Heh! RawStory and/or "xfundy" should have researched that Wake Forest, NC abuse story a bit more before pontificating about it. Or at least anticipated that some one might.
A few inconvenient facts are omitted:* The family was not particularly religious;
* It came out when one of the abusing brother started attending Hope Baptist Church, apparently became a believer, became convinced through the church's teaching that what he and his brothers had been doing was wrong, and confessed to a church elder;
* The brother agreed to go with that elder to the police and confessed;
* The church elder stated that had the brother not gone to the police to report himself, he, the elder, would have gone to the police.
To say the least, quite different from how "xfundy" represented what happened. Different to the point of being the opposite of how "xfundy" represented it. To be sure, "xfundy" pretty much followed what RawStory claimed, but 5 minutes or less using "xfundy's" search engine of choice would have brought him to a more complete - and coherent - report of the story, a report that would have included what RawStory omitted.
Before proceeding, I'm going to point out some of my background that is relevant to some of the DU discussion. My wife and I homeschooled our children, K-12. We started and led a Silicon Valley area homeschool support group that in 4 years went from a few families meeting in our backyard to 120 families; 20 years later, the group is still around. Our children participated in sports leagues and a choir for homeschoolers. We attended local and statewide homeschooling conventions, helping organize the former, and volunteering at both. I apologize for the boring details, but they are the context for my saying that we knew and met possibly as many as 2000 homeschooling families here in Silicon Valley and from around CA.
I wonder how many - if any - homeschooling families some of those DU-folk have known. Their invocations of two stereotypes - that homeschoolers are homogeneously "fundamentalists", and that homeschooled children are kept isolated - tell me that if they answered truthfully, the number of homeschooling families they know would be 2 or less (and "2" is me being generous).
When we were homeschooling, on the order of 10%-15% of homeschooling families in the US were not Christians. My guess is that the current % of non-Christian homeschooling families is similar or somewhat larger.
As implied above, most (probably the vast majority) homeschooling families do
not isolate their children. Besides the sports leagues and choir, our children assisted in the children's ministry at our church, our son earned Eagle rank in Scouting (which means he served multiple times as a leader in his troop and had to organize people to work in his Eagle project), our support group had weekly park days, art classes & journalism classes, and our daughter went on work-outreach trips to a school and village in Mexico. That I can recall,
. Our problem was not too few "socialization" opportunities, but making sure they were home enough to do their school work.
Oh, in that ~2 thousand homeschooling families, we did not hear of even one instance of sexual abuse.
Zeee-Roe!As to PSs whose teachers and educrats being such a safe haven, those DU-folk should search "teacher rubber rooms" using their search engine of choice. The news stories I've seen in the past have been about NYC and the Land of LA, but I would be totally surprised if they are unique.
