Wow. We have some very potent reading here. thanks, everyone for contributing.
I believe it is important to put into to perspective the sad reality that if anyone had complained back in the '60s even, our cries would have been ignored on the social level. society failed to protect. The law failed to protect. But, Christian ethics were always there. Our 'church' should have Biblically speaking taken care of its sheep."
I gave some quotes and links below for the younger readers of this forum. These 2 links focus on sexual misconduct -s which is a powerful tool to wield for power and control over another person. It is power and control that JRS wanted when he began his "mission". His actions are not unlike all the other cult leaders and powerful people in the US and the world.
"They" take what they want and they do what they want. That is the way is was - acceptable. People rarely talked about being taken advantage of like we were. This did not make wrongful actions right.
None of our parents had a clue of what to do. None of us 20-something had enough life experience. What a perfect bunch of people for JRS to control- then M & G to take over. If not us "they" would have found victims elsewhere
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I don't know if there would have been any recourse for anyone who went to the law decades ago once we were trapped and had wounds,
Where do we go from here? Perhaps we can help the future to learn from our past. I believe our discussions on this forum matter and will be valuable in the future.
Historically lawmakers did not recognize the problems Until 1974 or 1975. Laws currently have needed to be made or changed in order to address the crap we are trying to recover from.
Do you remember Anita Hill?
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Before Anita Hill Time Magazinen the mid-1970s, as the women’s liberation movement began to challenge a justice system — as well as a culture at large — that failed to recognize women’s consent. The campaign against sexual harassment was the natural extension of the grassroots anti-rape and anti-battering movements, which grew out of consciousness-raising sessions in which women shared personal stories and realized they were not alone in their experiences.
The phrase “sexual harassment” was coined in 1975, by a group of women at Cornell University.
By the 1920s, working women were advised to simply quit their jobs if they could not handle the inevitable sexual advances.
For decades, there were few significant changes in the ways women were treated at work. Those who complained discovered that sexually predatory behavior on the job was dismissed as trivial and harmless. Women rarely talked openly about the issue, although the situation only became more pressing as their participation in the workforce increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
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time.com]
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Placing Childhood Sexual Abuse into Historical PerspectiveNot until 1974, when Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, were states required to establish reporting requirements in suspected cases.
Sexual abuse of children is far from new.
But if the sexual abuse of minors is anything but a recent phenomenon, only intermittently has this country focused on the problem. Three conclusions grow out of the historical study of the sexual abuse of minors. The first is how slowly and unevenly American society has come to recognize the simple fact that the sexual abuse of minors is wrong and inflicts lasting trauma.
The second is that in attempting to understand the sexual abuse of minors, expert opinion has often shown more understanding for the perpetrators than the victims, overemphasizing victims’ resilience and minimizing the abusers’ responsibility and the corporate cultures and institutional arrangements that facilitate abuse.
The third key finding is that bureaucratic institutions that operate outside public scrutiny have dealt consistently with the sexual abuse by denying its reality, ignoring its existence, claiming that it is an anomaly and aberration, castigating accusers, and failing to hold perpetrators to account.
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tif.ssrc.org]