Think of the children

I’ve been following our Frank Lockwood’s fine reporting on the regrettable situation at Immanuel Baptist Church, where in 2015, a church employee was accused of sexually abusing a child. That case was resolved in 2022 when Patrick Stephen Miller accepted a plea deal, copping to a lesser charge of misdemeanor harassment, an offense which on its face carries no especial sex crime stigma.

You might be guilty of misdemeanor harassment if you “repeatedly commit an act that alarms or seriously annoys” another person if that act “serves no legitimate purpose.” (Feel free to supply your own joke here. Go ahead, pick on your favorite columnist or talking head. I’ll wait.) More likely, the pertinent section of the statute is the one that says it might occur when someone “strikes, shoves, kicks, or otherwise touches a person, subjects that person to offensive physical contact or attempts or threatens to do so.”

Miller received a one-year suspended sentence, with 19 days credit for time served. More importantly, he wasn’t required to register as a sex offender. Google may never again be his friend, but it’s not impossible to imagine his career recovering.

This may very well have been an equitable outcome. I don’t want to talk about this particular case or about Frank’s reporting, which indicates that church officials have been reluctant to acknowledge, even to their own members, what may have happened under their watch. (Was this a case of the alleged cover-up being worse than the crime? We may never know. But we should hope for more transparency from those who volunteer to be our professional moral leaders.)

My experience is that given the chance, prosecutors will often charge suspects with the most serious offense possible in order to increase their leverage and avoid the trouble, expense and uncertainty of a trial. Most justice is negotiated in this country. I don’t particularly like this practice, because it means that a few people will plead guilty to crimes that the government can’t prove they committed because they don’t want to risk being convicted of (and punished for) a more serious crime.

But there are some practical reasons for doing things this way, and save for instituting a system where prosecutorial winning percentages don’t matter—say, a non-adversarial system where prosecutors aren’t elected and they take on an investigative role focused on determining the truth rather than punishing defendants—I can’t imagine us doing much better given the volume of cases in our criminal justice system. (That’s also something we could do something about, were it not so easy to scare voters with “soft-on-crime” rhetoric and boogeyman fantasies.)

By now, some of you are probably upset that I haven’t talked about the other possibility: Because of the difficulties inherent in proving a sexual abuse case, a lot of sexual abusers probably go unpunished or get off with a slap on the wrist.

This is because the American default is innocent until proven guilty, and we need to be fair. While there are a lot of inequities in the system, it’s still difficult to convict a person when most of the evidence derives from the testimony of the alleged victim.

Statutory rape might not be so hard to prove given current science—eliminating consent as a defense clarifies things—but it’s still hard to prove “unwanted touching” occurred absent third-party witnesses or video evidence.

Every case is different, but sometimes alleged victims—even children and teenagers—lie. How statistically often this occurs is beside the point; in any particular case, its possibility must be considered. As a society, sometimes the best that we can hope for is the incomplete justice a brokered agreement between prosecutors and defendants provides.

We want police to aggressively investigate these incidents, and want these sort of cases to be publicized, not to shame the innocent-until-proven guilty defendants, but to augment the deterrent effect on potential abusers. (A more radical but not completely insensible argument holds that victims ought to be named as well, in part to eat away at the stigma of being a victim of sexual abuse.)

We need people like Frank Lockwood nosing around in what the leaders of Immanuel Baptist Church no doubt see as their internal family business, because terrible crimes are often committed under the color of good works. And because people who are inclined to abuse children often seek out positions of unquestioned authority over kids precisely because that facilitates their kinks. Catholic priests, youth ministers, Hollywood producers, coaches and school teachers are well-positioned to sexually abuse their charges.

So it’s incumbent upon the institutions that employ people who by the nature of their position wield authority and command trust to understand this dynamic and take measures to ensure they’re not employing opportunistic abusers and to take quick, sure and open action when incidents are reported.

This goes beyond simply cooperating with police investigation; they have a moral duty to protect the vulnerable. Too often these cases are handled quietly, the accused is allowed to resign and find a similar position at another church or school.

I know of another case that’s just starting to wend its way through the court system, involving a man who had been an athletic director at a high school that dismissed him after he allegedly conducted inappropriate relations with a student. Over the next couple of years he went on to coach at a number of other schools.

When this case is finally adjudicated, it may well be that the accused is found not guilty or is treated similarly to the way Miller was treated, and this might be a completely fair outcome. Or it might be the best that a justice system, armed only with the statements of victims, could do under the circumstances.

It’s only right that the justice system takes pains to be fair to people accused of crimes. It owes an accused murderer or rapist due process and every benefit of doubt.

But the first responbility of churchs and schools is not to their employees or their civic reputations. It is to the vulnerable innocents who must necessarily put their trust in adults who have chosen professions that afford them power over young people. A little extra scrutiny ought to come along with that power. If they don’t like it, they can work with grownups.