Kristen Browde, who describes herself as “a parent, lawyer, activist and out transgender woman” has created a database of sexual assaults on children between February 10, 2023 and May 23, 2024. In that period, she’s found 5 trans perpetrators, 1 drag queen perpetrator and 846 perpetrators with some form of religious affiliations. 67% of the politicians who are perps are Republicans.
Kristen runs a TikTok where she reviews assault cases. Her database is freely downloadable to be fact-checked. What a great public service.
AM in NC
And how do we get this information in front of the God-Botherers? They are ensconced in their church bubbles and don’t see info outside of it. Do we crowd-fund billboards in more populated rural/religious areas with this message? Print out copies of the charts and stick them in every gas station and fast-food bathroom we pass?
I will never forget talking with (freaking out at) a Good Christian(ist) woman just after the election when I said, “I sure hope you didn’t vote for the serial sexual predator” and she had heard NOTHING about Trump’s bragging on tape about being a sexual predator; hadn’t realized TWO juries found him culpable for sexual assault and defamation of Jean Carrol; or heard about the more than 2-dozen other woman who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault. I asked her where she got her news, since she was entirely ignorant of these major stories, and she said “from my church”.
It’s a real problem reaching these people, many of whom have been primed to believe utter nonsense (and the exact OPPOSITE of what their purported savior actually taught) and give their money over to charlatans of all stripes. How do we reach these people with reality???????
Steve LaBonne
@AM in NC: They won’t believe it even if you get it in front of of them.
KatKapCC
@Steve LaBonne: Yeah. It’s admirable as hell that she’s doing this work, but sadly, the right wing will just stick their fingers in their ears and call it woke lies. These people believe schools are giving 10-year-olds gender reassignment surgery during lunch. Anything that contradicts what they want to believe about the world will only get them to dig their heels in more.
Where I think this work can be helpful is with people in the middle, who maybe don’t “understand” trans people and are a little wary, but also think the rhetoric from the right is over the top and don’t like telling people where they can pee.
Steve LaBonne
@KatKapCC: Yes, exactly. There definitely are people who are badly misinformed but not entirely trapped in the wingnut information bubble, so this work is important.
Shakti
@AM in NC: Did they realize this or did they hear it and discount it?
Of course she gets her news from her church which has an active interest in not talking about that. Regardless of the actual denomination, highlighting that could interfere with the “church and religious authorities are inherently trusty” halo effect even if this story has fuck all to do with a perp confessing Christianity.
And I’m not sure how open people who only get their news from their church are open to getting it from other sources without discounting or dismissing it.
I swear so many people only care about abuse and assault if it’s out-group committing it against an in-group. They only care about norms if they can use it as a pretext for committing violence they want to commit.
And it’s not like this was hidden news. She didn’t know about it because she doesn’t want to know about it.
Shakti
Now this is something that I only know about because I followed a Twitch gamer who is estranged from her birth parents: npr.org/2022/06/02/1102621352/how-the-southern-baptist-convention-covered-up-its-widespread-sexual-a…
It was in the media but not constant front page news — unlike Trump’s….history of sexual abuse.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I have a hate follow of a maga loon on the book of faces. He actually lost his job this past year due to his hate posting regarding his thoughts about grooming and the LGBTQ community. So what does he decide to post on Christmas Eve? An article about a gay male activist couple that sexually abused their adoptive sons. I guess this makes him feel better or something. Asshole.
KatKapCC
@Old Dan and Little Ann: It’s interesting how they think “look here is a single case of a gay person doing a crime” is some kind of massive proof, but “look here are infinity cases of straight men doing all kinds of crime” is misandry.
Barbara
@Shakti: This has always been the case. The degree to which people will deny that sexual abuse is happening within their own tribe, whatever that might be — family, church, etc. — while still professing outrage about sexual abuse is utterly shocking. I can almost understand it when people are economically dependent on the perpetrator — but many simply refuse to believe even the most compelling evidence if it’s against someone that they personally like or trust.
KatKapCC
@Barbara: The “well he was always nice to me” thing. I mean, okay?? No rapist is out there raping every single other human being they meet.
jonas
@Shakti: A lot of evangelicals are raised/trained to think of themselves in a constant battle with the “world.” They’re taught to believe X and also taught that the “world” (aka Satan) will try to make them doubt and become confused about X, which is a sign that X is correct/godly. So trying to present them with evidence that Trump is, in actuality, a horrible, horrible sexual predator, fraudster, and unfit assclown will just get the ol’ “Get thee behind me, Satan!” response, because “Trump was sent by God” is the X they’ve been taught and any contradiction of that is Satan just try to undo God’s holy work. And more proof that Trump, is indeed the Second Coming.
Sounds nuts. And it is. But it’s how large swathes of this country think.
artem1s
@AM in NC:
It will only happen when a blue state AG and Governor decide they have enough of a mandate to see a major sex scandal case thru to the end. And any such case will inevitably hurt their own party members.
The Catholic pedophile scandal is still going on but there were a bunch of civil cases settled, the Catholic Churches paid the hush money and then shuttered all the inner city churches they could and sold off the properties to help pay their legal bills. All the White flight suburban parishes patted themselves on the back and congratulated themselves their priest and Pope John Paul had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile the politicians who were part of the cover up have been blackmailed to put in place voucher programs to further punish those inner city parishes for having the audacity to sue the Church in the first place. They shuttered the churches but not the parochial school with their football programs their alum so love.
Mike DeWine is a prime example of a politician who has spent his whole career line blocking for the church by passing fetal heart beat and bathroom bills and other initiatives that have made it possible for conservative churches to control the media and education and legislature.
Ask yourself sometimes how many state AG’s or prosecutors who looked the other way on these sex scandals got charged with obstruction? How many Florida officials have been compromised over years because of the Epstein cover up? Boston had a whole network of cops who would call the diocese lawyers and let them talk to victims (bribe them into not pressing charges) before they’d start booking priests who were named in complaints.
Meanwhile Pope Nazi is still running a shadow papacy and applying pressure to keep the coverup going.
Assume that conservative evangelical churches (who condone rape of women and minors BTW and don’t believe men need consent) have the same sort of network to keep things covered up and you’ll get a sense of how hard it will be to break the cycle.
Professor Bigfoot
@AM in NC: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
Starfish (she/her)
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I saw that news story! It was some wild stuff.
They had adopted their sons through All God’s Children, Inc., which is a religiously affiliated adoption place (I think the branch they adopted through is now closed.) But anyway, Christians have some explaining to do on this one.
West of the Rockies
@Shakti:
Watched The Name of the Rose yesterday for the first time in 35 years… yup, the church has and does have a vested interest in hiding all sorts of sins. Power and control, baby!
Starfish (she/her)
@KatKapCC: It was a married gay couple, and one of them was bragging about abusing his children to a Grindr hookup. Apparently, they had a group of people that they were bragging to about it, but no one saw fit to report it until someone got caught with CSAM and got asked where he got the CSAM from.
Professor Bigfoot
@KatKapCC: They do that to EVERYONE who isn’t them.
“What about Chicago?”
“13% of the population and 50% of the crimes!”
cmorenc
@artem1s: Who is “pope nazi” running a shadow papacy? Pope Benedict?
I realize there are cardinals and bishops still serving in the catholic hierarchy who are adherents to the more fundamentalist, strict approach of Benedict but I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression Francis had more or less directed them to chill out and get with francis’s more (relatively) tolerant program.
hells littlest angel
@AM in NC: If you can believe in a deity, you can believe in anything.
Starfish (she/her)
@cmorenc: I thought it was the previous one.
XeckyGilchrist
Not all that surprised to see that Libertarians outnumber Democrats in the political affiliation chart.
“Technically, it’s ephebophilia”
Starfish (she/her)
@XeckyGilchrist: The libertarians are the yellow which is tiny. The larger section is “Unknown.” I feel like these “Unknown” and “Other” categories should have been removed from the pie charts because they are not adding anything other than making everything else much smaller.
Roberto el oso
@cmorenc: American bishops, along with a fair number of African bishops, have been mouthing off in ways that, had it happened during either the Polish Pope or Benedict’s aborted stint, would have gotten them slapped down very hard indeed.
WaterGirl
@Starfish (she/her): I don’t know what CSAM is, and I don’t want to google it in case it’s something related to pornography. I don’t want google thinking I’m interested in that. :-)
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: I assume it’s something like “child s*x abuse material”.
:-(
Corrections welcome.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Raoul Paste
As Canadian Dan Ackroyd has famously said, “What the American people don’t know is what makes them the American people”
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: That makes sense. I am not great at guessing what acronyms mean. Thank you.
Starfish (she/her)
@Another Scott: You are right.
My understanding is that there is a lot of technical effort involved in not spreading very bad things on the internet and reducing harm to the folks that are doing manual filtering
This technical article is asking “Is your AI trained on CSAM, and how do you know?”
XeckyGilchrist
@Starfish (she/her): Aw, shit, I misread. Thank you.
Shakti
@Barbara: Nobody wants to believe their trusted family member/authority/religious figure is committing such a violation of trust. Or that how that person behaves with them is how they behave with everyone.
However this goes well beyond denial.
What’s striking is the way these religious organizations systematically covered it it up AND kept pointing at people who didn’t follow their outward sexual morality scripts (not married, LQBTQ, had an abortion, whatever) as the evil molesting assaulters as a constant loud drumbeat. For years. For decades even.
Systematic DARVO and what-aboutism but with third parties. And it’s so so vile.
sab
@Raoul Paste: Yet Vu ran off to Canada after trying to overthrow our government, and the Canadians let him in. They are welcome to keep him. They wouldn’t let us in when my mom, with a Canadian grandmother, wanted us to move north during the Vietnam War.
TBone
Meta (Fascistbook) just bent the knee, hard.
jewishbusinessnews.com/2025/01/05/meta-hires-former-republican-advisor-joe-kaplan-as-new-global-poli…
Raoul Paste
@sab: I hope it’s clear that my comment was about the uninformed American public, and had nothing to say for good or ill about Canada.
TBone
Greg Greene on BlueSky
sab
@Raoul Paste: I like Canada and Canadians, but I am under no illusion that they are amazingly better than us. Those who flee to the True North will probably be disappointed to find normal not mythic people there too.
wolf parade
As with all their horseshit every accusation is a confession. But the accusation sticks so they never stop their propagnda and it works.
theturtlemoves
So, looks like the land of my birth in South Dakota is #1 with a bullet per capita on those charts. I’d be willing to bet if you broke that down by ethnicity that the reservations are hit harder than anywhere in that statistic. Obscene numbers of Native girls getting trafficked out of the Rez over the last couple decades.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@AM in NC: my neighbor at my old house voted for TFG in 2016 and knew about the affairs and pushy grabbing and didn’t care. She only cared about abortion. She was into church stuff although i am not sure if she was evangelical or catholic. I don’t keep in contact her so have no idea about 2020 or 2024. BTW the family is first generation Mexican American. From what i’ve observed religious institutions where men are in power and women either aren’t around or have very little power are where the predators are.
RevRick
That Other category is huge and somewhat mystifying. Most child sexual abuse takes time and extensive access, to gain trust and then betray it.
I went to the database and found the three biggest groups in the other category are online, repeat offenders, and school district employees.
owlbrick
@artem1s: FWIW the former Pope Benedict died in 2022