Healing and Protection: How Churches Can Respond to Abuse with Victor Vieth | Part Two

This episode continues an important conversation with former child abuse prosecutor Victor Vieth about how churches, schools, and Christian communities can better respond to abuse and trauma. Victor discusses the importance of education, personal safety training, and proactive child protection policies, while also addressing the long-term effects of childhood trauma on faith, mental health, addiction, and family life. He shares practical guidance for pastors, teachers, and church leaders facing resistance to reform, along with deeply personal reflections on vicarious trauma and perseverance. 

SHOW NOTES:

• Center for Faith and Child Protection: https://zeroabuseproject.org/for-professionals/cfcp/
• Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE): https://www.netgrace.org/
• Freedom for the Captives: https://freedomforcaptives.com/

Transcript

Cold Open And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:01

On today's episode.

SPEAKER_03 0:03

Jesus gets it, the church may not always stand, you may not be blessed with trauma-informed uh pastors or other Christian friends, but Jesus really does understand. In the Gospel of Matthew, uh, the lineage there tells us Jesus is a descendant of all these movers and shakers of Israel, but he's also a descendant of Rahab Tamar, and as we discussed, best eva three subjects put a women, so it's a different God through the inspired writer is winking at us, saying, Yeah, Jesus understands this, it's in the DNA of Christ, the very blood of God, compassion for those who are suffering.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Welcome to the Life Challenges Podcast from Christian Life Resources. Our world today presents people with complicated issues of life and death, marriage and family, health, and science. It can be a struggle to understand or deal with them. We're here to help by bringing good information and a fresh biblical perspective to these matters and more. Join us now for life challenges.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Hi, and welcome back. I'm Krista Potrat, and today we are going to bring you part two of our episode with Victor Viet. This is a continuation of part one, and you can go back and listen to part one if you haven't listened to that yet. But this is the second half of the conversation

Education First And A Safety Committee

SPEAKER_01 1:30

that Pastor Bob Fleischman and I had with Victor.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

One of my questions, too, then, is for our churches. I think you talked about different places having child abuse policies or just different uh maybe action plans or your those type of things. Is that the place to start for a church? Is the pastor doing a sermon on this a place to start? What is your message to a church?

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Yeah, the starting place uh is education. So I uh would form a child protection committee that would take the lead in implementing uh policies and then sustaining the policies and improving upon the policies as time uh passes and new research uh develops. So it should be a standing committee. Then that committee should go through rigorous training. I'm biased, of course, because it's ours, but I think the best training out there is our two-day keeping faith training that we offer periodically online. But uh some communities uh have contracted with us to to to provide it uh for their individual communities. Uh either way it's possible, and we have some peer-reviewed research documenting the effectiveness of of some components of that uh education. Now, with that education, I would then say you should go through step by step a book called The Child Safeguarding Policy Guide, published by New Growth Press, written by Basil Chavidgin, a former child abuse prosecutor, grandson of Billy Graham, and Sherrod Bergovitz, who in the Jewish community is by far the most prominent expert on addressing abuse within a religious institution. So your committee then, with this knowledge, goes through that uh book chapter by chapter. It'll give lots of suggestions of what you might want to do depending on what type of ministries you have. It will walk you through how to inspect your building to see are there areas that are not observable or interruptible where an offender could uh violate a child undetected. And so you go through that book step by step as you build out your policy, and then you send the policy to somebody uh like me for a final uh go-over. Typically, what you'll need in your policy is standards for selecting and uh otherwise uh hiring volunteers or others that will be working with youth. You also need policies on monitoring uh interactions between your Sunday school teachers and others who are intersecting with youth. You need policies on what is or is not acceptable in terms of social media uh interactions with youth. All these sorts of things need to be done. But hands down, the most important policy and the one that we usually ignore is education. The Centers for Disease Control, and I also say now the ELCA in their social message statement says every single year there should be education for your pastors

Personal Safety Training For Every Child

SPEAKER_03 4:22

and your teachers and others that are working with youth every single year. And uh every single year there should be personal safety education for all the children God has entrusted to your care who are in your Sunday school or in your uh day school, and you should be providing education to parents uh as well. To my knowledge, at the present time, there's not a single Wells or Missouri Synod school that provides personal safety education. Contrast that with our Catholic friends, where every single school has that. Contrast that with public schools, which as a result of Aaron's law requires uh personal safety education for public school children. I think there's a profound theological question to ask here. Would it take lawsuits, which some would argue is what caused reform in the Catholic Church before we would do the right thing and provide personal safety uh education? Is that what it would require inside Protestant uh communities? What if we just did it because it was the right thing to do? Personal safety education is not hard. We have a research uh supported model. Uh it's for K through uh 12. It would take about an hour to teach at each school. It's four 15-minute modules. Each school would have to go through a three-hour train-the-trainer curriculum uh to educate. It is not sex education, although I would also support that. It is simply personal safety education. What do you do if you're uncomfortable or somebody's making you uncomfortable? It's not your job to keep yourself safe. It's my job as your parent, as your teacher, as your pastor. So uh please uh reach out to me uh if you're in a situation in over your head. What do you do if you're online and you dialogue with the wrong person and she or he asks you to send a picture of you with your top off or otherwise expose your body? And when it's all done, you kind of know it's wrong, but now they're saying if you don't submit to more activity, uh worse things will happen uh to you. What do you do when you're way in over your head? Give uh them some instruction, A to avoid the situation, but if they fall into a trap, uh what do you do after that? And by the way, this is also why we have to educate mom and dad. So they're saying, there's nothing you can't tell me. And even if you make a mistake and you're in way over your head, I'm not gonna come down hard on you. It's my job to keep you safe, right? So please come to me and talk to me in these really scary, difficult situations, if God forbid they occur. And you're also educating students of what do they do when their friend, their fellow pupil comes to them, because you're more likely coming to a friend than you do a pastor, a teacher, or a parent, so that they know uh to say, hey, thanks for telling me. That's really kind of scary. I think this is bigger uh than what either of us can handle. Let's talk to teacher so-and-so, or pastor so-and-so, or you know, I think your dad could handle this really well. I'll go with you. Those are the sorts of things uh that we need to provide education on. And the good news is research says if we do that, kids are much more uh likely to be able to protect themselves, avoid a scary situation, or to recognize early on that something is not kosher and to put the brakes on, or if God forbid something really bad happens, more likely to come forward. And even if they don't come forward, because most of the time the perpetrator is their mom or dad, and they don't want them to get into trouble or get arrested, even if they still don't want to come forward, we build resilience in them. They go home thinking, I don't want to tell my pastor or teacher because I don't want mom to get arrested or dad to go to prison, but I know I could. I know this is a safe place. I know there are people who care about me who would try to help me. I feel better knowing that I'm in a safe place, at least from 830 to 30 when I'm at the Lutheran school. There is no reason not to educate our kids and provide personal safety. We often give them fire safety. Statistically speaking, they're much more likely to be abused either in the home or in a faith community than they are to ever experience a fire. We provide them gun safety, and as scary as school shootings have been, statistically they're much more likely to get abused in the church or school or at home than they are to ever uh experience a gunfire. So if we would do it in these other scenarios that are less likely, why would we not do it in a scenario a scenario uh that they're much more likely to experience?

Training Pastors And Facing Pushback

SPEAKER_04 8:49

Uh we have a number of pastors and professors who listen to this podcast and try to you know deal with difficult challenges and so forth, bioethical, ethical challenges. And so there's going to be a group of pastors who are going to listen to this and go, Okay, I just accepted this call to this church, you know, a year ago. We have no policies in place. We now have a potential problem. So there's there's two things. One is you know, what can we say to help them? And then really the bigger question is a systemic question, and that is I mean, you reside in Minnesota, you know, we've got our teaching school there. Uh that you know, all of our pastors and teachers come through that college uh in our church body. Uh what can we do either on that level or on the seminary level to make things better?

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Yeah, there's some good news. For uh a number of years, Martin Luther College every single year has brought me in to do uh uh a three and a half hour workshop. It's required for MLC students that are about to go into a teaching ministry. And we have research from Pepperdine University that's just been submitted for publication of peer-reviewed journals showing some really uh positive results from uh that education, one of which is that uh we're much more likely to recognize the importance of child protection policies and to want to be engaged uh in this subject. And at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary for a number of years in pastoral uh theology classes, all the students are uh required to go to the Wells Special Ministry Freedom for Captives website and take the online training, which is about four and a half uh hours. Now that training's old, it's me providing the education and it's a few years old, we need to update it, but we're working uh to do that. Uh so uh at least for relatively younger people uh going into teaching uh or pastoral ministries, uh they're coming out better uh educated than they were in the past. I think our challenge is to build on that. Our older pastors and teachers have not had that education. They there's a lot that needs to be uh caught up with. And I think we need to do a better job of educating pastors and teachers. Hey, you've got this great information, you know what to do, but oops, you're running into obstacles with the elders at the uh school or uh with other congregational leaders who uh are throwing out uh uh uh bizarre comments. Uh um I had uh a well school in church I was working with, which obviously I won't uh provide the name, but they were frustrated, the pastor and others saying, you know, we're hearing uh from all these folks in the church that this is woke, this is the social gospel, this is not anything a church should be engaged with, right? And we can respond to all of that. You can't get through the book of Genesis without multiple counts of uh trauma. Jesus himself endured multiple counts of trauma. The entire Christian church would not exist but for an act of child protection. Murder was uh murder was in the mind of Herod, and he did murder a lot of boys. Jesus would have been one of them, but for a warning from God, which the Magi and Joseph and eventually Mary uh also presumably was told, and they all acted to protect the baby uh Jesus. So no Christian church would exist but for an act of child protection. So it's ludicrous to say that this is somehow contrary to the gospel. I want to make one other point on the issue of time, because sometimes people will say, oh, yeah, I need to do it, but it's so time consuming.

Childhood Trauma Links To Adult Outcomes

SPEAKER_03 12:25

If you do it well over an extended period of time, you're probably going to be saving yourself a lot of time. How many uh pastors are working with parishioners who struggle with alcoholism or drug usage, or they uh are in the county jail for yet another uh offense or multiple acts of adultery or you can't control your anger? Just fill in the blank. The research says the number one contributing factor to all those things is childhood trauma. It is the driving point. How many times are we working with parishioners who suffer from cancer or heart disease or other conditions? Now, don't get me wrong, just because you have cancer, amisur of cancer doesn't mean you endured trauma, but the ACE research said you're more likely to have cancer or other diseases if you've endured childhood trauma. And the reason is really just common sense. If you endure a lot of trauma, you're more likely to smoke and engage in other behaviors as you cope with the anxiety, and those behaviors increase the risk for cancer. Or even if you don't have contributory behaviors, trauma changes the development of your brain and it weakens your immune system, and now you're more susceptible to disease. So we'd have fewer hospital calls and like too if we addressed trauma. And oh, how about the issue you guys have talked about that conservative Protestants frequently talk about, which is abortion? ACE Research says the number one contributing factor to unwanted pregnancies and terminating those pregnancies is childhood trauma. Those who've endured no trauma, it's a very small percentage will terminate a pregnancy even if it's unwanted. But as your level of trauma goes up and you get to the point where you're abused in four or more different categories, more than twenty percent of those girls or women will uh terminate a pregnancy and sixty percent of them will have unwanted pregnancies. And it's common sense, right? To feed the ache in my soul, I'll have sex with everybody for 15 minutes because it feels good. Gosh darn it. God has always given us the power to significantly reduce unwanted pregnancies and the termination of those pregnancies if we just took Jesus seriously and cared for the least of these, but that's not what we've done. We have focused on the political solution, which we got and all the data I'm seeing says toppling Roe versus Wade has not uh reduced abortion in any way. And I or others who've worked with people who've terminated their pregnancies as a result of trauma could have told you that.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

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Vicarious Trauma And Self Care Plans

SPEAKER_04 15:34

You know, my uh my first five years in ministry, I was the contact pastor at the medium security correctional institute in the area. And roughly 85% of the Wells members that I was visiting in prison were in for sex-related crimes. And I used to be just unbearable when I would come back from those visits because you get to hear and see the dark side, the very dark side of things. So maybe one of my one of my last questions for you is how do you survive all this? Like Christopher, she was saying she was getting angry early on. That's the way I was kidding. I was like reliving those first five years all over again in just a few minutes. How do you how do you cope?

SPEAKER_03 16:15

Yeah, let me say uh quickly, there's a study on men in prison incarcerated for sex offenses, and more than 50% have what's called an A-score of four or higher, so maltreated in four or more different categories. So trauma also increases the the risk of going down a really dark uh path. In terms of how I cope, uh, that's an issue of vicarious uh trauma. I've been in the field for 38 years, and you know, one of my areas of specialty is child torture, and there's nothing harder uh to look at than images of a child who's been uh tortured or instruments of that type of cruelty. And I intersect uh regularly with survivors of of maltreatment. And I'm often battling uh the church, uh trying to convince them to look here, see this, do this, uh, how much better this could be, uh, how much more Christ-like this uh could be. And that's a struggle. Uh very, very rare is the message welcomed with open arms, maybe polite arms, but not necessarily welcome arms. Uh so that is a a challenge. And um uh there are times I struggle to walk inside a church because it can be a trigger to me. When when have I seen the church uh respond in a healthy way? Or I look at the children's choir and I know they're at risk because this is not a church or a school with a personal safety education uh program. And I look around the congregation and I know a sex offender would love to be here uh today. Or I hear a joke uh from the pulpit or uh God forbid, even a teacher or uh somebody else about corporal punishment, and I know that's the number one contributing factor to child uh physical abuse, and that's gonna be a trigger to some in that community who do not have a good memory of what it was like to be whipped uh as a as a child, and I know we're we're pushing those folks away from the community as well. So how do I survive? It's not turning to the church per se, but in re-envisioning the church as Jesus mentioned it, two or three gathered in my name. And I've always been blessed to find Christian friends, many of whom also work in the field of child abuse, who share some of the same struggle, and they can dialogue uh with me. And I'll give you one example. A few years ago, I was on a forum with a bunch of Wells and ELS pastors, and I was talking about child abuse, and they changed the subject to what they wanted to talk about, which was uh the issue of the confessional, and they were very upset about Schutze's article. And I defended John and I said he's uh uh spot on in saying there's no absolute confidentiality of the Lutheran confessional never has been. And these Christian and air quote uh pastors uh uh got pretty upset with me, and some of them engaged in, in my view, clearly sinful behavior, making fun of me, and so on and so forth. And it got under my skin, and I was literally, I couldn't sleep for three days, I was constantly crying, I was just falling apart. And I went to my dear friend Pete Singer, who's now in heaven, lost his battle to cancer. But Pete, devout Christian, he's also a mental health provider, and I said, I don't get it. I deal with really bad people every day. I've I've had my life threatened, I get hate mail on a regular uh basis, and I just go with the flow. And these three or four Lutheran bullies, I just can't stop crying. And Pete said, It's because they're your people. And through the awful grace of God, I learned more why survivors of abuse are hurt so deeply and why, answer to your question, Bob, out of anger, they may want to pursue the church. It hurts more when it's your own abuse. Oh, yeah, friendly fire. But in any event, I've always had folks like Pete that I can turn to. And then at zero abuse, everybody has a self-care plan. And so uh we have uh a buddy system where, say, you know, Krista, you were my buddy. You'd ask me what's your self-care plan this year, what are five things you're gonna do that are realistic, and it has to be realistic. So you can't say I'm going to Europe if you couldn't afford that. Um but I could say something like, I want to see a St. Paul Saints game and see the pig bring the ball to the umpire. That'd be kind of cool. So your job would be to check in on me. How are you doing with that uh plan? Have you bought a ticket uh yet? Uh and and so we're we're we're engaged in that. Taking uh time for a walk or a sunset or music, for me it's Johnny Cash. I had a bad day. Three hours of Johnny Cash uh music can be really uh soothing uh for me. Um having a wonderful wife is an extraordinary blessing uh from God, and uh having a spouse who just knows, yeah, I don't need to say anything today, but today's a good day to take my uh husband's hand uh uh or hold him a little closer tonight when we retire. Having somebody who loves you and is there for you, that's uh a really good thing as well. And then prayer is important and reading the Bible is important, and for me, writing is really helpful. How how I uh responded to those pastors that got under my skin, it was actually Pete Singer's suggestion. He said, Why don't you take out on them on an article? And I did. And I share that because my article on the Lutheran confessional is different than my other articles. Most of my articles are gentle, I write to persuade. This one was just flamethrowing. And it was still quality, still made it through peer review, got published, but it was a very strong uh language, and now you know the rest of the story. It was from a um a a deep moment of pain, and I I took it out in that article. So those are some of the things that I've found to be helpful, but it's reconfiguring the church in my mind to who are two or three people that I can always count on and and reach out to them when I'm struggling.

SPEAKER_04 21:57

Well, I'll tell you, you are even more amazing than I thought of. That's an awful lot. I know we get to deal with the deal with a lot of pain. People with a lot of pain. I also know what it's like to be on the receiving end of what I always receive as friendly fire. The atheists, uh unbelievers, it can be mean. When you need to either be encouraged or corrected by fellow brothers and sisters. Sometimes they just make their point by knocking you down. So I would encourage you to hang tough. This is definitely needed. Definitely definitely needed.

A Message To Survivors Jesus Gets It

SPEAKER_02 22:46

What would your message be to survivors that are listening?

SPEAKER_03 22:50

Jesus gets it. The church may not always, and you may not be blessed with trauma-informed uh pastors or other Christian friends, but Jesus really does understand. In the Gospel of Matthew, uh, the lineage there tells us Jesus is a descendant of all these movers and shakers of Israel, but he's also a descendant of Rahab, Tamar, and as we discussed, Bathsheba, three sexually exploited women. So it's as if God, through the inspired writer, is winking at us, saying, Yeah, Jesus understands this. It's in the DNA of Christ, the very blood of God, compassion for those who are suffering. As we discussed, Jesus himself was a near victim of child homicide and miraculously uh escaped uh because of the warning that God uh provided. And then it gets even better. Jesus grew up, and many scholars say he was the world's foremost defender of children. He scolded anyone who would keep children away uh from him. He often lifted up children as examples of great faith, not adults. He said, Better a millstone around your neck, drowned in the sea than to hurt a child. And uh on Judgment Day, a lot of religious leaders are going to be shocked that they're sent away because they refuse to care for the least of these. This was a high priority to Jesus, and Jesus knows what it's like to be abused. He was emotionally abused, he was spit upon, cruel words were uttered to him. He knows what it's like to be sexually exploited. Most scholars would agree he was executed nude, that was part of Roman crucifixions, the humiliation, particularly poignant in a Jewish uh community. They knew what they were doing in that regard. So he knows what it's like to be exposed, humiliated sexually, and he knows what it's like to be beaten and tortured, and of course, uh he was mutilated to uh death. He understands at a really high uh level, and he is always there as somebody we can pray to and turn to. And I think when you look at the life and teachings of Jesus through that trauma-informed lens, suddenly the old, old stories of Jesus on the children take on new meaning. When Jesus said and did these things, it was lawful uh in the Roman uh community to beat uh children. It was expected, in fact, uh it was lawful to sexually exploit children, it was lawful to neglect a child to the point of death. All of this was permissible and widespread. Jesus was countercultural to all of that. And he pushed back against the Roman Greco concept of logos that children can't reason very well, as he said, no, uh, out of the mouth of babes, even an infant can receive divine wisdom. That's why we uh Lutherans and our Catholic friends baptize an infant, because we know the power of God's uh word. That's the Jesus we we worship every day. And he's there for you. If I could say one more thing, we mentioned the Yelpsy social message statement. And near the close of that on page twenty-seven, they uh they say we reflect on the words of Paul, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, angels, rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord. Drawing on these words, the LCA writes, this church declares to victims of all forms of child maltreatment. We are convinced that neither your trauma, nor your pain, nor your grief, nor the injustice done to you, nor the sin of the adults around you, nor your anger, nor your doubt, nor your fear can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. You were created in God's own image, and you remain God's beloved child. We uh need to be proactive in giving that message to survivors. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us and all of

Resources Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_02 26:45

this. Um if people want to get more information on you, um, on the work that you're doing, where where can they find you?

SPEAKER_03 26:54

Yeah, uh Zora Buseproject.org is our website, and and there you'd want to click on the section for the Center for Faith and Child Protection. You can learn more about our keeping faith training and other uh resources. For those in the Wells, FreedomForthecaptives.com is the Wells Special Ministry. There's a lot of resources there. I would also recommend Grace, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment. NetGrace.org is their website. Uh, there's a lot of resources uh there as well. Feel free to follow me on uh LinkedIn or follow my organization on LinkedIn or social media. You'll always be alerted if we have a new uh publication or resource that may be of benefit.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for joining us and for um your message today. And um we thank all of our listeners too for joining us. And if you can reach us at Christian Life Resources.com, and uh you can reach us at the podcast here too at lifechallenges.us. And we look forward to having you back next time. Thanks so much. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Thank you for joining us for the Life Challenges Podcast of Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it, and sharing it with friends. We're here to help. So if you have questions on today's topic or other life issues, you can submit them as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes at lifechallenges.us, or email us at podcast at ChristianLiferesources.com. You can find past episodes and other valuable information at lifechallenges.us, so please check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit Christianliferesources.com. A guide gives you wisdom, love, strength, and peace of Christ for every life challenge.