Missions, MKs, and risk

There's a long history of children being considered a problem in missions. There are the stories of early missionaries who set out without their children, abandoning them to do their work. This video from the 1950s talks about missionary kids being neglected and the necessity of a school to send them to since their parents couldn't care for them. In "The Story of New Tribes Mission," Paul Fleming, founder of New Tribes Mission, now Ethnos360, is quoted, "...what will we do with the children? Their schooling has been a real problem..."

This emphasis on risk can be seen in the way Ethnos360 approaches child safety. Everything is internal; everything, including investigation of abuse accusations and decisions on how to respond, includes the mission attorney; and there's one person making decisions, and he is also in charge of personnel and runs the Missouri training facility.

I don't think people outside missions fully understand the detrimental way MKs are often viewed in the missions community, as a liability to the efficiency and effectiveness of the all-important task. This isn't just Ethnos360. I stumbled upon this job title for Wycliffe, Risk Management and Child Safety Officer. The title seems to be saying the quiet part out loud. There's no obvious assumption that children are precious and vulnerable and worthy of protection. Child safety is lumped in with risk management, which Oxford describes as, "forecasting and evaluation of financial risks together with the identification of procedures to avoid or minimize their impact." That would imply child safety isn't about MKs' actual safety and ability to flourish but about mitigating the potential financial risk for the institution.

How can we expect MKs to thrive when the missions community at large still seems to view them as a risk and liability?