, or suffering from treatable health conditions because the group did not allow Western medical care. This first episode of two starts the conversation about how cults can damage the body, as well as the mind."
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