I see a theme among many of the posts here, mainly regarding educating, making policies, putting safeguards into place, training, and the like.
I would like to be so bold as to say that I believe these things are, as I stated in another thread, working from the outside in.
No amount of education, training, reading the right books, safeguards, policy or checklists is going to keep children safe from abuse when the core problem is NOT that people were not educated, or trained, or safeguarded, or well-read, or poli-cized (not a real word, I don't think) or even checklisted.
The REAL problem came from the hearts of sinful men (and women) who committed the abuse and then those who covered up abuse. These people knew without reading, training, education and so forth that what they did and were doing was W-R-O-N-G. They KNEW it was sin. That is why they covered it up.
The people who DID know that it was wrong and sinful and were willing to take a stand, well, I'd venture to say that they didn't have to read a dozen books and 20 policy manuals and attend 200 hours of training on safe child policies to know that the abuse was sin. In fact, I'll be so bold as to go as far as saying that the only thing these people needed was the Holy Spirit and God's Word. <GASP!> And what happened to them? They were pooh-poohed, shunned, ostracized, made to feel like spiritual inferiors, lied to and bullied...
And as Mike Sullivan said time and time again: "Righteousness convicts unrighteous." So if we don't like the conviction we're receiving, well, let's just send the "troublemakers" away.
I would not spend much time on policy and education. Not at this point. It's trying to stick a finger in the dam and it's going to collapse under pressure.
What think all of you? I think it's a nice little diversion tactic to keep from dealing with what really needs dealt with.
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