Jan 12^th

An interesting situation has emerged locally. This involves a pastor who was a temporary appointment to bridge the gap between the former pastor’s departure and the new pastor’s installation. These people have a difficult job, indeed they make a career of moving from church to church often needing to calm the difficulties that led to the departure of the former pastor. The temporary pastor usually serves one to two years and then moves on when the new pastor arrives. The case in point here involves a temporary pastor, now long gone, who is accused of sexually harassing several parishioners and a staff member.

His superior was informed and the interim received counselling and was prohibited from serving in any church in his denomination for five years. The women who were harassed received nothing, but at least they remained anonymous. Now there is an effort to redress this imbalance and the church is prepared to pay for the women’s counselling expenses.

The question immediately arises; why didn’t these women go to the police? The most obvious answer is that by keeping their complaint within the church they could remain anonymous; if they went to the police they, as adults, could not remain anonymous. By keeping their complaints within the church hierarchy not even other church members knew anything about this event until very recently. That is a powerful incentive for a respectable church woman to do just what these women did. The church hierarchy is quite likely to want to keep the entire issue very quiet so their secret will be safe.

There’s more of course: If a complaint had been made to the police then evidence would have had to be presented for any prosecution to take place. If the harassment had taken place during a private counselling session with this pastor how could a victim present any evidence given that there would be no witnesses? Going to the police would also open the entire church to community ridicule; you can hear it already, what kind of church has pastors like that? The women complaining would probably not be very popular with their church friends. So there is considerable incentive for not reporting this to the police. Also keep in mind that this interim pastor will not be there very long. This is another incentive for saying nothing at all to anybody.

If women are not to be victimized they must be willing to risk the potential stigma that may come with confronting their attackers. It might take some time but we can see, even in the case of Bill Cosby, victims will have their day.