Risks remain higher in cross-cultural contexts. And misconduct is harder to report.
When Letta Cartlidge got on a plane as a teenager to leave her childhood home, she carried a secret. As the child of missionaries in Nigeria, she was sexually abused by a teacher at a school for missionary kids.
As the plane rose above Nigeria, she believed she would have to carry that secret forever. She thought that if she ever reported him—if she even knew how to report her abuser—it would hurt God’s reputation.
“We were in a culture where there was a looming God,” she told CT almost 30 years later. “And that looming God would punish us for disrupting the work of God.”
Cartlidge would, eventually, decide that wasn’t true. As an adult she found the courage to lead fellow former Hillcrest School students in what she calls an “incredibly discouraging” year-and-a-half effort to bring to light more than 40 allegations of abuse spanning from 1961 to 1993. The alumni won a small victory in August, when the school board voted unanimously to approve an external investigation.
It’s a step in the right direction.
Missionary organizations and Christian nonprofits have started paying increased attention to the safety of workers’ children—“missionary kids,” commonly called MKs—and advocates say the past few decades have seen marked improvement. But the rates of abuse are still high.
A recent survey of 1,904 adults who were raised in cross-cultural contexts found they were three times more likely to experience emotional abuse than children raised in their own culture in the United States. More than a third had suffered three or more adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, violence, or neglect. Almost 30 percent reported some kind of sexual …
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