Bishop interviews with youth

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Abuse and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

General Principles	The Church's position on abuse Bishop interviews with youth Mandatory reporting of abuse Abuse victims and lack of culpability Child abuse in the scriptures
Specific Cases	Ritual child abuse accusations in the 1990s Abuse and the Boy Scouts of America Bisbee, Arizona — Adams abuse case

Some have wondered if one-on-one interviews between youth and adult leaders is appropriate. This is especially relevant regarding discussions about chastity and sexuality.

In a 2020 FAIR Conference presentation, Jennifer Roach, a convert to the Church and therapist, addressed four specific reasons for allowing one-on-one interviews between youth and adult leaders.

Developmental Level

"It meets adolescents where are in their psychological development. To ignore this area is to abandon them."

Roach stated that "...it’s appropriate for a teenager’s developmental level to be talking about this stuff. They are dealing with these issues already, we are not introducing these issues to them, they already are dealing with them. Most people would agree with that statement."

Should youth talk about chastity and sexuality with someone outside of their family?

In her presentation, Roach discussed this question.

So, the question becomes, does the conversation have to be with someone outside of their own family? And then, if that answer is yes, does it have to be with a bishop? And those are kind of the main sticking points here. And there’s some research that helps us out, not from the Uplift data, but from a social psychologist, James L. Furrow. He’s one of the founders of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and he did some research on decision-making between religious and non-religious teenagers, and how teenagers learn to make good decisions. And so, he asks, does it make a difference if youth can speak with a non-parental figure about sensitive issues such as sexuality? His research says a resounding yes. For the best outcomes, youth actually need three non-parental adults who can help them contextualize their religious worldview into their lives.

This, in no way, downplays the role of mom and dad and the importance of the family, it just recognizes that during adolescence, students are starting to sort of look up, look around the world, and they need to know that it’s not just their family who’s seeking to live out these principles, but other adults who know and care about them are doing it too. It’s no longer enough just to live out the faith of mom and dad.

So, we see from Furrow, at least three non-parental adults. But does it have to be a bishop? It’s a fantastic question, and to be fair, Furrow is not looking at the Latter-day Saint context, he’s looking at a broad mainstream Christian context. But his research would say yes, best outcome, it has to be someone who’s in the bishopric. And here’s why: he says young people have to know that their issues are important to the highest level of leadership. He points out that teenagers have an intuitive sense about the issues that are important to their leaders and the issues that are not, and it matters to them that their top leaders care about their own specific concerns.

So, why should it matter to a full-grown man called into the bishopric that some kid in his ward is struggling with sexualized thoughts or actions? Well, according to Furrow’s research, it matters quite a lot to that kid. The kid will have a better outcome if he knows the highest level of leader in his faith community actually cares about the thoughts of a teenage kid. The cynical view here is, of course, that a middle-aged man would only care about teenage struggles if it were for his own gratification, but cynical is easy, and it misses some deeper undertows.

Their peers get this kind of support

"Every other Christian denomination has ways for teenagers to talk about issues of sexuality with their spiritual leaders. Why should our kids be deprived of that?"

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not alone in these kinds of interviews and discussions. Roach pointed out that,

One of the things you will hear people say, especially in online discussions about this, is that Latter-day Saints are the only Church where teenagers are expected to sit and talk about sexuality, and that’s just complete nonsense. ...

In the Catholic Church, teenagers are absolutely expected to sit in private and have conversations about sexuality. They call this confession, and it happens on a far more regular basis than it does for Latter-day Saint teens. It’s essentially analogous to what’s happening; those conversations are happening in private. Anyone who tells you we’re the only people who do this, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Protestant teens have a bit of a hybrid situation. On the one hand, they are not generally allowed access to the top leadership in their Church, especially the girls, so they miss out on this element that Furrow is talking about where they get the benefit of knowing that the top leaders care about what’s going on with them. In Protestant Churches, there’s no expectation that their top leadership, their pastors, have any concern about their day-to-day struggles.

Differentiation from parents

"If teenagers are to make their faith their own, they need practice having a direct relationship with church leaders and not one always mediated through their parents."

Eventually, most people need to establish independence from their parents, a fraught period that can lead to conflict between parents and children during adolescence. This is also true in matters of faith. Roach pointed out that, "the religious adolescent must learn to grow from their childhood faith that is based in great part on their parents’ faith, to one where they have their own direct relationship with their religion or Church. And youth interviews, though not intentionally, are one way in which that happens."

How do bishop interviews with youth help children prepare for adulthood?

What does it mean for a teenager in our Church to grow into being a fully adult member? Well, adult members in our Church who would like the full benefits of being involved are expected to give account to their bishop on certain behavioral markers, including issues of chastity, on a regular basis. This is a high-expectation religion, and teenagers should be allowed to experiment with that reality as soon as it’s appropriate, meaning as soon as there’s something to talk about. Because if they are to stay in this Church, that will be their reality: high expectations. So, a youth interview with a bishop gives them a chance to experience this and play with it while still having the safety net of their parents.

Disclosure of abuse

"It's important to understand exactly how disclosures happen in order to see why Bishops can play such a big role here."

Roach discussed that the average age for first disclosures of abuse during childhood or adolescence is quite high, with the average age being about 52. Most of the time, when adolescents disclose something, it is accidental. "When adolescents do disclose, 75% of the time it’s accidental. They didn’t actually mean to do it, but what happens is they say something that doesn’t quite add up to the adult that they’re speaking with. So, while bishops are not directly asking about abuse, asking about chastity is close enough that some kids are going to accidentally disclose."

Roach believes that it is important for bishops to appropriately ask questions because:

...when bishops are so afraid of asking the next question or asking any probing questions because they don’t want to be seen as abusers, it’s very hard for that kid to disclose. I know we feel weird about it, right? About bishops, middle-aged men alone in a room with teenagers, asking a probing question about something a kid just said on such a sensitive area. I get it. But the asking of the questions themselves is not abuse. In the rare situation when a teenager does decide to disclose on purpose, it’s almost always done in a very tentative way. They’ll put a little piece of information out there, and they’ll wait to see what your reaction is. Usually, that piece of information is something small enough that they could take it back if they needed to.

Continuing on this, in her 2020 FAIR Conference presentation, Roach also discussed inappropriate and potentially inappropriate questions being asked by ecclesiastical leaders, in the context of a non-scientific survey of 673 people conducted by the group Uplift.

Data from the Uplift survey yielded consistently high affirmative responses indicates that asking whether inappropriate conduct had ever occurred in a bishop’s interview. However, a significant portion reported that asking a question about the law of chastity, exactly as written in the Church Handbook, constituted sexual abuse. Roach disputed this interpretation, noting two possible explanations for such responses:

1. Some interviewees or parents may have been unprepared for the question and experienced it as scandalizing due to personal innocence or lack of exposure.
2. Others may believe that any discussion of chastity with teenagers should be entirely off-limits, regardless of the individual’s experiences.

One respondent stated: “We should provide privacy on this issue and don’t believe it is something the Church should be speaking into.” Roach believed that a lack of questioning along these lines could give a message like, "'Even if teenagers are struggling through issues related to sexuality, we should abandon them and leave them to struggle alone. The Church doesn’t care.'" That, she stated, "clearly...is not the message that we want to send."

When removing respondents who cited only the verbatim chastity question as offensive, the proportion dropped significantly, with the resulting figure reporting being asked something inappropriate at three percent. Roach cautioned that this percentage should not be misinterpreted:

So when I say three percent, that is a starting point. There’s no way in this data to analyze it in any way that gets some of those answers removed. Further research would be needed to figure out what that number is. And I want to be extraordinarily clear, this number does not mean three percent of interviews are abusive. It does not mean three percent of bishops are abusers. It does not mean three percent of Latter-day Saint kids have been abused in bishop interviews. It means there’s three percent of interviews that probably should be looked at to see what actually was happening here. They say that good research just provides more questions, and there you go.

Possible explanations for these cases included:

• Awkwardly worded questions without abusive intent.
• Attempts by a bishop to clarify a youth’s statement when the youth was hesitant to be explicit.
• Questions aimed at identifying possible accidental abuse disclosures, which the youth may have misunderstood or taken offense to.

In the official Church Handbook, counsel and advice is provided for leaders conducting interviews, as seen here.

Jennifer Roach has also talked about this in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune. She has also published about some of the unique protections offered by the Church against abuse at Public Square Magazine. She also discussed it in a 2024 interview on the podcast Let's Get Real with Stephen Jones.

Notes