In the last few weeks, there’s been a rash of stories about sexual assault at Christian colleges and ministries. It’s worth putting them side-by-side to highlight the common elements and show how they’re all rooted in the more pernicious teachings about gender that are pervasive in conservative Christian theology.

In the New Republic, Kiera Feldman writes about sexual assault at Patrick Henry College, the ultra-right evangelical school in Virginia that was a pipeline to government jobs during the George W. Bush administration. Like many private Christian colleges, Patrick Henry enforces rigid gender roles – the so-called “complementarian” view where women are expected to be the submissive servants of men – and sets strict rules controlling contact between male and female students. Quotes like this one give you a good idea of what the school’s view of sexual assault is:

Last September, the school chose Dr. Stephen Baskerville, a professor of government, to deliver a speech that the entire student body was required to attend. He argued that feminism and liberalism have transformed the government into “a matriarchal leviathan.” The result, he said, according to a copy of the speech, was a society plagued by politically motivated “witch hunts” against men – while “the seductress who lures men into a ‘honeytrap'” was really to blame. “Recreational sex in the evening turns into accusations of ‘rape’ in the morning, even when it was entirely consensual,” Baskerville explained.

With hostile anti-feminist views like this holding sway, it’s absolutely no surprise that female students who are raped or assaulted run smack into a stone wall of victim-blaming. Feldman’s story has several examples of PHC women who tried, in good faith, to report sex crimes perpetrated against them by men on campus, and are invariably told it was their fault for being alone with strangers, for drinking, or for wearing supposedly too-revealing clothes. One student who came forward to report being drugged and assaulted got this shocking response from a school dean:

Sarah says Corbitt grilled her on certain details: What was she wearing? Had she flirted with him or given him mixed signals? “The entire line of questioning was basically like, ‘Did you make it up? Or did you deserve it in some way? Or was it consensual and now you’re just lying about it to make him look bad?’ ” recalls Rachel Leon, Sarah’s roommate who had accompanied her to Corbitt’s office for support. Listening to Sarah from across her desk, the dean was as polite as ever. But she didn’t seem to believe Sarah’s story at all. “If you were telling the truth about this,” Sarah remembers Corbitt saying, “God would have kept you conscious to bear witness to the abuse against you.” …Corbitt told Sarah and Rachel to forward all of Ryan’s e-mails to her and delete them from their inboxes. The dean then asked them to pull out their phones and show her Ryan’s text messages. Corbitt said to delete those, too. The dean explained that they weren’t allowed to speak of this matter outside of her office. She also forbade Sarah from seeking outside counseling.

There are near-identical stories at Bob Jones University, another ultra-conservative Christian college that’s infamous for banning interracial dating until the year 2000. As at PHC, the victims of assault are told they’re harming the Christian community by speaking out, accused of tempting their abusers to sin and put under extreme pressure to forgive them:

“Nearly everyone at Bob Jones grew up in a fundamentalist environment, so if you were abused, your abuser probably came from inside that bubble, too, which is what happened to me,” she said. “The person who supposedly counseled me told me if I reported a person like that to the police, I was damaging the cause of Christ, and I would be responsible for the abuser going to hell. He said all of my problems were as a result of my actions in the abuse, which mostly took place before I was 12, and I should just forgive the abuser.” …Erin Burchwell said that when she accused a university employee of sexually assaulting her in the late 1990s, “their idea of an investigation and counseling was to ask me what I was wearing and whether it was tight, and to tell me not to talk to anyone about it because it wouldn’t look good for me.” She said university officials alternated between “saying it never even happened and saying I was a willing participant.”

What makes this especially egregious is that BJU’s administration knew they had a problem: in 2012, they hired a Christian consulting group called GRACE to investigate and advise them on their handling of on-campus sexual assault. This month, with the report nearly complete, BJU announced that they had fired GRACE, giving no more than a vague explanation as to why. It’s not a big leap to conclude that the report would have revealed more sordid facts that BJU wanted to keep secret. (This is a trend: according to fellow Patheos blogger Libby Anne, a missionary group called ABWE hired GRACE to investigate allegations of child molestation by one of their employees, then fired them before the report was finished.)

There’s also Bill Gothard, a major figure in the Christian homeschooling movement, who’s been accused of sexual harassment by literally dozens of different women over a period of decades, with some accounts supported by multiple witnesses. As Libby Anne points out, this was an open secret: the leaders of other evangelical groups knew of the allegations and chose to say nothing, potentially putting more women in harm’s way.

Stories like these make a joke of essays like one by a Ken Ham lackey who sneers that only immoral atheists need harassment policies at their gatherings, because good Christians would never do such things. But this sneer is hollow; the evidence that good Christians do these things is right in front of his face and he’s pretending not to see it.

Nor is it the case that the predators are a few malicious people concealed among blameless ministries. To the contrary, their behavior is encouraged and condoned by the theology of these Christian groups they belong to. This theology preaches that sexual assault isn’t a deliberate act that some men choose to commit, but a quicksand of temptation that blameless men can be dragged into by the merest glimpse of an unchaste woman. This belief both degrades men by teaching that they can’t be expected to control their own behavior and shames women by laying the blame for men’s transgressions at their feet. And as a result, it lets predators commit the same crimes over and over, while denying both justice and compassion to women who seek help after being victimized.

That said, this is by no means a solely Christian problem. I wish I could say our hands are clean in the atheist community, but that isn’t the case: we know that some prominent skeptics are sexual predators and harassers and that the organizations they work for have sheltered them. There are also many similar stories of sexual predators at secular colleges who are abetted by incompetent or victim-hostile administrators. If these stories are going to stop, we’ve all got a lot of work to do in cleaning up our respective corners of the world and banishing the criminals from our midst. But I do believe that abolishing rigid and restrictive gender roles and viewing women as the moral equals of men is a necessary first step – and that, at least, is a step the rest of the world is slowly taking, while most religious groups obstinately refuse to do even that.