Marcus wrote: ↑Sun Oct 09, 2022 7:05 pm
malkie wrote: ↑Sun Oct 09, 2022 2:09 pm
If there is "plenty of room for improvement", and the recent efforts by the church are impressive, I'd expect to see huge improvements in the works as a matter of urgency. The church has, effectively, unlimited funds to use, a large law firm at its call, and a membership willing, nay eager, to obey every whim of their leaders, be it working against gay rights, or castigating women with more than one ear piercing.
With the resources at its disposal the church could revolutionise its handling of abuse cases overnight.
Perhaps I'm the only one who is missing any little sign of that happening.
No, you're not. The pdf of cases that Doc has posted repeatedly is subtitled "a history, 1959-2017." And there have been a flood of reports and stories published continuing to document this problem well past 2017. The simple fact that background checks are required by law in CA, and CA is the only state the lds church has now decided to "require" them for its members is a perfect example. There is not much in way of sufficient "recent efforts."
Just a word of caution about trends. When Doc posted the pdf of cases, I read a bunch of them starting from the most recent and going back. The dates listed are of court filings (like complaints or conviction) or media articles. The dates do not represent the dates of alleged abuse. Sometimes the dates on an entry are decades after the alleged abuse. The publicity over abuse in the boy scouts and the BSA's bankruptcy filing caused a ton of cases to be filed, many by adult men alleging abuse years or decades before the suit was filed. Also, many states have special statutes of limitations for sexual abuse of minors that extends, and sometimes eliminates, the statute of limitation. Even if the pdf of cases and media articles were complete, it would take a ton of work to figure out whether the frequency of abuse has changed over time.
To make it even more complicated, the entries include accused abusers who at any time had a connection with the LDS church, even if the abuse itself had no connection. So, one case was about an LDS member who was caught, convicted, and excommunicated for child sex abuse and then years later went on to commit abuse in a setting unrelated to the LDS church. It's in the list.
Finally, changes in rates of reporting may not reflect similar changes in rates of actual abuse. All we can see are incidents of abuse that someone has reported. It is entirely possible that the number of reported incidents could increase due to heightened vigilance and awareness at the same time the rate of abuse incidents is decreasing due to preventative actions.
I don't think we know what we should expect to see today as a result of changes made over the past few years. Most likely, the reports will lag the actual abuse by perhaps years. Without doing the analysis needed to make sure we are comparing apples to apples, I have to say that I have no idea whether changes the church has made over any given period of time have been effective.