'You're a sinner': how a Mormon university shames rape victims
Madi Barney sat sobbing in the Provo, Utah, police department. It had been four days since the Brigham Young University sophomore had been raped in her off-campus apartment.
She was scared – terrified – that the officials at her strict, Mormon university would find out and punish her.
Nonsense, the officers told her, they’ll never know, and they won’t hurt you. But a month or so later, there she was with her attorney in Brigham Young University’s Title IX office – a place where rape victims are supposed to get help – and offered an ultimatum by a university official.
Rape victim could be punished under Brigham Young University’s ‘honor code’
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Barney was told the school “had received a police report in which ‘A) it looks like you’ve been raped and B) it also looks like you may have violated the honor code’”, she recounted, and that “I was going to be forwarded to the honor code office unless I let them investigate me. I said absolutely not.”
The university has told Barney that she cannot register for future classes. She is no longer welcome at the institution her father attended before her, along with aunts and uncles and two cousins, a university that devout families consider the Harvard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
~snip~
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/30/mormon-rape-victims-shame-brigham-young-university
Another woman in the story:
“Up to this point in my life, I’ve never been vocal about it,” Payne Dietz said of the 2001 incident. “I haven’t really been in a place in my life where I’ve been able to be as active as Hailey. But now I am.”
She recalled confiding the details of her rape to a bishop, who said she would be expelled. Her father intervened, and the religious leader backed down. But she was forbidden from receiving the sacrament at church.
“The most devastating part,” Payne Dietz said, was when the bishop told her: “‘If you’re pregnant because of this experience then you will need to leave BYU’.”
No doubt we need to understand that these people with their ignorance, bigotry and adherence to dogma are "not True Christians", eh? Even people in this group have recounted with great glee how they like to pass the time on long journeys chuckling over those whacky Mormons and their funny ways.
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