Dive Brief:

• Bob Jones University officials for decades told sexual assault victims not to go to the police, that they were to blame for the assaults, and that reporting the assaults would damage their families, churches, and the university, according to a 300-page report by an independent investigator.
• The report recommends unspecified “personnel action” against Bob Jones III, the evangelical Christian university’s chancellor and former president, serving from 1971 to 2005, the New York Times reported.
• The report is mostly about the university’s response to victims who reported sexual abuse that wasn’t perpetrated by students or employees of the university or its primary or secondary school.

Dive Insight:

Only 37% of the abuse victims surveyed for the report said the assailant was a student or employee of the university. In many cases, the victims were abused when they were children, and the assailants were in their churches. Besides singling out Jones, the report says that James Berg, who has headed counseling programs at the university, should be barred from teaching or speaking about sexual abuse, and from counseling. The report is by Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE — an evangelical group focused on sexual abuse problems. The university hired GRACE for the investigation, fired the group, then rehired it after intense criticism.