Sexually Abused Missionary Children No Longer Silent

CLEVELAND, March 20 (RNS) -- While their parents were out saving souls in remote African villages in 1974, four little girls were losing their childhoods at the Ivory Coast Academy in Bouake. They muffled their cries then; only now are they and many others like them being heard by evangelical missionary organizations that for so long preached forgive and forget.

Several nights a week, during that school year almost three decades ago, dorm parent Carl Schumacher would lead devotional prayers, then come into the girls' sleeping area, linger over the beds of four youngsters and allegedly sexually molest 8-year-old Annette McNeill, 8-year-old Marcia MacLeod and two other girls.

Stories like this one have been whispered about in the halls of mission agencies and Christian colleges for decades in an evangelical community unwilling to admit that such abuse could occur.

Even after an independent commission of inquiry found in 1998 that more than a dozen children of missionaries assigned by the Gospel Missionary Union were abused from 1950 to 1971 in Guinea, the organization did not offer counseling to the victims. Now, two of the girls abused in 1974 at the Gospel Missionary dorm on the Ivory Coast say they find leaders of the more than century-old mission agency unmoved by their pleas for help.

The Rev. Carl McMindes, Gospel Missionary president, declined to respond to the allegations. "That area is being worked on currently, and I'm not free to give any information," he said.

Church documents and scores of interviews with former missionary kids, their parents, mission officials, researchers and abuse counselors show that the problem cannot be dismissed as isolated or unproven incidents.

Moreover, a growing body of evidence indicates a significant turning point in the way American Protestantism responds to sexual abuse of the children of missionaries.

In a breakthrough study of former missionary kids, 7 percent of a sample of more than 600 missionary children said they were sexually abused.

And some missionary organizations are beginning to listen to their pleas for help.

The evidence of change includes:

-- Statements from Annette McNeill and Marcia MacLeod, who say they were molested as children on the Ivory Coast. They agreed to talk after a lifetime of dealing with the effects of sexual abuse and of being ignored, they say, as adults by the Gospel Missionary Union and the international group that requires mission agencies to set ethical standards.

-- An inquiry launched in February by the Presbyterian Church (USA), one of the largest providers of foreign missionaries. The church is investigating the allegations of at least 20 people, including eight daughters of mission workers, who say they were sexually abused in the Congo between 1945 and 1978.

-- Child protection policies instituted by several mission agencies after a story by The Plain Dealer of Cleveland 2 1/2 years ago disclosed how the Christian and Missionary Alliance found that seven missionaries had physically and sexually abused scores of children more than 20 years ago at a school in Guinea.

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