San Diego

When Children are Maltreated by Religious Groups

By Dave Rice

Child sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church have repeatedly rocked the nation for more than a decade now, and in 2010 spread locally to reach the San Diego Diocese. The so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and early ‘90s brought the prospect of harm to children through mysterious and violent rituals to the forefront of the nation’s attention (though such focus turned out to be largely overblown), while periodically stories reach the news involving the tragic death of a child raised by a family of religious separatists. Incidents such as the aforementioned remind us that institutions of faith are capable of inspiring misplaced trust that can bring harm to the most vulnerable amongst us: our children.

These stories, however, just scratch the surface of a more widespread problem concerning the mistreatment of children in the name of religion, says Janet Heimlich, author of Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment.

It was “a chain of events” dating back to 2008 that sparked Heimlich’s research, she tells me by phone in mid-May. “It started by reading in a top-of-the-fold, front page New York Times article about an 11 year-old girl named Kara Neumann died of diabetes. She hadn’t been taken to the doctors since she was three, so her condition was never diagnosed. Her parents prayed over her, church members prayed over her, but she was never taken to the doctor . . . that story really gripped me.”