Before I get into this, let me lay down some ground rules...I know that child abuse is not limited to religious circles. This article is in no way meant as an attack on organized religion...this is just an account of a nasty case we had in my community a couple of years ago. I was reminded of this case as a result of a conversation I had over on Cornbread's 'Gay what???' thread. As always, I welcome responses and comments, but be warned that I will not tolerate attitudes such as 'well, your religion does worse things than mine', or 'Dharma's christian bashing again, that's par for the course'. My creator and I are on speaking terms again for the first time in years, so don't even go there....
In 2002 we had a child abuse case surface here that horrified a lot of people. Not because what was done to the child involved was particularly depraved, more because of what it was done in the name of.
One rainy afternoon, a young boy wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a pair of roller blades (minus the fabric inserts) was seen wandering the streets of military housing. The police were called, and when they responded they found this kid crouched at the end of someone's driveway, crying. They picked him up, asked him what was going on and after a few seconds realized that if what he was telling them was true it was not in his best interests to return him to the familial home - so they took him to the Law Enforcement facility and got the rest of his story there.
He was 12. He had been adopted 2 years before, by a military couple. Prior to his adoption, he had been living on the streets of London, England. The family that adopted him were uber religious Southern Baptists, and it was hoped that some of their values would rub off on this kid and he'd straighten himself out.
He said the abuse started about a year after he went to live with them. They started locking him in a linen closet for punishment when he misbehaved, but after a while it became a routine thing. He was in the closet 23 hours out of a 24 hour day, 7 days a week. He wasn't allowed to come out for meals, he wasn't even allowed to eat the same food as the rest of the family. Every couple of days, the father would throw a half a loaf of bread and a couple of dollops of peanut butter in the closet for the kid to eat.
Once a day, for an hour, he would remove the child from the closet, take him to the basement, have him lay face down on the floor, and would lay a piece of 2 by 4 on the back of his head and one on the back of his legs so he could tell if the kid moved from the position he had told him to assume (he'd hear the wood fall onto the concrete basement floor) - the the dad would go upstairs and watch TV for the remainder of the hour. He call it 'stretching out'...his twisted version of 'exercise'. When the time was up, the kid would be returned to the closet. The father would shut the door, lock it, and hang a tin can from the doorknob so he'd be able to hear if the boy tried to open the door. On the rare occasions that the child tried to get out, the father heard, and the kid was beaten with a paddle and a belt. They were home schooled, so he didn't have the opportunity to tell a teacher or principal what was going on. Nobody saw that child for months at a time.
Occasionally the father would take him out of the closet for some fatherly advice sessions. He'd take the boy down into the basement and blindfold him. The he'd spread thumbtacks, pointy side up, over the floor, and clear a narrow path through them. He'd start the boy at one end of the path, still blindfolded, and tell him that if he followed his vocal instructions exactly, stepped exactly where he told him to, then he wouldn't get hurt. The lesson is all this was Proverbs 3 : 5-6. 'trust in the lord with all your heart, and lean not into thy own undertstanding. In all they ways acknowledge him, and he shall make thy paths straight'. The kid was to trust his earthly father, and he would make his path through the field of thumbtacks straight.
The father in all of this was pulled in for questioning, as was the mother, and the boy and his sister were removed from the home and placed in the care of DSS. The father didn't understand what all the fuss was about; he was a "god fearing christian man" and he was only discplining his child the way he felt the bible told him to (I haven't managed to find the part of the bible where it says it's ok to lock your kid in a closet and toss food at them every few days)
The mother said that she was a righteous woman too, and that she hadn't come forward because her husband "had dominion" in their house. To come forward and tell about the things that he had been doing would have been just as bad as adultery in her eyes.
So, they were both detained, and a hearing was set for 2 days later. At the hearing, bail was set at $45,000 per person. Guess who bailed them out? Their church. The church, in a public statement (the media had got wind of this case by then and was all over the story) said that they stood behind the man, the woman and their actions 100%, and that if perhaps more people raised the families this way we wouldn't have such horrible social and economic issues. It left a lot of us in the community wondering if the pastor and the church members knew the whole story - and wondering how in hades they could condone such behaviour and activity if they did. It's one thing to minister to one of your parishoners whilst they're incarcerated; to forgive them for their actions...but to 'fess up almost a hundred grand to bail someone out, and then to claim publicly that they had done nothing wrong? It beggared belief.
At trial, it all came out. The boy in the family wasn't the only one being abused, the wife and daughter were as well. The wife, once separated from her husband, became emboldened, and spoke out about the other things that happened in the home. The son wasn't the only one getting the buckle end of the belt, let's put it that way.
The man was sentenced to 6 years in the state penitentiary, was given a dishonorable discharge and forfeited all his pay and allowances for his remaining time in service. The woman was given probation, but was awarded custody of her daughter. The son was placed with a foster family who one day hoped to adopt him.
I guess that my point in relating this to you is, as I said in the beginning, to emphasize not only how people can twist the words of the bible to fit their own needs, but to show how far people will go in an effort to please their god. I'm not saying that christianity has sole rights to that claim; far from it: one only has to look at the current state of affairs in the middle east to see that christianity in the US is very 'vanilla' and tame compared to Islam...but we in the west pride ourselves on being civilised. I don't see anything civilised about abusing your child because your church encourages you to do so.