On Child Sexual Abuse And The Church’s “Help Line”

Oregon's first LDS temple — The Portland Oregon Temple was the first Latter-day Saint temple to be built in Oregon.
(LDS Media Library). There will soon be three temples in Oregon, with an additional temple being built across the Columbia River in the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington.

I want to call the attention of those who might be in the area on that night that I will be giving a fireside in Beaverton, Oregon (i.e., in the greater Portland area), on the evening of Friday, 12 September 2025. The tentative title is “A Cloud of Witnesses.” (I’ve been asked to speak about the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.) The event will take place in a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse — I believe but am not certain that it is the Beaverton Oregon Stake center — located at 4195 SW 99th Avenue, Beaverton, Oregon. Those who are in the area on that evening will want to plan to be as far away from the epicenter as they can be.

The Yale shield — “Urim ve Thummim,” says the Hebrew inscription on Yale University’s shield: “Lights and Perfections.” “Light and Truth,” says the Latin inscription.

(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This interesting new item, by Jeff Lindsay, was posted today on the never-changing blog of the Interpreter Foundation: “Shared Themes Between Doctrine and Covenants 88 and “The Words of Gad the Seer.””

Sellaer Christ Children — Vincent Sellaer (1537), “Christ blessing the little children” (Wikimedia CC public domain image)

I glanced through the comments from readers on this article earlier this morning and they seemed to run overwhelmingly — that is to say, with very, very few exceptions — to the view, strongly stated, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is wrong on this matter, uncaring toward children, harmful, and perhaps even evil, and that clergy privilege ought to be abolished, with reports to the authorities being legally mandated: “Latter-day Saint abuse help line and clergy privilege protect children best, church attorney says: ‘This is as valuable a tool as exists in the world to protect children,’ Randy Austin says at FAIR Conference” Several commenters seemed to believe that Randy Austin was being either willfully stupid or flatly dishonest.

It seems commonsensical obvious, of course, that requiring clergy to break confidentiality and report sexual abuse to legal authorities would lead to better outcomes for children. But surprisingly, as alluded to by Brother Austin, the data seem to contradict that idea. Josh Coates has shared the two following links with me:

“University of Michigan researchers find that mandatory reporting is correlated with lower rates of confirmed reports.” Of eighteen states studied, five required clergy to report (NE, NC, OK, RI, TX) and six required it “sometimes” (LA, ME, MN, MO, PA, UT); the other seven had no clergy mandate (AR, DE, FL, KS, KY, MA, WA). The researchers found that there was a 10% lower reporting rate in the ones that mandated reporting for clergy.
“2017 Johns Hopkins School of Nursing study concludes that universal mandatory reporting is correlated with lower confirmed reports of abuse.” “Physical abuse reports made in Universal Mandatory Reporting states and territories were less likely to be confirmed. . . . Universal Mandatory Reporting can potentially lead to poorer outcomes. For example, more reports made but without sufficient evidence can divert valuable but limited resources from endangered children who are actually in need of protection.”

An overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit as photographed in 1974 from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules (CSM) during the final fly-around by the CSM before returning home. NASA public domain photograph)

I love this story, which I saw online yesterday:

The American electrical engineer and NASA astronaut Dr. Owen Garriott (1930-2019) spent sixty days aboard the U.S. Skylab space station in 1973. He had brought a cassette tape recorder with him. On it, his wife, Helen, had recorded a few prepared lines that had been specially designed especially for flight controller Robert Crippen, himself an astronaut, back at Mission Control.

One day, right before the usual daily check-in with Earth, the voice from Houston came through:

“Skylab, this is Houston. Do you read?”

Garriott held his cassette player up to the microphone, pressed “play,” and a woman’s voice came to Houston from orbit high above Earth’s surface:

“Good afternoon, Houston. This is Skylab.”

There was silence. Then came a confused voice from Earth:

“Who is this speaking?”

The female voice replied: “Hi, Robert. This is Helen—Owen’s wife.”

A long pause followed. Then Crippen, clearly panicked, asked: “What are you doing up there?!”

Helen answered calmly: “The boys haven’t had a home-cooked meal in so long I thought I’d bring one up.” After several minutes in which she described a beautiful sunrise and several forest fires seen from space, she said: “Oh oh. I have to cut off now. I think the boys are floating up here toward the command module and I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

And then . . . radio silence. Total chaos at Mission Control. For a full minute, the room froze.

I would have given my eye teeth to have pulled off a prank like that one.

Karl Marx — Not Groucho.
Not nearly as funny as Groucho.
Much more deadly. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Okay. Here’s something, from the Alberta Worker, that may leave you scratching your head just a bit: “Why I no longer identify as a communist” “Kim Siever is an independent queer journalist based in Lethbridge, Alberta, and writes daily news articles, focusing on politics and labour.”

And, in other news from the Latter-day Saint political left: “Gaza Genocide Provokes Anti-War Dissent Among Mormons: Campaigners are targeting the hearts, minds, and multibillion-dollar investment fund of the Utah-based faith.”