Everyone’s Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection
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Abstract
Since the emergence of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, online tracts have been
employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in
religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women’s
rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to
testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do such testimonies reveal
adolescent agency and provoke policy re/actions about the accountability of religious institutions?
Digital revelations submitted anonymously to Everyone’s Invited are analysed alongside interviews
conducted with educators, parents, and youths in Jewish schools in Britain. Findings indicate how
adolescent digital revelations of peer sexual abuse call for accountability by implicating the faith
schools in question, which in turn triggers pedagogical and policy debates from educators. Public
responses reflect diverging denominational positions on how to balance the protection of young
people and safeguard religious self-protectionism. The paper spotlights the agency of youth in
shaming peer abusers as much as faith schools and structures of religious authority, and in turn, how
online shaming reveals frictions over accountability
employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in
religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women’s
rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to
testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do such testimonies reveal
adolescent agency and provoke policy re/actions about the accountability of religious institutions?
Digital revelations submitted anonymously to Everyone’s Invited are analysed alongside interviews
conducted with educators, parents, and youths in Jewish schools in Britain. Findings indicate how
adolescent digital revelations of peer sexual abuse call for accountability by implicating the faith
schools in question, which in turn triggers pedagogical and policy debates from educators. Public
responses reflect diverging denominational positions on how to balance the protection of young
people and safeguard religious self-protectionism. The paper spotlights the agency of youth in
shaming peer abusers as much as faith schools and structures of religious authority, and in turn, how
online shaming reveals frictions over accountability
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This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
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Volume/Issue
13(6)
Page Number / Article Number
556
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Link to article including link to pdf, Everyone’s Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection
Bibliographic Information
Everyone’s Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection. 2022: 556. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.3390/rel13060556
