The SBC's Sexual Abuse Hotline: Who Does It Serve?

(123rf.com)

Last week, after the Southern Baptist Convention’s top CEO admitted that the development of a clergy abuser database was being sidelined, Karen Roudkovski asked this question:

“With no database, why the hotline?”

Why indeed?

Who does the hotline serve?

“I thought the original purpose was to funnel names over to the database,” said Roudkovski, who is a licensed professional counselor and the author of Understanding Spiritual Abuse.

Survivors were baited

Roudkovski didn’t get her ideas about the SBC’s sexual abuse hotline from out of the blue. Repeatedly, those who developed and promoted the hotline told us that one of its primary purposes was to gather information to assess: “Is this person credibly accused and should they be going on the database.”

Further, the abuse reform task force claimed it was going to hire personnel “to receive and investigate reports of abuse and mishandling abuse” in Southern Baptist churches, and told survivors they could initiate the process by making a report with the hotline.

So, from its inception in May 2022, the hotline was presented as being connected to the development of a database.

Survivors were effectively baited with the expectation that, if they reported a pastor to the hotline, someone would look into it to assess whether the pastor’s name should go on the SBC’s database.

You can clearly see that in this survivor’s comment about her contact with the hotline:

“I gave her the name of my perp, I sent the scanned felony paperwork, the link to his being on the Texas sex offender list, and still, I do not see his name on the SBC list.”

Seven months after contacting the hotline, she wrote that to me. She had believed her hotline call would yield action and was disappointed that nothing had happened.

It’s now been two-and-a half years since her call to the hotline, and her perpetrator’s name is still not on any SBC database.

She’s not alone in her disappointment. There are no names at all on the much-touted “historic” SBC database. And now, SBC officials have flat-out admitted that they’re sidelining the development of a database.

The hotline has always been problematic

It’s no secret that, from the get-go, I’ve viewed the SBC’s sexual abuse hotline as being profoundly problematic. I wrote three op-ed columns about it – here, here & here – and none of them favorable.

So much about the hotline was veiled in secrecy and obfuscation, and I couldn’t see any assurance that survivors would benefit from reporting to it. I also thought the hotline carried significant risks.

I wasn’t the only one who raised concerns about the hotline. Sexual abuse attorney Boz Tchividjian succinctly stated:

“Without crystal clarity and transparency, this hotline simply cannot be trusted.”

Boz also raised questions about “what it does with the information it collects.”

On social media, others have also raised concerns about the hotline:

“I would put a big STOP do not call sign on this. It’s like calling the family of your abuser who did nothing about the abuse.” – Tania Andre Montanez (@TaniaAndre_)

“We don’t know what they are doing with those reports. Because we don’t know, we might be concerned that they are settling with NDAs.” – Dee Parsons (@wartwatch)

“It seems so odd that we would encourage people to call & disclose to the institution that is actively filing briefs to hurt survivors.” – Johnna Harris (@johnnarae)

Now, the hotline’s problems are even more obvious

Despite the expressed concerns, the SBC Executive Committee rallied its allies – task force members, advisers, and others – and mustered its own press to actively promote the hotline.

They said it was “safe” and claimed that survivor information was “protected and confidential.” But that wasn’t accurate, a fact that became all the more obvious when, unsurprisingly, a court ruled that a survivor’s communications to the hotline administrator had to be disclosed.

They also said the hotline would ensure that abuse reports are “properly handled.” But from all appearances, it seems the vast majority of them simply vanish into a dark file somewhere. Is that what they deem “properly handled”?

With the passage of time, the risk/benefit considerations of the hotline have only grown to weigh more and more heavily on the risk side. And now, with the abandonment of even the pretense of developing a database, the question becomes all the more urgent: Who does the hotline actually serve?

It sure doesn’t seem to serve survivors.

The most recent data from the hotline

Last week, SBC Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg announced that there had been 674 abuse reports made to the hotline, 59% involving alleged abuse of minors and 41% involving alleged abuse of adults.

Yet we know near-nothing about who those reported pastors are, about whether congregants have been informed, or about whether independent investigations were done.

How do those reports, just sitting there, make anyone else safer? And how do they provide any healing validation to the survivors, who often want desperately for the truth to be acknowledged about their pastor-perpetrators?

What we do know is that not a single name of any reported pastor has been added to any SBC database, and they won’t be anytime soon because the database has been sidelined.

SBC officials use hotline data to bolster denialism

Over a year ago, Johnna Harris asked this important question about the hotline:

“What are people in favor of it gaining?”

Though much may still be veiled, we now know at least a piece of the answer to that:

With the hotline, SBC officials are gathering data to irresponsibly bolster their claim that SBC clergy sex abuse isn’t a widespread problem.

How do we know? Because based on the hotline reports, Iorg asserted that sexual abuse is “not widespread” within the SBC.

Karen Roudkovski immediately saw the problem with Iorg’s statement: He was effectively using the hotline data as though it provided a prevalence rate for clergy sex abuse within the SBC.

And of course it doesn’t.

There are heaps of reasons why survivors would rightly be wary of reporting to the SBC’s hotline and would deem it untrustworthy. So, of course, many survivors would wisely choose not to make a report to the hotline, and therefore, the number of abuse reports to the hotline would be low.

While Iorg acknowledged that the hotline data was “not a comprehensive look,” he still pointed to how much they had publicized the hotline and stated that the Executive Committee’s plans for responding to abuse were shaped by the hotline data.

So, to summarize… it appears the Executive Committee decided to sideline the development of a clergy sex abuser database based on their belief that, because the hotline had “only” 674 abuse reports, the problem wasn’t “widespread.”

Jay Mallow explained the reality of what the SBC had done: “It’s a real phenomenon where you make the complaint process difficult or untrustworthy, then point to the lack of complaint as evidence of a lack of a problem.”

As I see it, the bottom line is this: The SBC’s hotline doesn’t serve to make kids and congregants safer, and it doesn’t serve to help with survivors’ healing. Instead, it serves SBC officials to bolster their denialism and to rationalize their institutional recalcitrance.

To learn more about the ruses and maneuvers of the Southern Baptist Convention, check out my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.