Hiding in Plain Sight: How Child Sexual Abusers Operate (and How to Spot Them)
Welcome to STRONGWILLED, a multi-media project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity. Today we are releasing part 2 of our series on how purity culture is pedophile culture, looking at serial child predators who hide behind religious language, hierarchical structures, and abuse power imbalances to get away with abuse. Please be mindful of triggers as you read, and if you appreciate our content consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. This is a survivor-led and survivor centric project, and we cannot do this work without your support.
CW: Talk of child sexual abuse and grooming in a religious context, and lack of consequences for the abusers
“Pornography's greatest harm is caused by its ability—and its intention —to attack the very dignity and sacredness of sex itself, reducing human sexual behavior to the level of its animal components.”
— Father Bruce Ritter in his personal statement for the Meese Commission (1)
Father Bruce Ritter, the other prominent conservative religious figure alongside James Dobson on the Meese Commission, had been on a personal crusade against pornography since 1979. Father Ritter was a known figure in New York City in the 1970s and early 80s, mostly for starting Covenant House, a home for runaway boys in Times Square. At the time of the Meese Commission, Ritter was a well-respected priest who, like James Dobson, positioned himself as a defender of traditional family values who was intensely interested in protecting the youth of America.
A Franciscan priest who began his ministry with a focus on addressing poverty, by the 1980s Father Ritter had been campaigning against pornography as the number one evil in society. Both Dobson and Ritter used their extensive platforms to promote the ideas that pornography was being operated by the mafia, and that it was an evil that made men progressively more and more violent (which the commission itself could not find plausible evidence for). He was so focused on pornography that, unprompted, he submitted two separate papers totaling tens of thousands of words to include in the final Meese Report. Ritter also constantly strove to equate homosexuality (which was often shown in pornography) with sexual deviancy. From the Meese report: “Distressed by the idea that queer relationships would be viewed with the same respect as straight ones, he asked, ‘So much of the available pornography is homosexual pornography. Is this Commission obliged to say . . . that heterosexual activity is no more normative to society than homosexual behavior?’” (2)
Like James Dobson, “Father Ritter argued that the ‘single greatest harm’ of violent pornography is its attack on the family. He said pornography ‘attacks radically the concepts of love, affection, commitment, fidelity. Frankly, it despises them, and literally teaches a contempt for the very glue that holds the family together . . . There is no longer any necessary connection between sex and families, between sex and love, between sex and commitment.’" Interestingly, the four women on the Meese Commission disagreed with this argument as a means to criminalizing all pornography, but Dobson and Ritter would not be deterred.
The media used the logic of Dobson and Ritter to joke about the hundreds of hours these two Christian men spent looking at some of the most violent and degrading pornography available. The Washington Post asked the commissioners: “Given their concern that pornography is hazardous to public health, did the commissioners and staff suffer from all that exposure? ‘I was worried it might,’ says Dobson, ‘but it didn't.’" Another commissioner, Deanne Tilton, responded: “Watching this material for a year did not create deviant behavior on the part of the commissioners. At least I don't know of any of the commissioners being arrested for sex crimes. I certainly haven't been.” (3)
But Tilton turned out to be wrong. As Father Bruce Ritter was busy researching and typing up his soliloquies on the exploitative nature of pornography for the US government, he was also paying for young men to come to his hotel rooms in the various cities the commissioners traveled to. And within the next year, at least 15 of the young men and boys who lived at the Covenant house under the care of Ritter would accuse him of sexual abuse. For nearly two decades, in fact, rumors had been circulating around Father Ritter and abuse of the youth in his care, and it was his hypocrisy of being on the Meese Commission as a defender of “family” values that encouraged several of his victims to speak up.
The journalist who broke the story of Father Ritter was Charles M. Sennot, who eventually published a book about Ritter called Broken Covenant. But reading the media coverage of the "downfall" of Father Bruce Ritter is an exercise in seeing how badly American society was failing to keep children safe at the expense of protecting the powerful and religious. Ritter had stacked the board of Covenant House with prominent and successful New York leaders. So when Sennott broke the story of Ritter using Covenant House money to pay former male prostitutes, New York institutions like the New York Times came to Ritter’s defense. Eventually, they conceded the allegations were credible but they still seemed swayed by his charisma: “Father Ritter himself was often mentioned in the same sentence with Mother Teresa, but perhaps Sennott's phrase, ‘the Donald Trump of Catholicism,’ better captures the personal drive and entrepreneurial spirit that led to Covenant House's phenomenal growth.” (4)
Eventually, the Manhattan District Attorney compiled enough evidence for a case against Ritter but in 1990 he was allowed to resign from Covenant House in exchange for all charges being dropped. Ritter never admitted to doing anything wrong and lived out the rest of his days on a farm for troubled priests in upstate New York. He never faced accountability and none of his victims had a chance to share their stories in court. In 2018 the New York Post published an update on their reporting of the case that included a letter from 1990 written to Ritter from one of the victims, a man named Darryl Bassile: “You were wrong for inflicting your desires on a 14 year old . . . I know that someday you will stand before the one who judges all of us and at that time there will be no more denial, just the truth.”(5)
In an era before the Boston Globe shone a spotlight on the wide prevalence of pedophiles in the priesthood, Father Bruce Ritter was seen as an anomaly. Hushed up, sent to a farm out of sight, he lived out the rest of his days adamantly denying the allegations of abuse. A serial predator hiding in plain sight while he pontificated on the dangers of pornography and fought for "traditional family values,” while privately abusing his power over the most vulnerable people in society — the very youth that the Meese Commission members swore they were working hard to protect.
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“The good influence of godly citizens causes a city to prosper, but the moral decay of the wicked drives it downhill” — Proverbs 11:11, TLB
Father Bruce Ritter was one of the first pedophile priests to garner media attention, but he was far from the last. He holds many of the hallmarks of pedophiles and serial child predators that multiple expert witnesses testified to repeatedly for the Meese Commission. He embedded himself in a community as a trusted adult to children in a venue absent of supervision. He used the concept of spiritual authority to gain power over children. He also found ways — including using religion — to view himself as a good person and to position himself as a revered, influential member in the community. Lastly, he was able to escape any prosecution or jail time by cultivating his image as a respected, upstanding religious authority, and he declared until the day he died that he had done nothing wrong. (6)
People like Father Bruce Ritter are not as uncommon as we would like to think. In 2004, the New York Times reported on multiple studies that found 4% of priests had been accused of molesting children, an epidemic that “peaked with the ordination class of 1970, in which one of every 10 priests was eventually accused of abuse.”(7) One out of ten priests is an enormous number — and so too is the level of devastation caused by the vast number of victims that most pedophiles abuse. But whereas the Catholic Church has been forced to have a reckoning with the number of abusers in their ranks, protestant churches — and evangelicals in particular — have been slower to face such accountability.
This is due to a variety of reasons, including the reality that evangelicalism in the US is a decentralized affair. But if the public awareness of the growing number of pedophile priests has taught us anything, it should be that this is not an issue relegated solely to Catholics. Since serial predators are enabled by the structure provided in patriarchal, religious authoritarian movements, it’s no surprise that there are increasing reports of abuse occurring within protestant churches. (8) Precisely because these high control frameworks give people access to vulnerable communities, protect abusers if they are male and identify as Christian, and create the perfect conditions for power imbalances to be exploited.
Patriarchal buddies Father Ritter and James Dobson, who had been so cozy together on the Meese Commission, went their separate ways after 1985. Dobson, in all of his years recounting his time on the Meese Commission (including the book he co-authored on the subject titled Pornography: A Human Tragedy) never mentioned how his fellow commissioner Father Ritter was credibly accused of child molestation, exploitation, and embezzlement. (9) His fellow champion of the conservative patriarchal family was erased from the narrative that Dobson was weaving.
But didn’t Father Ritter exemplify the very point Dobson was striving to make about the progressive nature of pornography? Ritter was a textbook example of the type of child abuser exactly described by experts who testified to Dobson and to the rest of the Meese Commission. His story could have been an example of how parents and communities must remain vigilant and a way to discuss the warning signs of those who seek unsupervised access to children with no accountability.
Dobson could have written in his books and talked on his radio programs about what the experts on child sexual exploitation had stated repeatedly; the most likely offender was male, usually known to the victim, and often a pillar of the community who sought out the company of families and children. He could have taught communities about basic protocols that keep kids safe and encouraged the kinds of policies that responsible organizations use, such as not allowing adults to be alone with children and requiring background checks for all volunteers.
And yet — despite his tireless recounting of his time on the commission — Dobson neglected to use what he learned on the Meese Commission and the outing of Father Bruce Ritter as a serial child predator to educate his large listenership and to teach kids about safe and unsafe adults.
Instead, Dr. James Dobson went and did the exact opposite.
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“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Matthew 18:6 NIV
comic-book style images from this page
Two years after his time on the Meese Commission, and one year after the story of Father Ritter broke in national media, Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family premiered a radio drama show for children, complete with high quality voice actors and professional scripts called Adventures in Odyssey. The show revolved around a small town in middle America named Odyssey, and the Christian patriarch at the center of it: Mr. Whitaker.
Mr. Whitaker was older, in his 50s or 60s, was a widower, a millionaire businessman who left behind corporate life (and espionage with the CIA) to start an ice cream shop for children. He was also an inventor, and his crowning achievement was the Imagination Station, a virtual reality simulator where he could send the children of Odyssey on realistic adventures to Bible times, revisionist history experiences in American colonization, or even to hell (in order to scare them into being Christians, of course).
Mr. Whitaker, who seems to have been a self-insert of James Dobson, was held up as the wise patriarch and it was assumed that the children of the town should not only listen to him — but that they needed to obey him immediately and without question. He was often found dispensing wisdom and life one-on-one to children, including on the topics of modesty (for girls), the dangers of tolerance and queer people existing in public, creationism, and more. In one series, released in 2014, where Mr. Whitaker works to cancel the town’s pride parade, Mr. Whitaker took it upon himself to teach the children at his ice cream shop about the importance of heterosexuality. The purity culture world of Adventures in Odyssey considered it preferable for a man to teach a child about sexuality in the back room of an ice cream parlor, than for children to receive formal sex education in a classroom setting which would provide the safety of a more public setting.
Early on in the series, listeners hear an episode about Mr. Whitaker crossing boundaries, when his 10yo grandson Monty comes to stay with him, and Mr. Whitaker spanks him — against his daughter’s wishes. “Whit” as he is often called on the show, explains how the spanking was necessary, and that his grandson found it loving and even begged for it. He modeled a way of interacting with children under the belief that adults knew better than children about what they wanted, and that children often actually want the behavior they are saying no to. And, to prove his point, he often pointed out how beloved he was by the children and their families, and how it gave his ministry more purpose. (10)
Millions of evangelical children grew up listening to Adventures in Odyssey (AiO) episodes, imbibing the belief that any man who calls himself a Christian is worthy of respect, admiration, and immediate obedience. Mr. Whitaker wasn’t a pastor or a priest, yet he was upheld as the town’s spiritual guru for children, sometimes even pitting him against the hapless parents of the town. Adventures in Odyssey normalized the concept of having older Christian men hold authority over and proximity to children, absent any structure that would ensure that this relationship would be safe and beneficial for the children. It was a program designed for children that taught them that being chosen by a Christian man for spiritual mentorship was a special prize. Devoted listeners of the show will easily remember Mr. Whitaker’s common refrain to children, inviting them to withdraw from the loud public parlor area to a back room of the shop because, “It’s much quieter back here.”
Many organizations, such as the Scouts of America, 4-H, or the YMCA, know that their programs run on the generosity of the adults who volunteer to support children. We want to be clear that the problem is not that adults might want to invest in the younger generation. The problem is when that investment has no policies or protocols to ensure the safety of children. As Lois Harrington, Assistant Attorney General of the United States testified to the Meese Commission, “Many people who truly love children want to be their teachers and their coaches and their school bus drivers. But unfortunately, so do those who seek to exploit.” 11 James Dobson and Focus on the Family did not in any meaningful way grapple with this reality, which in turn placed vulnerable children at risk — especially coupled with the religious authoritarian parenting methods they promoted.
Focus on the Family used its extensive network to turn AiO into a hit show. At its heyday in 2005, 1.2 million people were listening to AiO daily, and the Focus on the Family show regularly partnered with Chick-Fil-A to give out cassette tapes and CDs of episodes up until 2005. Former Vice President Mike Pence often talked about how he and his family loved AiO, because it upheld Christian family values.
While the show holds nostalgia for many people raised evangelical, a cursory glance at the way the show sets up its main protagonist should give anyone pause. Dobson’s organization spent decades creating and championing a man who fit the Meese Commission’s description of a possible child predator, without any source of accountability or structure to ensure the children in his care were safe. This, coupled with Dobson’s parenting methodologies that relied on spanking children on their buttocks for every act of willfulness, refusing to teach children about consent or bodily autonomy (and villainizing public school systems that did), and demanding instant obedience to godly authority, is a recipe for abuse of all kinds to take place. In many ways, Mr. Whitaker can be seen as a prototypical groomer, who hides behind his religion and his copious connections to have unlimited access to children who have been conditioned to obey him, with no oversight or accountability for his actions.
Instead of asking whether Mr. Whitaker was a safe adult, and if conditions existed that would increase child safety, the Focus on the Family radio program continually questioned the children in Odyssey: Would they obey quickly? Would they maintain their Christian patriarchal values, and perpetuate them through both social and political avenues? By listening to this show, evangelical children were having their experiences in their homes confirmed: obedience and conformity, driven by pain and corporal punishment, was essential for ensuring that children obeyed the teachers, pastors, and law enforcement in their life. At best, Adventures in Odyssey is a sophisticated indoctrination attempt aimed at children idealizing a Christian nationalist utopia run by benevolent patriarchs. At worst, it is a program telling children to trust and obey all Christian male authority figures and look to them for wisdom, instruction, and unsupervised mentorship.
All of this takes on a more sinister note when you realize the records show that in 1985 alone, Dr. James Dobson was bombarded with evidence as a part of his time on the Meese Commission of the growing epidemic of children being sexually abused by their fathers, stepfathers, acquaintances, and religious leaders. Testimony after testimony — from victims sharing impact statements to professionals sharing statistics — painted a picture of how vulnerable children are to serial child predators. And yet in all the books he published, all of the talks he gave on the radio, and all of the Adventures in Odyssey episodes he promoted, not once did Dr. James Dobson give concrete advice on how to identify and protect children from serial child predators from within religious authoritarian communities.
The danger was always outside — a stranger snatching your child at the grocery store, a queer person giving a reading at a public library — and never from within the community. He was grooming entire families to fall into patriarchal Christian norms that would protect abusers while giving them access to vulnerable populations. Mr. Whitaker from Adventures in Odyssey is a classic example of someone who fits the profile of a serial child predator: he seeks out access and employment that puts him around children; he was currently or formerly married in a heterosexual marriage; he is a Christian who believes children should respect and obey him; he is often finding ways to get children to have one-on-one conversations with him; he is connected to all the powerful people in town who hold him up as an exemplary figure and pillar of the community.
And like most serial child predators (including Father Ritter), Mr. Whitaker believed he could do no wrong. He believed he was helping the children he abused. That they were begging for it — to be disciplined, controlled, and loved. Just like all children were.
Just like Dr. James Dobson always said.
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Coming up next: Part 3: How Pedophiles Think (And the Origins of the Modern Purity Culture Movement)
Many thanks to STRONGWILLED member Elizabeth Gonzales, who was able to access and photograph transcripts from the Meese Commission hearing at the National Archives and Records Administration.
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Endnotes:
1. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report Part 1 (1986). P. 98: Accessed here.
2. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report p. Xli. Accessed here.
3. Lloyd Grove, “Descent into the World of Porn” The Washington Post June 6th 1986. Accessed here.
4. Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, “The Priest and the Runaways” The New York Times December 13th 1992. Accessed here.
5. Steve Cuozzo, “This New York priest’s dramatic downfall was just the beginning of the perv-priest scandals” The New York Post September 13th 2018. Accessed here.
6. Ritter also demonstrated the pedophile hallmarks Detective Lanning identified, as he was someone obsessed with the issue of child pornography and child sexual exploitation, he collected materials that had to do with these issues, and considered himself an expert on helping vulnerable youth.
7. Laurie Goodstein, “Two Studies Cite Child Sex Abuse by 4% of Priests” The New York Times February 27th 2004.
8. Larger organizations within the framework of evangelicalism have all been accused of covering up serious crimes against children (like the Southern Baptist Convention, Sovereign Grace Ministries, and more). But there is no study or framework or even spreadsheet document that has catalogued the various patriarchal protestant pastors, youth pastors, deacons, volunteers, and more who have been credibly accused of sexually abusing children. We suspect that if one was put together, the results would be overwhelming and we hope intrepid lay scholars, archivists, and whistleblowers continue to do this important work. Here is one article that delves into the SBC in particular: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php
9. Dobson had a history of trying to erase his ties to problematic people — including trying to obfuscate his close connections to white supremacist eugenicist Paul Popenoe, who he worked with for ten years from 1967-1977. You can read our Chapter on Dobson and Popenoe here.
10. We’ll discuss in our next chapter how this sort of belief system enables sexual abusers of children.
11. Transcript of proceedings United States Department of Justice Meeting of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Volume II. Washington DC, June 19th 1985. P. 12