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As the Investigation into NTM Panama is nearing the final stages, some of the Panama MKs are concerned that the final report and resulting actions to be taken by NTM will be insufficient by a large margin based on how other investigations have gone. We collectively have tried to put together a list of what we want to see come out of this process from NTM. Below is the final letter delivered to the Executive Board
Dear Executive Board members of New Tribes Mission USA,
We Panama MK representatives greatly appreciate the opportunity to express our concerns to you regarding the upcoming issuance of the findings and recommendations report summarizing the investigation into alleged abuses that occurred in Panama. The following points are a compilation of many hours of thought, discussions back and forth online and several hours of phone calls. The list below is representative of the concerns/requests of a significant portion of the Panama MKs. We ask that you give our concerns careful thought and consideration.
1. A comprehensive master report on all abuse findings from the Panama investigation needs to be produced and disseminated. This master report should be in such a form that it can be read by the general public without revealing the identity of a victim of abuse or information of a sensitive nature such that a victim of abuse would be easily identifiable.
2. This master report should include the names of all who have been confirmed by the investigators to have committed abuse against children. The master report should also describe the types of offenses committed without identifying or re-victimizing survivors. We strongly contend that it is possible to do this in such a way as to reflect the seriousness of the abuse while still protecting the victims.
a. The report should be supportive of and protective of victims. It should not contain comments from abusers or others which would re-damage victims. (e.g., an abuser said something like, "she didn't say no, so I thought she liked it".) b. The types of abuse should be described without revealing identifying information of the abused. As NTM boarding schools were small, tight-knit communities, victims would feel very vulnerable if the report were to say something like, "Victim 8 reported that Mrs. Smith was angry that she couldn't finish her green beans and withheld food from her the next morning until she ate the cold green beans that had sat on the table all night." Any children who witnessed that incident (and may have remembered it) will immediately know who Victim 8 is and anything else in the report which is associated with Victim 8 will also be recognized. Instead, something more broad should be in the report, like "It was reported that Mrs. Smith would force children to finish food that they were served, even going so far as to refuse to feed them anything else the next meal until they finished it." The nature of abuse is such that MK survivors are conditioned to live in so much fear that they are worried about the repercussions of revealing their abuse to investigators. They fear their abusers and those who love or support their abusers, including the children of those abusers. When they have had the courage to speak to investigators, it is very important to protect them and keep them from feeling vulnerable and exposed.
3. Of utmost importance is for the whole truth to come to light even if the truth is ugly. Abuse needs to be called abuse. Rape, sodomy and beating are tough words to use but they need to be used when those are the facts. Victims do not feel validated or vindicated when their abuse is described in ways that soften the impact. It is incongruous for a report sent to a victim to confirm “abuse” yet a separate report disseminated internally to use a more innocuous term such as “act of misconduct.” This has the appearance of intentional deception or cover-up.
4. Where investigators have reached conclusions about significant and related matters, these should be included in the master report. If other factors contributed to the abuse (such as the culture of the organization/lack of oversight), these should be included in the master report. The report should also indicate who in positions of authority responded or failed to respond in ways that would have protected children, removed abusers and/or prevented future abuse.
5. The master report should be clear on the scope of the abuse. It should include time periods, number of victims, number of known victims of a particular abuser and statistics indicating how many MKs attended the boarding school during the particular year in question. Information about the investigative process, such as how many MKs were contacted, responded and participated in the investigation, should also be included.
6. The master report should be disseminated to all who participated in the investigation, not just to confirmed victims of abuse.
7. The master report should be made available to the general public. If a report is to be disseminated internally to members, it should not be a different, confidential, and/or a reworded report.
8. The recommendations in the master report and resulting actions taken by NTM should be grave and significant, not only against confirmed abusers but also against those whose actions or lack of actions failed to protect children, to remove abusers and/or to prevent future abuse. All supporters of missionaries confirmed to have perpetrated abuse should be informed, not just a single “sending church.”
9. Redundancy is counterproductive. Rather than producing repetitive multi-part reports for each abuser, each field leader(s) and each victim, issuing a master report would reduce situations in which an MK with more than one abuser would receive multiple separate reports with many subparts.
10. The master report should include not only victim accounts of abuse but also that of eyewitnesses, parents, field leadership and, where relevant and appropriate, the response from the accused when confronted by the investigators with the allegations of abuse.
11. The master report should include a discussion of the environment/culture present in NTM at the time the abuse occurred and whether this fostered abuse. We ask that NTM acknowledge that this culture existed, that the environment in general contributed to the abuse, that it was unacceptable and that it is no longer tolerated by NTM.
12. The master report should clearly identify current NTM policies intended to prevent current and future MKs from suffering abuse. It should identify additional child protection policies to be implemented to further safeguard current and future MKs. Articulate the enforcement mechanisms available to NTM USA should these policies not be implemented and followed by foreign NTM organizations.
The following are current concerns that have been expressed regarding IHART:
A. That there has been and continues to be a lack of good, clear and ongoing communication with MKs regarding the investigation completion timeline.
B. That the Panama statement of findings will be too personally revealing to be posted verbatim for the public to see.
C. That IHART may not understand NTM history and culture including how small the schools were and how clearly many people remember the abuse events.
D. That IHART will not have fully completed the investigation prior to writing the report resulting in relevant people not being interviewed and critical information not being discovered.
E. That issuing scores of individualized reports (rather than one master report) will result in template based copy/paste documents that are cold, sterile and poorly written.
We sincerely ask that you allow the Panama MKs to engage with you in productive dialog regarding the above-mentioned concerns in the hopes that we can together find as effective and mutually satisfying a result to this investigation as possible under the circumstances. We would like to discuss these concerns with you in more detail in the near future as this letter would be too lengthy if it included all requests and suggested solutions. We have compiled numerous responses from individual Panama MKs regarding what they want to see from NTM out of this process. These responses have been synthesized to form the content of this letter. We would appreciate a timely written response as we know that time is of the essence.
Respectfully submitted, Panama MK representatives
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