Sometimes analogies tell on you

Ethnos360/New Tribes Mission leadership's posture towards abuse can be hard to identify. Many have observed how their nice words about transparency, child safety, and sorrow over how missionary kids have been treated do not match their actions. Although leadership has been informed of this inconsistency and has had ample opportunity to change, the same patterns continue. Sometimes the analogies they decide to use appear to shed light on what they actually think. Here are two examples:

Coworker disagreements:

Brian Shortmeier, long-time director of child protection and former boarding school administrator, allegedly responded to concerns about how leadership was handling the Gary Earl abuse case with an analogy that compared a childhood abuse survivor and the person who abused them with two coworkers who can't get along. He described being asked to mediate between a person and leadership and said, "Each side is looking for some sort of pronouncement that the other side is totally in the wrong and that is almost never the case."

Sit with that a minute. In a case he described as "excessive corporal punishment" that "was not acceptable, not in this decade or any other," to imply that both "sides" hold some culpability and neither is "totally in the wrong" is ignorant and harmful. Would you want someone with this perspective in charge of the safety of your children?

Stealing a cookie:

Brian Coombs and Brian Shortmeier sent out a mission-wide communication during this same timeframe describing how the organization views "zero tolerance." Missionaries were writing with concerns about how leadership was responding to Gary Earl's abuse. Their response accused members of misunderstanding what zero tolerance means and proceeded with the following analogy, "I may have a zero tolerance of stealing in my household, but that doesn't mean that I give the same punishment to my children for taking a cookie without permission as I would for shoplifting."

Remember, this is a case Brian Shortmeier described as "excessive corporal punishment [that] was not acceptable, not in this decade or any other" and in which Brian Coombs and Brian Shortmeier said, "All involved agreed that Gary Earl... should be removed from the possibility of working with children," and yet the severity of this abuse was compared to a child taking a cookie without permission.

These are the people Ethnos360/New Tribes Mission chooses for their child safety team. These are the people who have been in charge of child safety for over a decade (Brian Coombs seemingly continues in that role to this day). There has evidently been no concern or thought as to whether they're qualified or equipped for this job; therefore, it appears this is the attitude of the organization at large towards children.