The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous, in order to help protect the identities of the people involved in the case discussed below.

Author’s note: I wrote this post in a rather dispassionate tone, as I had to, in order to get through it. Please know, however, that I have processed deep pain over the incident, and while I am ready to speak of what happened, I am not ready to speak of the pain. Please do not consider the post callous because I do not engage in the emotional side of it. Thank you.

Most of us don’t show up to church on Sundays worried what will happen to our kids during primary. We want to believe that the church building is a safe haven, and we are encouraged to be vulnerable and open to the Spirit there. But in light of the (reportedly glitch-induced) reposting of a statement about the Church’s policies regarding child abuse prevention measures, I felt it was time to share my experience participating in a child abuse investigation brought against a ward member for alleged abusive acts that transpired – regularly – during Sunday meetings.

It’s a long story, recounted below, but in short I learned that:

-Background checks are not done for any nursery (or any primary) leaders

-Background checks are not done for a parent or other adult who may visit the nursery. The nursery is usually open to any adults who want to be there.

-Primary presidencies are not notified of the identity of anyone accused or convicted of child abuse in the ward, so they do not have the information to isolate children from those individuals.

-An official course on two-deep leadership training is not required to be completed by primary leaders, teachers, or nursery workers. Simply having two nursery leaders is not enough to comply with the two-deep leadership model, which is often not upheld due to the frequent necessity for one adult to leave the nursery room. Also, the parents who constantly hang out in nursery are not trained or required to implement two-deep leadership while they are there.

-Even if two-deep leadership is mandated, there is no rubric or reporting system to monitor whether it is practiced as intended.

-If a leader or parent in your child’s nursery were ever accused of abuse, no one is required to disclose that to you – in fact those privy to the circumstance are probably told NOT to tell you.

-It is unclear if a parent or leader under investigation for abuse would be removed from their calling or barred from the nursery, since they are considered innocent until proven guilty.

-If abuse does occur toward a nursery-aged child, s/he is of such a young age that the child’s testimony probably won’t be enough to convict a perpetrator.

-In my experience, in direct opposition to what it claims, the Church will prioritize avoiding litigation more than the safety or well-being of the kids.

-If a Church lawyer is involved in a claim of child abuse at church, that lawyer is there to protect the general church organization, NOT to protect the local church organization.

Here’s my story:

I was called into a Primary Presidency, a position which I held for about 3 years. My responsibilities included overseeing the nursery, a two hour class for children 18 – 36 months old.

I had no training at all in two-deep leadership, and no background check, nor did any Primary Presidency members, teachers, or nursery workers, as part of their primary training. I have since taken two-deep leadership training for Cubscouts so am much more familiar with the way it works.

When I was called into the Primary Presidency, we had two married couples serving as nursery leaders. Sometimes they taught as couples, other times the wives and husbands would alternate so that the two women taught or else the two men taught.

There was one little girl who always screamed the whole time at nursery. When she was about 3 1/2 she finally started talking to her parents about why. They approached us as a Primary Presidency and claimed that their daughter had described traumatic experiences inflicted upon her by her junior nursery teacher when she was 2 years old. She had named him by name. By this time, he had been gone from the ward for months, so we never faced him directly after the allegations were issued.

As a presidency, we were floored. We were also personally traumatized, because EVERY member of our primary presidency had had a child in that nursery with that leader, and we knew that other children had been exposed as well. That nursery leader had served in the nursery before I was in the presidency and left soon after I was called, so I never got to see him work up close, though my daughter had been in nursery with him for months.

To understand how this happened, it is important to know the systemic vulnerabilities of how a nursery functions. A leader may leave the nursery to sooth a crying child, to get water or snacks, to get a vacuum or cleaning supplies, to visit the library for art/cdplayer/manuals/songbooks/etc. The reasons are many, but of greatest note is bathroom needs.

Nursery aged kids, ages 18-36 months, are in that very delicate period of potty training where some are wearing diapers that need to be changed, some have pullups, and others use underwear. This means some kids need diaper changes, some kids come in pull-ups that will function as a diaper in case they can’t make it to the bathroom in time, and others are expected to use the toilet. Some parents prefer kids to always use the toilet, especially if the child needs potty skills as a prerequisite for attending preschool.

As leaders, we were instructed to never change diapers – if a child needed it, we were to get a parent. This means that although there are two nursery leaders in the room on any given Sunday, the kids are often left alone with one leader while the other leader either leaves to get a parent to change the diaper or else actually takes the child to their parent. A single leader left alone in the nursery, and a single leader wandering the church building alone with a child are both violations of two-deep leadership.

Relatedly, if a child comes in underwear or a pullup and is expected to use the bathroom, options for the nursery leaders are limited:

a nursery worker could just let the kid poop or pee right there in the nursery

a nursery worker could let the child leave unattended to go to the bathroom

a nursery worker could go get the parent to take the child to the bathroom

a nursery worker could take the child to the parent

a nursery worker could escort the child to the bathroom

Obviously, just like with changing diapers, it is best to have a parent take their kid to the bathroom instead of the nursery worker. Most parents try to do this before dropping their kid off in nursery. But often, they are in a rush, forget, or an older sibling brings the child in without a bathroom run first. And let’s face it, even if a kid is empty at 10:15 it doesn’t mean s/he is still empty at 11:00. If a 2-year-old says s/he needs to go potty, the kid means s/he needs to go NOW. Newly trained pelvic floors don’t have much control for long.

So, while getting a parent would be ideal, the risk is always looming that the kid will empty right there on the floor in the nursery, where babies are crawling and toys are rolling and kids are snacking. The leaders often take kids to the bathroom and help them through it.

If you have never helped a two-year-old go to the bathroom, let me spell it out. It may mean you let the kid go in to the bathroom alone, but as a nursery worker you are responsible for the kid, and don’t want them to be alone in a room with other adults going to the bathroom, or with running water or endless rolls of toilet paper. Plus, the kids are usually too small to lock the stall door, get on the potty alone, or even reach the soap or water faucet to wash their hands. So, usually a worker has to help the child with their pants/skirt, and lift them onto the toilet. The nursery worker may have to wait there while the child goes (which is not always on cue), hold the stall door closed, and help them get toilet paper from that big roll. When the kid is done, the nursery worker may have to help wipe, get their underwear up, and get their pants/belt resnapped/buttoned/buckled (the kids often lack the agility to do this unaided). Don’t even get me started on re-situating girl’s tights, which are easy to get on if the kid is lying down, but which are very complicated while she is standing up and skirts are hanging down where the tights are supposed to go. Through all this, one leader is left alone with a bunch of kids in the nursery, and the other is, let’s face it, in a private, perhaps locked place with a half-nekked kid.

Of course this is a completely inappropriate situation, but let me tell you, it happens ALL the TIME.

Often, there is a bathroom close to the nursery. And while new-build buildings tend to have only public bathrooms with many stalls, old or repurposed buildings may have a bathroom that is its own room, or a special handicapped bathroom that is totally private, with a lock.

In my ward, the private bathroom situation created potential for abuse, and this is what the child described in her young, circumspect way. Once the parents understood what their daughter was telling them, they decided to press charges against the nursery worker.

Although it was not a church official who had allegedly abused this young girl, it had happened on church property, and over a period of months during church meetings. So when the parents contacted Child Protective Services, they decided to investigate the nursery procedures and anyone responsible for the nursery kids, including our Primary Presidency.

So the Church got a lawyer.

We met with the lawyer about an hour before our interviews with CPS, at behest of our bishop. The lawyer, it turned out, was there to prep us on how to answer questions. If asked about Church procedures or policy, we were NOT to say “The Church does this…” or “The Church does that…” I felt that, since there was a handbook and a nursery manual, we could refer to those when asked about Church procedure or policy. But we were instructed no, don’t refer to those, just say “In our ward we do this…” and “In our ward we do that…”

In essence, I felt like we, as the Primary Presidency, who ran a church program, were being asked to incriminate ourselves and take responsibility for the actions of the alleged abuser. I felt like it was at least partly the Church’s responsibility to have structural guidelines, policies, training, and screening in place to ensure child safety. We were untrained, well-intentioned leaders without the experience or perspective to know how to prevent abuse. I believed at that moment that child safety, operating within a churchwide set of structural vulnerabilities, was not something just to be punted into the laps of untrained local leaders. It should be the responsibility of the General organization to coordinate reasonable child safety measures, and the responsibility of the local leaders to implement them.

It was a strange experience to answer the CPS investigator when he asked us how nursery leaders where selected. “Well, our ward is run on volunteer labor, and usually priority for selecting people is given to the priesthood quorums, Relief Society, and youth programs, then they fill the Sunday School teachers and primary leaders, and often the nursery is last, so we have a limited field from which to choose. It is common for people to turn down the invitation to serve in nursery, further limiting our options. We pray for inspiration on who to call for service.” Needless to say, the CPS worker was incredulous. This was not a system organized to select people based on their qualifications to work with children. I had never appreciated the strangeness of our selection process until that interview.

The second part of our legal counseling was to emphasize that the accused was innocent until proven guilty. His reputation was at stake, as well as the privacy of the accusing family, so we were not to talk about this, ever. I can appreciate caution against character assassination, but I was taken aback by the gag order. We HAD to talk about this, since our children and several others’ children had been exposed to this alleged abuser. When we raised this concern, we were told NOT to inform the parents of the other children that this nursery worker was under investigation, in order to protect his reputation. This whole proceeding was confidential. We were not even allowed to tell the other man he had worked with in the nursery. We had no further discussion about assessing the other exposed kids for abuse (including our own), no discussion of two-deep leadership, no discussion of background checks or anything else to change the system so that kids would be safe going forward. This incident was seen as an unproven, individual aberration, not a problem for the system to solve.

We as a presidency found out several years later from the accusing parents that the charges against the alleged abuser had been dropped because the girl’s testimony had been deemed unreliable. She was so young when the alleged incidents had happened (at age 2), and she told of things that had happened retrospectively a long time afterward (at age 3). She could not be explicit about things because she lacked the vocabulary, and, her parents believed, she was too traumatized to go into elaborate detail. So there was not enough evidence to convict. Of course, any two-year-old would be in exactly the same situation, so unless an abuser were directly caught by another adult, any allegations by a toddler would not be enough to establish veracity in a legal sense.

The matter was addressed at the next stake training several months after we spoke with CPS and the Church lawyer. The stake leaders told all the Primary Presidencies in the stake that an allegation of abuse during church had been raised by a parent, and that the Church had fully cooperated with the law. We were told to not change diapers or take kids to the restroom. If a kid needed a change or a trip to the restroom, we were to make a missionary go get the parent.

While well-intentioned, this response by the stake fell short in several ways. First, they really seemed to think that it was enough to simply instruct primary presidencies to have two leaders in the nursery. They did not address the regular need for one leader to leave to get parents, except to make a missionary do our bidding – and it wasn’t clear how we were supposed to find a missionary without leaving the nursery ourselves. They did not discuss contingencies for a kid who soiled him/herself during nursery or for bathroom emergencies. The stake did not discuss training for nursery workers or anything about two-deep leadership, background checks, security in the nursery against visitors and parents, or any response for the other kids who had been exposed to this teacher.

I actually asked about doing background checks, and was told that if the Church instituted them, we would lose a lot of people to fill callings, because many people (read: immigrants) did not want to be monitored by the government. So, in order to run the wards, we do not do background checks.

It was enough, it seemed, for the stake to make a footnote mention of the incident to a room full of primary presidents. I felt like we were patting ourselves on the back for cooperating with the police and for not being indicted as culpable. They seemed to take this as a sign that there was no need to change how things are actually done.

That was it. And I guarantee that nursery leaders still take toddlers to the bathroom every Sunday, and that there are nursery-aged kids left alone with leaders both in hallways or nursery rooms. I have lived in and visited wards around the world, and seen it almost everywhere.

There is no easy solution to cases of alleged abuse, but I do think there is a lot that can be done to make Church safer for kids:

-Official two-deep leadership training coupled with a monitoring system to ensure it is stringently observed, even when inconvenient (and believe me, it often is VERY inconvenient so it needs enforcing).

-Restrictions on use of private one-room bathrooms

-At least 3 leaders at a time in every nursery, coupled with the mandate that no leader can walk a child through the halls

-Sign-in/sign-out procedures for the nursery

-Background checks on any primary worker and/or parent in the nursery

-Contingency plans for bathroom emergencies

-Restricted access to the nursery by non-primary-worker adults

-Required removal from a calling for anyone accused of abuse

etc.

Hopefully some of those changes are afoot, but from what I’ve seen, we remain resistant. Part of the problem may be that not many priesthood leaders have served in nursery, or they are unaware of the risks as currently constituted, but most likely, most of us simply don’t want to admit that anyone we know could be a perpetrator. When I saw this incident go down, I observed that the women involved were quick to believe the child’s story and frantically obsess about how to keep the kids safe and how to avoid it ever happening again, while the men involved were quick to emphasize the accused man’s innocence until proven guilty. How the decision-makers responded at least partially drove how the organization responded, and those decision makers were, of course, all men.

We should ensure there is never a need to question what has happened to a child at church. Our communities work on trust, but for safety’s sake, we still need boundaries, especially when it comes to our kids and adults interacting so frequently. We have to be honest with ourselves and just decide that we won’t let anyone have the chance to hurt a child on our watch. I can’t look at my child and promise that she’s never been exposed to an abuser, because I took her to nursery when she was two. I don’t want that for any parent.

As uncomfortable as it is to admit it, protective measures at Church are actually necessary, and we have a very long way to go.