MK forum

I could just cry!
Like I haven't already.
Many times!

Excerpts from IHART's May 2016 Progress Report, http://www.ihart.care/progress.html :

"The Bolivia team is in the very final stages of their Master Report. ... The Panama process continues with the writing of individual Statements of Findings and the Summary Report that we plan to make available to the public."

New Tribes Mission: as IHART works (and works ... and works ....) on their reports, let me refresh your memory with a copy of the letter submitted to you, the Executive Board, in July 2014. This letter came from a group of Panama MKs who were hoping have some influence over how the investigation into the child abuse in Panama would be concluded. After receiving this letter, a meeting was planned in Sanford, and a group representing the Panama MKs traveled to the NTM headquarters to sit down, at the beginning of November 2014, with members of the EB and others representing NTM. (Note that one of the people representing NTM in those meetings was Theresa Sidebotham, who at that time had not yet replaced Pat Hendrix as IHART coordinator.) During those meetings, there was some indication that the MKs had been heard.

Panama MKs, I am refreshing this letter here, and adding some highlighting and underlining, to emphasize what your MK representatives requested. When (if) you receive your reports, you can compare them with this letter and see if your requests were implemented.

(July 2014)

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

I think the Pii report for AWBE on the Donn Ketcham investigation would be a pretty good example to follow.

Yes! And the group who investigated Donn Ketcham's abuse in Bangladesh, Professional Investigators International, is THE SAME group who conducted the investigation into child abuse in Panama!

Pii's investigation of NTM Panama began in Jan. 2012. In May of 2014, we were informed that Pii had completed their investigation, and had submitted their final report to IHART, who in turn would be presenting it to the NTM Executive Board in July of that year.

It is reasonable to conclude that the report written by Pii on their findings on Panama abuse would have been similar to the report they submitted to ABWE on abuse by Donn Ketcham. Pii says their report on Panama was 1075 pages long!

This report would have been seen by Pat Hendrix, the NTM Executive Board, and the Recommendations Panel, which met in Oct. 2014. Obviously, Pii's report would have also been seen by Theresa Sidebotham.

In early Nov. 2014, NTM announced that it was replacing the IHART coordinator. (Many people had had the impression that IHART was an independent group. But with the ouster of Pat Hendrix by NTM, and the installation of Theresa Sidebotham as the new coordinator, it was evident that NTM had final say, and in fact, from this point on, NTM began describing IHART as a "process of NTM".)

If no one else ever gets to read Pii's report on Panama abuse, it will be because Theresa Sidbotham stepped in and took over, effectively redirecting the investigation.

Since Nov. 2014 to the present, Pat has managed to stall the conclusion of the Panama investigation. Her explanation that she needed this time to re-examine "leadership culpability" lacks credence, considering the fact that Pii says it would have taken them 4-6 weeks to include leadership culpability in their investigation, given all the information already uncovered during their interview and investigation process.

Yes, the MKs from Panama almost got to see a report that probably would have been similar to the one Pii produced on abuse in ABWE.

Almost. But not now.

I predict that what the Panama MKs will get instead, will look more like what IHART and NTM mailed to Vianopolis abuse survivors than what the ABWE MKs got.

I fear that we are in for another Epic Fail.

What a shame. What a terrible, terrible shame.

I have heard again, recently, the argument that NTM is prohibited by law from publicly naming child abusers who are found, by process of investigation, to have committed sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse on children.

May I point out, once again, that the report ABWE recently released CLEARLY shows that argument to be bogus!

ABWE has attorneys too! The attorneys who have supposedly advised NTM that they cannot allow names of pedophiles and child abusers who were members of the organization to be publicized are not correct!

NTM, stop hiding behind your lawyers with excuses which do not hold water. It is clear to me that you have your own motives for not wanting the scope of child abuse in your midst to be publicized. It is clear as well, why you do not want the names of abusers to be known.

Anyone who has been around NTM for long knows how entangled family trees have become over the past decades. People being named by abuse survivors have family members still serving in NTM. Or good friends who are in positions of prestige and power.

It's a fragile house of cards which could come tumbling down, if the whole truth were to be known.

So I understand it. But I don't buy it.

If someone has abused a child, it doesn't matter that they were your father, your grandfather, your cousin, your neighbor, or your buddy. It doesn't matter that they hurt children while they were outside of US borders, and thus cannot be prosecuted. It doesn't matter that you think you know that person so well that you can swear on a stack of Bibles that you KNOW they would have been incapable of doing what they have been reported as doing.

None of those things are acceptable reasons not to validate victims and allow their stories to be told!

Turn toward the light. Embrace the truth. Stop covering for people who hurt children, and for people who protected those who hurt children.

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE.

NTM is lying! It's built on one big arrogant lie! We all know who the offenders are! We know some are still in NTM, it's no big secret.
NTM is only interested in keeping the lid on their crappy past for as long as they can, so they can roll in as much cash as they can con out of naive churches and individuals!
If they named all the perverts, some big names would come out of the wood work and because there is so much intermarriage, a hell of a lot of Tribers are going to be linked!

Come on NTM, start giving up your perverts! Do it willingly and avoid the embarrassent of being forced to do so! Change is coming, wakey wakey!

The whole truth must be known!

Sooner or later the whole truth WILL be known. I just hope it's sooner rather than later.

I read a great quote once a long time ago.

"Those who see evil being carried out and do nothing are just as guilty as those who are carrying out the evil."

There are those of us who are seeing the evil that has been done and is still being done. We are watching closely but that is not all we are doing.

Thank you, Watching Closely. What an encouraging post to wake up to this Sunday morning!

It means a lot to know there are others watching besides the handful of us who usually post here.

And that there are those who are not just watching .... maybe someday I will get to find out what else you are doing.