Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment

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Recognising children's rights and parenting children with compassion, according to their developmental needs, and accepting that certain doctrine is harmful, are good ways to raise children with healthy faith. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Whether a ‘smack’ amounts to reasonable punishment will depend on the circumstances of each case, taking into consideration factors like the age of the child and the nature of the smack. Their book, To Train Up a Child has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and, under the guise of “biblical discipline,” encourages parents to beat their children into submission, withhold food, and hose them down outside when they soil themselves. Once Joel turned twenty-three—at which time the statute of limitations on prosecuting child sexual abuse in the state had run out—the school claimed that the rabbi had done nothing wrong and kept him on the payroll.

We learn of women whose babies died in childbirth yet are trapped in the womb for days because no one has taken them to the hospital. Rieth explains that a religious text can be a source of hope, consolation, and joy for children who have suffered trauma, including abuse. This means that children can complain to a UK court if their rights have been broken, and if the claim is rejected, take their claim to the European Court of Human Rights.In England, pupils can leave school on the last Friday in June if they’ll be 16 by the end of the summer holidays. The warning signs that a child is being abused or neglected can vary according to the type of abuse inflicted. This follows a sustained lobbying campaign from religious groups who fear that the treaty's requirement that states intervene to promote young people's “best interests” would limit the freedom of parents to beat and home-school their children. My hope is that pastors, priests, and other religious leaders work with our justice system to better understand each other. The Pearls’ teachings have been linked to the deaths of Sean Paddock, Lydia Schatz, and Hana Grace-Rose Williams.

This is simply the best book on religious abuse and the total fundamentalist mindset since Father Leo Booth's When God Becomes A Drug and Alan Peshkin's God's Choice: the total world of a fundamentalist Christian school. The National guidance for child protection in Scotland gives more detail about this and explains how professionals should act to protect young people from harm in different circumstances (Scottish Government, 2023a). Teen parents, for example, might have unrealistic expectations about how much care babies and small children need.

Child sexual abuse is an especially complicated form of abuse because of its layers of guilt and shame. The children exposed to sexual abuse – and not only within the Catholic Church – by religious communities convinced that a “man of God” could never be guilty of such crimes. A child or young person may be considered homeless when their home is not suitable or they do not have the right to stay where they live.