Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity. This episode, DL talks with RL Stollar about threats to children’s safety in child-centric organizations like churches or the Scouts, as well as what statistics say about which demographic are most likely to sexual abuse kids.
RL is a child liberation theologian and an advocate for children and abuse survivors. The author of a book on child liberation theology, "The Kingdom of Children." Ryan has an M.H.S. in Child Protection from Nova Southeastern University. He has served on the board of and run numerous social media campaigns for child advocacy organizations, including the Child-Friendly Faith Project, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out. He authored the first and only comprehensive curricula on child abuse awareness and suicide prevention specifically tailored to homeschooling families and communities. Co-founder of the viral website Homeschoolers Anonymous, his advocacy work on behalf of homeschooled children and alumni has been featured in national and international media.
You can find out more about RL’s work and social media links at his website.
This episode focuses on the risks of sexual abuse of children by adults, so please take care as you listen. If you find this triggering because of your own experiences, rainn.org is a good place to look for support.
Also, we love comments on these posts, but please don’t share graphic information and keep in mind that this website is a public arena where anyone can read comments posted here.
Transcript
DL: Welcome to the STRONGWILLED Podcast. It's me, DL Mayfield, and I'm so excited that I get to do another interview. It's been a while, but I have been wanting to talk to my guest today for quite some time. And actually, he has been a really huge help and a sounding board for me as I've tried to tackle this really unruly subject of abuse of children within evangelical spaces.
And so, I just want to say, first of all, thank you so much, RL, for the phone call and the editing help. You've been so helpful and just have this spirit of comradery and scholarship. You're one of those people that I feel like I have to interview you because I'm very impressed just with your overall ethic, all the stuff you do, and your willingness to help and make things better and more accurate.
It's just great. So I'm talking to RL Stollar today, also known as Ryan Stollar. So welcome, RL, to this podcast. I'm so glad you're here.
RL: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. I have been following the STRONGWILLED project since the beginning. I think it's been amazingly well done. So it's a pleasure and an honor to be here.
DL: Well, thanks! I feel like maybe it'd be best to start off with you letting our audience know who you are, just a tiny bit of your background, because I think all of this is really relevant and really interesting. And the work you've done in the past and the work you're doing now.
That's a lot to cover, but you tell us as little or as much as you want to about your background and how you came to be talking about both child liberation and child protection.
RL: I have come to these topics through the angle of homeschooling. I was homeschooled by evangelical parents from kindergarten through high school graduation. So all the way through as we say.
DL: Oh, wow.
RL: And, you know, my homeschool experience personally was a bit more moderate and positive, and I think a lot of my friends’ experiences were. But when I became an adult and I was talking to friends and reconnecting with peers, I was seeing a lot of patterns in our stories. Even though my experience was relatively positive, I definitely had negative experiences with different adults and ideas in the movement.
And so in 2013, I founded an organization called Homeschoolers Anonymous, which was a blog and narrative sharing platform for homeschool alumni to share their experiences in the movement, most especially with abuse and neglect. And out of that organization, several nonprofits were founded. One was Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out, and then another, which currently still exists, is the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
And through my experience with those organizations I studied and learned a lot about child abuse prevention as well as other topics like suicide prevention awareness. We created resources for homeschooling communities, several free curricula for co-ops to use to educate themselves on those issues.
As I was getting more involved with advocacy, I felt like I needed to be better equipped to help my fellow alumni as well as address the issues that we were facing. So I went back to school and got a master's in child protection, and it was while I was studying for my child protection degree that I was really seeing this reoccurring issue of everything that I was learning in terms of what were the best practices for, you know, child development, childcare, child protection, all of these best practices were really in diametric opposition to the practices that I grew up with that were recommended as not just, you know, good but holy and the only way to do things.
DL: Yeah.
RL: So there was this constant tension which became a really significant concern of everything that I grew up with and that so many other people are growing up with still, currently, they're being taught these things that really are very harmful to children and families.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: And so I started thinking about, you know, okay, I think a lot of this is due to how evangelicals are reading and interpreting the Bible, and how they think about their faith in relationship to children and families. And so I started thinking, there have to be different ways to do that that would be instead of focusing on harm, you know, control and fear. You know, ways to think about one's faith in relation to children and families that's actually in empowering and healing for children.
DL: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
RL: And so the first thing that came to mind was Liberation Theology, which might seem weird since I was raised very conservative. But when I was in undergrad, a friend introduced me to Liberation Theology, and even when I was an evangelical back then, I was just really drawn to its emphasis on making the world a better place as opposed to having the right ideas or beliefs.
There's different types of liberation theology. Any kind of marginalized people group you can think of, there's a liberation theology for them. There's Black Liberation Theology, there's queer Liberation Theology, there's Liberation Theology for people with disabilities. And so I thought, there's got to be one for children. So I started researching it. I found just one book at the time, that was written way back in 1991. It's called Suffer the Children by Janet Pais. And it just really, honestly, blew my mind and made me really rethink a lot of what I grew up with.
So I've been researching and writing about child liberation and theology now since 2015. I published a book on the subject two years ago called The Kingdom of Children. So child liberation theology is kind of the nexus of where all my interests kind of come together.
DL: Yeah.
RL: I think that a lot of the harmful beliefs and practices that we see in the United States today when it comes to childcare and parenting have their roots in a lot of what you've been writing about in STRONGWILLED, the white evangelical, religious authoritarian parenting model, even though that's coming from a religious perspective, I think that kind of this emphasis on authority and control in families is very saturated throughout our whole society.
DL: Yes.
RL: And a lot of that is emanating from evangelicals because they really kind of commandeered and took over the whole parenting culture and advice industry during the seventies and eighties, the time when Dobson and other people like that were becoming really popular. The left liberals and progressives really kind of vacated that space pretty significantly as they got more uncomfortable with the right wing taking it over. And so that kind of created a vacuum where evangelicals became the loudest and most influential.
DL: Isn't that an interesting thread? You know, as I studied Dobson, and I've said this before, I don't think he's some evil genius, but he's relentless. He never stops talking. He never stops writing, never stops producing, never stops networking. He never stops his political campaign. He just never stops.
There's so much I want to talk to you about, but we have to narrow the scope. I just really appreciate that you mentioned becoming really interested in child development and child protection, because I think they're very intimately related. And my partner, Krispin, is obviously very interested in how certain child developmental phases are exploited by these authoritarian religious parenting methods.
What I'm here to talk to you today about is how these parenting methods, religious authoritarian ones in particular, can create conditions where children can be exploited and groomed, talk about predators because as the religious right took over these kind of parenting methods, and now it's sort of filtered throughout a lot of our society, we've had less and less actual information on who is truly harming kids in America. And so that's something you and I are going to be talking about in this conversation. So I hope people are prepared for that.
Real quick, I want to say, Liberation Theology was something I also got really into as someone who was indoctrinated into Christianity. It just made sense. It really mirrored my heart for social justice, equality, and balance. And the work you're doing is so radical because kids are truly the last population that people want to listen to, I feel! And this is not like a hierarchy of marginalization, I'm not saying that, but as far as the materials out there, to me it makes perfect sense that you're like, I'm obsessed with this, and why are there no liberation books for kids? About kids? Centering kids?
RL: Mm-hmm.
DL: So your work is so important in this field, and I hope that continues to grow. For now, at STRONGWILLED, we're dealing with grownup kids, but we still, all of us have that kid inside of us who grew up in these spaces. So, especially if you're still a person of faith, a Christian, I highly recommend RL's book. It's really great. So I just want to throw that plug out there for that.
RL: Thank you. I also just want to make a quick comment on that hierarchy of marginalization because, you know, I sometimes see child advocates make the claim that children are the most oppressed group in the world, and I have a reaction to that. I know other people have a reaction to that. And what I always try to urge people to think about is that in most groups of marginalization, you're going to have children within those subsets. So in saying that children are oppressed, you're not pitting them against others or doing that comparison per se.
But, you know, you know, queer people are very oppressed, Black people are very oppressed, but there are also queer children and there are also Black children. And so I think when we think about the oppression of children, we have to think about not just where they're situated in terms of age, but also, you know, the other groups to which they belong, which also contributes to that oppression.
DL: Totally. And this is why intersectionality matters, right? You can be a disabled Black child, right?
RL: Exactly. Yeah.
DL: And for me, I feel the same way about child liberation theology as I feel about disability theology, which is, all of us experience it, right?
RL: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DL: All of us were children. So we all have an entry point into that, honestly. And getting in touch with how powerless you felt in childhood is a part of healing. You can't just skip over this stuff as much as you might want to. So for me, it's all exactly related. Same thing with disability. It's like it's only a matter of time when you're going to experience some kind of disability. It's not an if, it's a when. And so I think both of those are really important just as a baseline 'cause all humanity experiences childhood. You just have to as a part of it.
So that's why it's so important and it is shocking how few resources there are out there. So I'm just so happy you're doing your work. Now, we're going to switch into kind of a more intense thing that we're going to focus in on, which is, I come from the evangelical world. You come from the evangelical world. I was told I was homeschooled to keep myself safe from the liberals, the queer people are going to groom me, you know, like the world is unsafe. All that stuff.
RL: Mm-hmm.
DL: So lots of talk about keeping kids safe. Now, that does not seem to play out in reality, that raising your kids Christian or homeschooling them or any of these things actually keeps them all that safer from predatory people. So that's kind of what I want to talk about here.
And a lot of this has to do with these larger narratives about who is hurting children. Obviously in our wider culture right now, the far right is really into targeting the queer community, the drag community, the trans community as grooming kids for abuse. But I wanted to ask you, as someone who actually is an expert in this, who is actually most likely to abuse children in the United States?
RL: Yeah, I think that's a super important question. I think that we have two caricatures of that, that we often hear talked about in general conversation. One is that creepy man with the mustache and the big glasses and the cargo van offering candy to kids.
DL: Yeah.
RL: And then the other would be what you mentioned, like a drag queen or someone, you know at story hour, the transgender person that is in a restroom that people don't think they should be in. So those are kind of the two main caricatures that we have, and they just don't really align with what actually the statistics show about who's preying on children. So, I'll throw out a few statistics and then I'll just kind of tie them together.
And of course we'll be talking about child sexual abuse statistics, so if that's going to be triggering to anyone, make sure you take care of yourself.
So the first thing is that child sexual predators are more likely to be married or formerly married. They actually have a higher percentage than the general population here. Predators are more likely to be married at 77%, and the general population is like 73 or 74. So these are folks that are in families, not, you know, this stranger or a creepy loan loner in a van. That's the idea of stranger danger, which isn't really true.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: The average predator tends to be a man. And this is a very high number. It's 94%. In their day-to-day lives, child sexual predators are more likely to identify as heterosexual at 96%. So the vast majority of those that prey on children in their day-to-day lives, when you're looking at them, they're going to be looking like people that are heterosexual.
And I'm saying identify here because there's a couple things to know about child molesters, which is that, first, a lot of molesters are not actually attracted to a gender, they are attracted to children. And so even if they may identify in their lives or look like they're in a heterosexual relationship with adults, their actual sexual preference is with children, not for that adult relationship.
DL: Can I ask a quick question about that?
RL: Yeah. Yeah.
DL: Because just for my own sake, it's hard for me to grasp what this all means. And I've started to think of it as a power situation and recreating a power dynamic, which makes sense why then gender is not on the agenda. It's who can you exploit and do this to, and get away with it. Who is vulnerable? Children are vulnerable. So am I making a correct assumption that it's kind of about power in all this?
RL: Yes. I mean, there's several levels here. There's several different groups of people that prey on children. One would be, what you're describing we would call, professionally, situational generalists.
DL: Okay.
So they are people that they're going to abuse whoever is in their circle. They will prey on the people that are vulnerable. It's called situational generalist because, whoever might be most vulnerable, it could be a child, it could be a woman, it could be a man, you know. The situation doesn't matter so much as the vulnerability and the power trip they get from it.
DL: Yes. Okay. Yeah.
RL: But there's also people that prey on children who are what we would call pedophiles.
DL: Yes.
RL: And those are people that are sexually attracted to children and usually they're not attracted to just girls or boys, but to children in general. And of course pedophilia is referring to the desire or the attraction. So not all pedophiles are necessarily molesters or abusers. So we also make that distinction.
DL: Right. Okay. Thanks for that.
RL: Oh yeah. Yeah. But even if you would abuse anyone in your circle or if you're attracted just to children, most of these predators in their everyday lives, because they are primarily married, as I said, they're going to be in an adult heterosexual relationship.
DL: Yes. Mm-hmm.
RL: So that’s a key distinction there. So just a few other stats. The average predator is more likely to molest girls. So girls tend to be a higher number of victims for predators. However, child sexual predators with the most number of victims each, are more likely to molest both boys and girls.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: I think this is a really important point in terms of child protection with all the conversations about bathrooms and bathroom bills because – So the predators with the most number of victims each are more likely to molest both boys and girls. Here's a statistic about that:
Those who report molesting only girls average about five victims and 34 acts. Those who report molesting both boys and girls average 27 victims and about 121 acts.
DL: Oh my God.
RL: So those who are molesting any children of any gender are averaging about five times as many victims and about five times as many acts.
DL: And I just want to interrupt really quick right here, because this is a thing that tends to shock people, is just the sheer amount of victims that a serial predator has. And I don't understand why this is not general knowledge. This is shocking to me. I learned this when, due to very personal circumstances, I had to research, “What is a serial offender like?” because I suspected someone of being a serial offender.
And it's just like, why are we not talking about this? Right? So I just wanted to maybe be an audience proxy and just say my shock there. I don't know if you have an answer as to why. It's just this is the reality – that is the average number of victims for a serial predator.
RL: Yeah. No, and you'll hear often people will say after some big abuse case that comes out that like there's going to be more, there has to be more. And this is one of the reasons why is that the people that are doing the most abusing are extraordinarily prolific.
And I think part of that is that because they're not being stopped or being held accountable or having oversight. When you just think that an abuser's okay, because they break down crying and say they're sorry for what they did, and then you just let them go on like their everyday lives, then you're going to have these sorts of situations where people just keep abusing.
DL: Wow. Which probably goes into your next statistic, right?
RL: Yeah. So the next statistic is that the average child sexual predator is religious. And this is a very high number as well. This is 90%. So 90% of people that abuse children, they're going to church, they profess a faith.
The average child sexual predator targets the children of their own families and friends. This is also a very high number, in the nineties. And this goes to the idea of stranger danger, which has been probably popular since the eighties. And, you know, the idea of, you know, don't accept candy from a stranger. But it also feeds into what we were talking about, about being afraid of, you know, strangers in the bathroom.The fact is that those people are not doing most of the abusing. The people doing most of the abusing are people that you know and trust in your circle of family and friends. Yeah.
DL: Yeah. It's devastating. But yeah, that's the reality.
RL: There's two other stats here, and then I'll tie it all together.
The next one is that more than two thirds of child sexual abuse images are made at home, and the victim's biological father is the perpetrator in 58% of the cases, and the stepfather in 41% of the cases. So if you add those two numbers together, that's 99%. So that's telling you that the people making what we call child porn, which the official, professional way is refer to as child sexual abuse images or material, only 1% of those making those are people that the children are not related to.
DL: Oh my God.
RL: And then abuse in general, so not just sexual abuse, but all forms of child abuse, these are most often perpetrated by children's own parents. The American Humane Association notes that 79% of perpetrators were parents and 6.8% were other relatives. So that means in under 1% of child maltreatment cases, the abuser is someone other than a parent or a relative.
Oftentimes when people point out the widespread and systemic abuse of children in these evangelical family value spaces, those spaces will deflect and point to high rates of abuse in, for example, the public school. And that's absolutely important to talk about, you know, abuse in public schools, but the fact is that that deflection is happening because there is so much abuse in those evangelical spaces.
Even though you have a high race in public schools, the vast majority of this abuse is actually happening in the families.
DL: Oh my gosh!
RL: So if you pull this all together, the average child sexual predator is someone who's married or was married, is religious – and these people often prefer churches and faith communities, which we'll talk about I think in a little bit – but essentially this is someone that is a family man. So the average child sexual predator looks like your average church going father or husband, essentially.
DL: Yeah. Yeah.
A question I have, just looking at the big picture is, again, why is this information not being written in a million articles that you can just easily find? I've been trying to research this. It's quite hard to find profiles of predators. It's hard to find it summed up like you sum it up and that just begs the question to me, why?
And then as soon as you put it all together, it's like, well, that's why. Who is a protected and privileged person in the United States and actually has been right. since the founding fathers? It's these white, land-owning men who exploit people constantly and abuse people constantly.
RL: Mm-hmm
DL: And that's still happening. And that same pattern is repeating itself over and over. I just find it really disturbing how hard it is to find out what the average profile of a predator is. So thanks for putting it out there. I wish this information was much more well known, which is why I'm spending my Sunday morning talking about this instead of chilling.
RL: Haha. Yes.
DL: So, sorry, I just had to interject there. And I think you have even more insight into this because you have actually taken the time to delve into the research of why predators identify as being religious and why they actually flock to church communities. Not just to go find more victims, but it becomes a whole part of their persona, right? Just a good person in society that you can be overlooked.
You probably have much more refined attitudes about this. I'm just looking on the sidelines, trying to piece it together myself.
RL: This wasn't on our list of things to talk about, but what you said just reminded me of – so here in the Bay Area, there is a Calvary Chapel Church. I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with Calvary Chapel. It's an evangelical megachurch, parachurch organization. They have a bunch of churches around the world. They lead with the Moses model, which is the idea of the pastor being like the person with all the power. So it's very just traditional evangelical.
DL: Yeah. Love that model.
RL: Yeah, great model. And there's a church in town, in Mountain View, and I can talk about this because it all has been in the news. But there's the pastor of this church, his name is Bill Bjorkman. And a few decades ago, he was arrested. He worked for a theater group. He abused some children. He went to jail, and in jail he converted to evangelicalism. And then he got let out on good behavior. And then he immediately became a pastor at this Calvary Chapel Church. He's now like the head pastor. His wife is the head of the children's ministry.
And there are some news articles about him leading the church even though he has this history of child abuse. And in one of the articles – it was like the creepiest thing I read – I read an article about when he became the pastor of the church and he talked about his history, you know, vaguely that was like, I did bad things and God forgave me and I repented. And then the article actually says that other people in the church were really moved by what he said and went to him afterwards and confessed their – and the article used something like dark deeds or whatever – to him.
DL: No. No.
RL: So when I read that, that really highlights for me– I think what we'll talk about now is what makes churches vulnerable to predators. And I think that there are certain things that we do that make ourselves vulnerable, but at the same time, there are faith communities and churches that are not just vulnerable, but that are
enabling and empowering predators intentionally. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
DL: I would say attracting them.
RL: Attracting them, but also, I think, set up specifically for that sort of situation, because of this romanticizing of the conversion narrative.
DL: Yeah. And I think if we're looking at this spectrum, a place that is more patriarchal, more hierarchical, and emphasizes immediate compliance to authority along with this doctrine of forgiveness, that's going to be very attractive to predatory people. And that's one of the things I've seen as I've been researching is, predators are aware of these things.
They're looking for the weak links in the system, and so they're going to be attracted to these places. Some of it, I think, is knowing, and some of it I think is unknowing. And at the end of the day, the kids are still getting hurt and getting exposed to predators, so that's why we just know it's this whole thing.
But do you want to talk a bit more about why churches – and I'm using these terms, like patriarchal and all that, maybe you have a different view of it. Do you think it's helpful to say, why do abusers flock to churches? Or do you think it is important to make distinctions about what kinds of churches?
RL: I think we can say churches. I mean, I think that they flock to them first and foremost because they see the churches as vulnerable and forgiving. So they see church as a place where they can go and either get in despite their quote unquote sins or evils, or a place where they can mask and fool.
There's this quotation from a convicted child molester that's in a book written by Dr. Anna Salter. Dr. Anna Salter wrote a great book about pedophiles and predators and who they are, their profile. So those who are interested in what we're talking about here I would definitely recommend Dr. Anna Salter's book, Predators. But this quotation from a molester that she interviewed says,
“I consider church people easy to fool. They have a trust that comes from being Christians. They tend to be better folks all around and seem to want to believe in the good that exists in people.”
So I think that's one level. Church people tend to be either wanting to be or feel forced to be accepting and forgiving of any sin.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: But I think then there's also some beliefs and ideologies going on, too. And some of these are maybe more prevalent in what you're referring to as the patriarchal communities. One would be the idea of sphere sovereignty.
And this is an idea that comes from R.J. Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism, which is the foundation of the evangelical homeschooling movement. Sphere sovereignty is the idea that God has established different spheres of authority and control.
So there's the church, there's the state, and then there's the family. And according to this model, no sphere is really supposed to interfere or get involved in the things that the other spheres are supposed to be doing. And so the church is seen as a pretty holy and sacrosanct sphere that the state shouldn't really have authority over.
So when abuse happens in churches, many of these more conservative, patriarchal churches believe that they're supposed to handle it in house. They're not supposed to report that to the authorities. Same with family, since people think that, in these communities, child abuse and families, unless it's super extreme, is often supposed to be handled within that family or, worse comes to worst, the church can get involved, but the state really isn't supposed to.
Sorry, you were going to say something?
DL: Yeah, I grew up homeschooled, too, and a quick aside, maybe people don't know how explicit that instruction is, and I didn't even include this in my chapter on the recipe for abuse because we didn't really talk about homeschooling. But I was told over and over again as a child, the government is trying to control us, the government is our enemy, they want to interfere with how we raise kids. And actually there's tons of explicit talk from my parents of the government wants to take away spanking. The government is – and just all of this stuff. And so even as you're talking, I'm like, this is talked about a lot in these communities. The government has no authority.
Which again, is so sad when abuse occurs. Not only are the parents not going to go, but the kids aren't going to go to the authorities because of all of this instruction. So, sorry. That was my little aside. Keep going.
RL: I think that connects to another thing, which is that in these communities, children are not seen as having rights. So when you say that the state shouldn't have authority over church or family, what that means is that when children are harmed in these communities, they're being raised with the belief that they don't really have any recourse other than to, if their dad's abusing them, maybe they'll tell their mom, but the mom is supposed to submit to the dad, so that's not going to go anywhere.
The kid could tell the church, the church isn't going to tell the authorities and they're going to come tell the parents what the kids said. And so again, every kind of path to addressing abuse is closed down because of these beliefs, and the family and the church are supposed to remain these private spheres.
And it's interesting you mentioned corporal punishment because one of the big leaders in homeschooling, Chris Klicka, he was an attorney for the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. There's this quotation by him that says something like, “If children had rights, they could be, they could refuse to be homeschooled and it would take away the parents' rights to spank them.”
I think that kind of just really distills everything we're talking about here, which is that if children are seen as fully human people who are autonomous, who have the right to agency and consent and bodily autonomy, if they really are supposed to be seen as fully human, then it is a threat to those who think that they should have the right to deny children education or hit them, essentially.
DL: Yeah, totally.
RL: The other thing I think that we should mention here in terms of why predators are attracted to churches and faith communities is that there's often a lack of accountability and oversight. Because many churches and faith communities not only are not reporting abuse to the authorities, they also don't have things like child protection policies. So they don't have established best practices for their communities on how to respond to situations where children are actually abused.
And so that means predators can, if they're caught in one church, they can move to another church because the other church isn't doing background checks that would reveal that that person, you know, did something previously. And so predators find these faith communities to be not just forgiving, but also as I said earlier, vulnerable because they don't have checks and balances like many secular institutions might.
DL: Yeah. And so the work we're doing at STRONGWILLED, we're trying to talk about the long-term impacts of these particular parenting methods. We just put out this chapter on how so many factors of these parenting methods create not just kids, but also entire communities that I would say groom kids to be exploited and abused in a variety of ways, including sexual abuse.
And so we talked a little bit about that, in that chapter that people can read, but I think one of the things from your book, The Kingdom of Children, that stood out to me so much was about the lack of education on consent. So I wonder if you could just talk about that a tiny bit. And then we're going to shift into talking about how can we start keeping kids safe, because this is so heavy.
But I wondered if really quick you wanted to talk about why consent is so important and how that not being a part of any of these conversations in any of these parenting books or churches can lead to abuse.
RL: Yeah. I think that section in my book about consent, for those who haven't read the book, I talk about how consent is really important in child protection, in teaching children about sexual abuse, physical abuse, it's really important to teach children that their bodies belong to themselves, that people should not be making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. In child protection circles we talk about, you should teach children about safe and unsafe touch. In previous decades, we would've said good and bad touch, but we don't say good and bad anymore because that can be confusing to children. It's easier to teach about safe and unsafe touch.
And to be able to teach children about that, you know, you have to let them know that adults should not be touching them in certain ways.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: But I think that there's another level, and I talk about that in this book, which is that consent isn't just about a child's body. It also should be applied to their mind and their inner life. So I think that it's really important that if children's bodies belong to themselves, that we all start teaching them that their thoughts, their beliefs, those sorts of things also belong to themselves. And they shouldn't be being forced into any sort of situation where they feel like their autonomy or will is being violated in a way that is unsafe.
And I think this really connects with child protection specifically, because in evangelicalism, there's two ideas. One is, breaking the child's will, which is really important to a lot of evangelical parenting teachers. They think that the child's will is either sinful or at least feral. And so it needs to be broken and molded into a will that matches the parents.
And then there's also the idea of immediate obedience or first time obedience. So children should always be obeying adult commands right away. And I think those two teachings are standing as direct obstacles to child protection. Because when a child is abused, remember as we were talking about the average abuser is a trusted adult.
DL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
RL: Okay, so, I'm a kid, I'm abused by someone that I trust and is an authority over me. It's likely it's one of my parents, or it is someone in my church, like a pastor. One of these people that are seen as important and beloved by the community. So someone like that abuses me and I now need to go tell the other parent or someone in the church. That's going to be very scary. You know, you're a kid, you've been harmed by someone that you thought you could trust. You don't know if the other people you trusted are going to harm you too.
And you have to go tell someone that. Or you're taught to tell someone who abuses you to say no very loudly and firmly. Those sorts of actions require a lot of courage. And courage requires will. It requires a child to be able to stop and think and assess a situation and say either, no, I shouldn't do that, that's wrong. Or I should go tell someone about this.
And so when you break the child's will, or you force obedience immediately, you're training a child to do the very opposite of what's going to protect them. And so I think that, more than anything, is what is going to make children most vulnerable in these communities.
DL: Yeah. And as I've delved into this topic, and I've just been circling this topic for forever, there is this question I've had, which, you know, the intent behind these like child parenting books – Was the intent to actually draw predatory people? Because these books are written by people with perhaps a predatory bent.
I think that question maybe isn't even that interesting anymore, but knowing the statistics, we know that in these kinds of communities that use religious authoritarian parenting methods, abuse of children does occur. They don't go outside the community. So they're telling the leadership, they're telling the pastors.
I'm sure Dr. Dobson got messages about kids being abused and he never once went on to then share the information that would keep kids from being abused.
DL: Does that make sense what I'm saying?
RL: Mm-hmm.
DL: So who cares about the intent at the beginning? Where we have ended up is that these parenting experts and these patriarchal churches in general have had situations of abuse brought to them and they have not done what is necessary to change to make that stop happening. Instead, they've enabled it, they've perpetuated it.
So that's my little soapbox. These people know, they have heard the stories, and they have absolutely done nothing to incorporate the measures that would keep children safe. So we have to do that ourselves, RL. We have to do that ourselves.
It's kind of a theme right now. The people in power are not going to save us, you know, we save ourselves. And a part of how we do that is by sharing this information that can keep kids safe. That's what you do. That's why I think you're such a rockstar for doing this.
So I kind of want to rapid fire, as we're slowly winding down this conversation, I want to know – how can we keep children safe? Now, a lot of your work has been done within Christian spaces. You're still firmly in this Christian world, which I honestly think is so necessary and so needed, and I'm so grateful for people like you, who are doing this under this umbrella of liberation theology.
There are people who listen to us that are still a part of a faith tradition like Christianity and still attend churches. So maybe let's just start there really quick. How can churches help keep children safe? What are your thoughts? Let's just kind of go rapid fire. How do churches keep children safe?
RL: Yeah. So, I think the most important thing is teaching and modeling love and respect for children and their experiences. So, their emotions, their thoughts and their rights. I know that sounds kind of esoteric, but it's essentially like applying the golden rule to children and treating them in the way that you as a fellow human being would want to be treated. For those who are religious, this would mean seeing the image of God fully reflected in children. And if you are not religious, it would mean seeing the full personhood and humanity of children.
So as a community, as a church – and this also I think, applies to non-religious communities – I think it's really important that a community is valuing children and how they experience that community And that they listen to children, listen to how children think and how they feel about the community itself. Does the community make them feel safe?
We've talked about the importance of child protection policies. This is also something I think that's super important for religious and non-religious communities that involve children. It's really important to have thought through as a community, what are we going to do if and when abuse happens? Because the fact is that predators, while we know they have this common profile of being church-going husbands and fathers, predators are ultimately going to be attracted to anywhere where children are present.
DL: Yes, that's so important to recognize.
RL: Predators are in all different demographics. And so we have to make sure that we have thought through as a community, if we're going to involve children in this community, we have to anticipate that sort of event. We have to think about how are we going to take care of those children? How are we going to respond to the adult predator? How are we going to report it? How are we going to take care of those that were harmed after the fact?
And then I think that we also really have to be building in a feedback loop into our community where, child protection policies, for example, you shouldn't just make one and then be done with it, it's something that you're supposed to revisit every six months or a year as a whole community to make sure everyone's on the same page and that everyone fully understands and is signing onto it.
But I also think that that feedback loop is important with children. We should be asking children as communities. We should be checking in with children regularly, especially if we are teaching them or leading them. How are we doing as a community? Asking children, do our different programs and events, do you feel safe in them? Do you feel like you are being respected and valued? Is your input being solicited? Do we give you opportunities to lead? All these kind of things we need to be checking in with children, just like we would check in with adults, or asking adults for their feedback about our different programs or events.
I also think that families can follow these same sort of principles. While families don't need a formal child protection policy, I think it's a wonderful idea for families to create a list of the rules for their house about how they make each other feel loved and respected and safe. You can create a list of things like, we don't yell at each other, we knock before we open a door.
All these different things that help establish, for everyone in the family, things that we're all going to follow and respect no matter our age, to make sure that people's autonomy, consent, those sorts of things are respected in the family.
DL: I mean, I love everything you're saying and it's also so sobering to me how so much in our society is not geared towards soliciting that feedback from children because we don't want to hear. We don't want to hear that the public school system is failing so many kids. We don't want to hear that kids are really upset about climate change. We don't want to hear that kids are despondent about how the adults in their life are not taking their concerns seriously.
And that shows up everywhere. And so I just think it's so important to start modeling this at the family level or the individual level because not everyone listening has kids. But you might be an auntie, you might be someone in the life of children. And just keeping this underlying concept of children have rights, children deserve to be heard, their feedback deserves to be incorporated. And it's sort of depressing at how little that happens anywhere, religious or secular.
So thank you so much for highlighting that because it's one of my core beliefs that if we listened to children, we could really change some stuff for the better And so I just love that that's the baseline here, you know?
RL: Yeah. Absolutely. I do think that children really are the baseline. I think this kind of goes back to what we started with, talking about, are children marginalized or not? And I think that when you create a society that is fully accessible to children, that is going to be creating a society that's accessible to everyone.
Especially if we're talking about creating something that is accessible for all children. Not just one subset of children, but making sure that our churches and our community, our schools and our summer camps are accessible to children with disabilities, to children of color. When you use that as your baseline, I really think that it is kind of the key to making things accessible for everyone.
DL: Yeah. Yeah. I love this. I've told this story before, but I'll just share it really quick. When my oldest child was in fourth grade, they had to do a school shooting drill. You know, they call it something else in elementary school. But my child came home, they figured out what it was for, and they asked me, Mom, does anybody ever go to school and shoot kids in America?
Just point blank, asked me that. They're very intelligent and so I could not lie. So we had a developmentally appropriate discussion about how that happens every once in a while, you know, all this stuff. And my child just got stomach aches and headaches every day for the rest of fourth grade.
And I asked to see the training, I asked to see the videos. And the response I got from the school is, your child is having an outsized reaction. This doesn't scare kids. Like, this is all great. You should pursue counseling, all that. And I'm like, sure. But also, the kids are saying, why are grownups allowing this to happen? Why can't we have stricter gun laws? It's not a huge leap for a kid to be like, why aren't the grownups protecting us? Why do we have to do these scary drills twice a year?
And again, the school's just like, no kids don't know what it's about. I'm like, well, at some point they will. And this is a failure on every level. And yet selfish adults, who honestly often fit this profile of who a predator is, are the ones who are the loudest about their right to own guns in the United States. So this is one example of our failure to listen to kids when they're like, this is actually really hurting us.
And nobody wants to face that.
RL: That’s fascinating because, my day job is I work in elections, and I help create the training programs for the staff that work at vote centers, for their security. And so I actually have to teach a bunch of people about active shooter scenarios.
And I'm teaching people that are 18 through 80, because we have some retirees in our groups that volunteer.
DL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
RL: And the active shooter thing is traumatizing to everyone. It doesn't matter their age. It's scary. People don't want to think about it. When they think about it, they get very anxious and panicking. And so we put a lot of effort and thought into, how do we teach this in a way that's going to not be traumatic.
And then we're teaching the same things to kids and not showing them the same sort of care and respect that we would with adults. And this is a completely tangential topic, but I think that it relates to the fact that we have a society that is, what I want to call childist.
It reflects childism, it reflects a world where children are not treated equally or fairly. And we do discriminate and look down on children and their experiences. I think that it points to how our society just doesn't really extend to children the same respect and equal treatment that we would to adults. Whether it's teaching them active shooter or how we treated them with COVID, we constantly treating children as lesser than or less important.
Or you know, in, in religious terms we talk about, we treat children as the future of the church and not the present. Like they'll matter one day, but they're for the future. They're not for our current times to worry about.
DL: Ugh.
RL: I think that that just leads to so many problems. Not only are we harming children now, but we are also setting them up to not expect those things like respect and fair treatment in the future when they're adults.
DL: Totally. Totally. Okay. So, I think this is probably going to be my last question, maybe second to last question, for you today, is just what are some things individuals can ask about, organization’s or institution’s child protection policies and don't you think we should be normalizing asking about that?
RL: Yes, absolutely. I think that, as I said, any organization that involves children in any way should have a child protection policy. So if you're involved in an organization or an institution with children, then you absolutely should go and see if they have a policy. If they do, you should ask to see it. And then you should make sure that it is adequate.
So I'll just real quickly go over what a child protection policy should involve.
Every policy should have four qualities. The first is it should be visible. So I should walk into your church and it should be on the wall. I should be able to go to your website and I should be able to see on the front page of your website a link to it. Anyone that wants to join the community or is a part of the community should be able to access it easily.
The policy also should be agreed to. So it should be something that everyone in the community is coming together and working on to create and then signing off on. So this is something that you can't just have the leaders do. It has to be everyone in the community committing to working on making a safer place for children.
The third thing is that the policy should be comprehensive. That means it should involve all the official, different elements. And if you get a book on creating a policy, or if you find internet resources, there's certain things that should be in the policy, and I'll mention those in just a second.
And then the fourth thing is that the policy should be implemented. By this I mean that a child protection policy, you don't just create once. It has to be something that is lived out on a daily basis. So it has to be looked at and assessed regularly, at least once a year. The whole community should be coming together at least once a year to go over it together to make sure that everyone remembers the different aspects of it, that everyone knows how to follow it.
So those are the four things that every policy should exhibit. And then the actual elements, so what makes a policy comprehensive, there's five elements. The first is that it should have principles. So the beginning of the policy should involve a statement of why the community is committing to protecting children.
So this can involve your religious beliefs, your philosophical commitments. Like if I'm a Christian church, in my policy I would want to make sure that I say that we're protecting children because we see them as equal to adults, made in the image of God, things that will remind the community why this is important to us.
The second element is that there should be rules for responding to when the policy is not followed. So you have to make sure that your policy has rules and procedures in it that the community actually is going to follow and make sure that the steps are laid out there very concretely.
The third thing that a policy should have in it is survivor support. So every policy, in anticipation of the fact that there could be abuse in any community, there should be steps in your policy that establish what you will do, when the situation occurs for the survivors. So you need to establish, if someone is abused in our community or institution, are we going to provide the survivor with legal support? Are we going to provide them with mental health support, counseling, those sorts of things?
And then the last thing would be mechanisms for actually implementing the policy. So this would be where you would state, every six months or once a year, we're going to reassess this. We will have, you know, maybe a child abuse awareness prevention day, something like that, once a year. The different actual ways that we'll ensure that the policy doesn't just go on the shelf and collect dust, but it'll actually be actively used.
So that, that would be the core of what a child protection policy would have. If people are interested in learning more about that, I do have three different resources I can recommend.
DL: Great.
RL: For religious groups and organizations, there's two books I'd recommend. One is called Let the Children Come: Preparing Faith Communities To End Child Abuse and Neglect. That book is by Jeanette Harder. H-A-R-D-E-R. Then the second book would be The Child Safeguarding Policy Guide for Churches and Ministries. And that book is by Basyle Tchividjian and Shira Berkovits.
So both of those policies, teach churches about child abuse, what are the warning signs, who are the common predators, and then they teach you how to actually put together a policy step by step. But those are for specifically faith communities.
For non-religious groups and organizations, what I would recommend is a toolkit online that you can get for free. It's called the Keeping Children Safe Toolkit for Child Protection. And that's created by the Keeping Children Safe Coalition. For your listeners who don't care if they use a religious or a non-religious resource, I would recommend the non-religious one.
And the reason for that is that the non-religious one does not just guide you on how to create a child protection policy, the steps that it uses are based on children's rights and involvement. So the secular resource is actually based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That's kind of like the theme for it. And so as you go through the policy steps, creating the policy, the resource itself involves children. So it wants children to be a part of that creation process.
DL:Oh, I love that.
RL: So if you don't need a specifically religious one to convince the other people in your community, I would recommend the secular one for everyone, just because it's more child focused.
DL: Wow. And I'm sure that's even like a healing way for those of us who were raised with no rights, and actually religion was used as a way to convince us our bodies and brains were not our own, it could be sort of healing and helpful to even go through this resource and see what it looks like to have this child-centric approach to safety.
I'm just so happy resources like this exist in the world. I wish they were better known and more well known, but I'm just so grateful that you could come and talk to us just a little bit about these issues. I really recommend y'all follow RL, RL Stollar on the socials, follow his blog. He's putting out really high quality work and articles, and you've just been doing this for a really long time.
We've never actually specifically addressed homeschooling on this podcast or in the STRONGWILLED project, which we hope to get to it at some point. So I would just, again, if you come from that background, that community, RL's work is just so important and validating. And I don't know. It's just been so good.
There's so much more I wanted to talk to you about, but we simply don't have the time. Hopefully this means we'll get to a chat or work on something in the future. But for today, I just want to say, RL, thanks for coming and sharing your expertise. Is there anything else you wanted to say that you didn't get to say in this interview today?
RL: I think the one thing that I was interested in talking about that we didn't touch on was what I would call the idolatry of the parent. And this would be, in many evangelical communities, there is this idea that the parent is a stand in for God. The child doesn't really have a direct relationship with God. They don't have access to their spirituality, it has to be mediated through the adult.
And I think that is kind of at the crux of many of the issues that we're talking about. Because when you set the adults in that position, then the children not only feel like they have no option but to obey and obey immediately, because they're, not only afraid of the parent, but they're afraid of the parent being the representative of God. And so you not only would be disobeying the parent, you would be angering this omnipotent being.
And so, not only do you have all the fear and all the control that you might have in any sort of religious or any sort of authoritarian parent, but then there's this whole additional religious element. And I know that's something that you and Krispin have talked about in STRONGWILLED, the emphasis on the religious aspect of religious authoritarian parenting.
But I do think that even beyond these religious circles, when you set up the adults as people that must be obeyed no matter what, and then that situates within this whole chain of authority, it doesn't bode well for teaching children about why they should have a will, about why they should have the ability to think through a command, why they have the right to speak up, why they have the right to say no, why they have the right to disobey all these things that are so critical and important to keeping children safe.
And so often we want to shy away from that, but I think we really need to lean into that sometimes. You know, take something like disobedience. Yesterday on Twitter someone made a comment about parenting and why your children should immediately and cheerfully obey. And they said, you know, disobedience is death because disobedience means the kid could run into the street.
DL: Oh yeah, we've heard that a time or two, huh?
RL: Yes. Yes. And I think sometimes we just need to look that squarely in the eyes and say, no, disobedience can be lifesaving.
DL: Yeah. Totally.
RL: Disobedience has led to many important things. For those who are interested in social justice, disobedience has led to civil rights. For those who are religious, I can think of no better example than Miriam and baby Moses. Miriam saved Moses' life by disobeying. And Miriam was not just disobeying, Miriam was a child disobeying.
DL: Mm-hmm.
RL: We need to realize that sometimes that is, not just not negative, but it is vital to like our thriving and to creating a better world. And so again, that all starts with children. What we're teaching children as parents, as other people involved in children's lives, what we're modeling for them in families, what we're modeling for them as aunts and uncles, and friends and other family, that is what the rest of our world is going to look like ultimately.
DL: Yeah. Oh, that's so true, RL. And for me, this project is not just about processing religious authoritarian parenting methods, but it has an explicitly political connection. And I say, in America at this moment, we are absolutely at this place where it's like, are you going to obey the orders if the orders are telling you to arrest someone without due process?
You know? It's just, it's such an interesting time and for me it's been really important to get in touch with my inner will, my strong will, because even though they try and beat it out of you, we all have access to our will, our true selves, and everybody gets to make those choices.
So learning how to disobey is really important. Some of us didn't get to do that as kids. And now we are seeing the fruits of that in our society a bit. And yet there's always room and space to get more in touch with our true selves. And I think by focusing on actually protecting kids, instead of just paying lip service to it, we can actually be a part of this social change we want to see in the world.
And show up for kids and help create a world where it's easier to be them, it's easier for all marginalized groups. So for me, this topic is totally political. Thanks so much for bringing in that awareness here because it's all very much related.
If people want to find you, where can they find you on the internet? What's the best way?
RL: Yes. The best way would be through my website. My website is rlstollar.com. And on my front page I have links to all my different social media. So if you want to follow me on one of those, they're all listed there.
DL: Okay. Great. Well, thanks so much. I feel like you know you and I'll be chatting more in the future, working on more stuff. Thanks again for your insight and input into my chapter on recipe for abuse, and thanks for coming on and chatting with me today.
RL: Absolutely. Thanks again for having me.
