Evangelical institutions systematically shifted blame for sexual assault onto female victims

Evidence

Across conservative evangelicalism, it was not uncommon for allegations of assault to be met with skepticism or otherwise covered up or dismissed. In 2014, an independent report found that Bob Jones University had been telling victims not to report sexual assault to the police so as not to harm their families, churches, and the university. For decades, too, they’d told victims they were to blame for their abuse. That same year, The New Republic published a report on sexual assault at Patrick Henry College, the school founded by Michael Farris to serve as a pipeline for homeschooled Christian culture warriors. The previous year, the college had required all students to attend a lecture in which a professor spoke of “witch hunts” waged against men even as “seductresses” lured men into “honeytraps.” “Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of ‘rape’ in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual.” Another PHC professor explained, “When you have a culture of license where you can’t tell the difference between what’s full rape or fake rape and what’s real rape,” it was hard to deal with rape at all. This reasoning echoed that of Missouri Republican Todd Akin, who had provoked outrage during his 2012 Senate campaign when he sought to distinguish “legitimate rape” from most rape allegations—a distinction that was common at places like PHC, where the burden of guilt rested on female victims. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 644

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth asking whether this victim-blaming doctrine functioned as the institutional ‘cover-up’ mechanism that let the movement’s militant-masculinity ideal endure by steering any scandal back onto female failure. The PhD thesis the reader was collecting patterns for.
• XREF: The seductress/honeytrap framing is a direct echo of the garden-serpent-eve blame structure in Genesis, and the PHC ‘culture of license’ language maps onto the moral-panic frameworks in the reader’s own work. — connects to: Elite sexual abuse proved far more widespread than previously supposed — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1939