MK forum

I wanted to let everyone know that I met this past Friday with Rich Ramirez and his daughter, Kristen, who are helping with the Via investigative team. I'm so glad I had the opportunity. They are wonderful people; listen well; ask good questions.

I want to let you know how important it is that they hear from each individual. They have heard a lot of second-hand info from people but they need to hear from the actual people involved. The more people they hear from, the more stories they hear first-hand, the more thorough their investigation can be. They can only move along as quickly as they do hear from people. They have no desire to expose victims or have them suffer more. They want the truth to be exposed.

Let me know if you have any questions I can answer for you or if you'd like the e-mail address for the Via investigative team.

I'm curious. Most of the paedophiles had children, what happened to them? Surely many of them are aware now of what their parent/s deeds were. While most of us had wonderful parents who served in tribal areas and may only occassionally have caught a whiff of the smoke from the boarding schools, others of us had parents who were on the bases where the boarding schools were located and it was a bit more than the occassional bit of smoke wafting around.
I'm one of the latter and so have had to confront the possibility that my parents at the very least knew what was going on and did nothing about it. What I've found out is not pleasant, but if I stick my head in the sand and say "I don't want to know", doesn't that make me no better than others who have covered up? Sometimes the truth hurts, some of our parents did not act honourably, and many still don't, but what about the children of these abusers, are they blind to what their parents did, or do they just want to pretend it never happened? Am I alone when it comes to looking at the past and asking, where were my parents in all this?

You pose a very provocative question? You are probably the most outspoken student I know who had parents on base at one of the schools. Our school site is private and you have to be invited to join. I have noticed that none of the perps children have been invited as we freely discuss some of them by name. I get the feeling we are deliberately protecting them from hearing what their parents did. I have no way of knowing if the kids were aware of their parents actions or not. It has been pointed out that some staff and field committee member's children were indeed treated without malice while the rest of us suffered abuse. Many of the perps kids went on to take leadership roles within the mission where as most of the abused kids chose not to get involved. Coincidence??? I think not!

Coincidence??? I think not also. But what about perpetrators who abused their own kids, where did they end up?

I suspect you are right, that I am the most outspoken of the "base" kids. I hope my outspokenness equates to being honest. I think it would be poor form for me to chase after paedophiles and close a blind eye to what was happening in my own nest.

There are the Adult MK children of Pedophiles.
And there are the Adult MK children of Leadership who are afraid their parents might have been involved in covering up abuse.
Both have a strong tendency to protect the parents. I've experienced that this is just as strong from MKs whose parents were on leadership as with MKs whose parents were abusers.
Also a very big reason that some victims will not speak out is because it will hurt their MK friends, who are the children of these pedophiles and leadership.
I appreciate your honesty Bemused!

This is such a complicated picture. Each of us thinks our own family was the normal one (well, most of us still think that... acknowledging at least one exception in the room .. ahem, Bemused!). Children, in order to survive, cling to the adults who feed and clothe them. Sometimes those adults are abusive. In some cases that was a dorm parent or staff member, in other cases it was a child's own parent/s. We go to strange places in our heads to rationalize and justify the fact that people who were supposed to love us were cruel to us. I have heard adults relate stories of terrible physical and emotional abuse by their parents, proclaim that they turned out just fine, and then use their own history of being abused to justify why it is okay for them to inflict harsh corporal punishment on their own children!

When NTM MKs fly to the defense of their parents, I'm not sure what we can do to dissuade them. We will probably never be able to get a clear picture. Was the missionary parent abusive to the MK, but they have accepted their childhood as normal, and okay? Did the missionary live a Jekyll and Hyde existence, and treat some vulnerable MKs differently than they treated their own children? Is the adult MK's own identity, position or livelihood threatened by the truth about their family, so they feel they must stay in denial for their own survival now, as an adult? Did an MK raised in an abusive home become an abuser themselves, and so they must now hide their own shameful evil side?

I am of the opinion that most missionaries who abused other people's children had a very unhealthy family life that had to have an effect on their own children, on some level. In some cases I know this be a fact. In other cases it's just conjecture. I know that some victims of incest within the mission actually grew up to become NTM missionaries themselves.

There are also some adult MKs who I think are completely unaware of what their parent was capable of, or what they did. Other adults at the time of the abuse may have known, but they hid the facts from the child (understandably), and over the years, this became a deeply buried secret that would be devastating to the now-adult child.

And then there are the children of missionaries in leadership positions who did not handle cases of abuse in the right way. Naturally we all live with the fear that some decision we made in the past is going to come back to haunt us. I think we can all relate to that. And as a woman whose father, husband, brother, brothers-in-law and other assorted relatives and close friends have all been NTM leadership, I can say that I actually know the fear of wondering whether a mistake made by one of them is going to be exposed in these IHART investigations. I can relate to the desire to protect those I love, and I can predict that if I learn that one of them is being named as a participant in a cover-up, I will feel defensive and protective. After all, we are family. Which is exactly what we are discussing here.

But I am committed to pursuing justice and healing for wounded children. They MUST remain my focus. They were defenseless long ago. They must be protected now, and believed. Even if that makes us and our families very, very uncomfortable.

good input, Raz

Many thanks for the above posts, nicely put.

I was never under any illusion that the family I grew up in was normal. I can remember back to the pre religon days, just. At that point in time we would probably be considered typical of an immigrant family to a new country. When religon crossed our path, there was a dynamic shift in my parents and an even bigger shift when we entered NTM.

Many families good deeds on the mission field far outweighed the occassional misdemeanour committed. Some adults badly let their families down and the wider NTM family by their criminal behaviour. I'm not sure where my family sits on this sliding scale, I doubt it is at either end. However at the end of the day there were far to many families that were at the negative end of the scale, it should have been just the odd rogue, who was weeded out very fast, not the dozens that we now know about.
Each of us must answer for what we did or didn't do. Defending or exposing what our parents did or did not do is a personal choice. My own choice is to get to the bottom of what was really going on, how much my father knew, why he made the choices he did and what were the consequences of those choices.
At the end of the day, I have to live with my non perfect self and being less than honest is not the person I want to see in the mirror.

Bemuse, you start us wondering about our own families. Some of the 'now exposed' families were very close friends of my parents. How could they not know??? But then again, I put my own daughters in harms way and did not know.

Our neighbour went to Jail for his crimes. The scarey thing is, he was no better or worse than any other parent (he seemed just like any other NTMer). He covered it up and worse still, NTM covered it up, even when he went to Jail, NTM Australia covered it up for 8 years and left to many families possibly exposed. That is criminal and NTM Australia needs to explain to their "family" why!
Until they do, they and all who defend and associate with them will come under a cloud of suspicion.
Some of this is very unnerving, we just don't know who was doing what, but we should know, this is a Christian organisation not the mafia we are dealing with. An organisation that has let itself badly down and hurt far to many innocent people.