Megyn Kelly has hinted that she won't go after Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar as hard as we've hoped. However, I'd like to think she would be somewhat less kind to them tonight if she knew about the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that America's most famous babymakers at the very least condone blaming victims of rape and sexual molestation for their ordeal. I know it's been scraped at here a few times (most recently by Scott Wooledge), but no one's really peered into its guts yet. However, I did a couple of times over at Liberal America, and I thought I'd share what I found.
You've no doubt seen this page from a training manual published in the Duggars' spiritual mentor, Bill Gothard, on how to counsel victims of sexual abuse:
Well, I happened to see this last week when Wende Benner of Homeschoolers Anonymous, who also learned from a Gothard-influenced homeschooling curriculum, delved into it.
According to Benner, students at Gothard's Advanced Training Institute were actually trained to see if there were ways a victim was responsible for being assaulted. One way is if you somehow "defraud" your assailant by dressing or acting in a way that stirs up lustful thoughts in the attacker. According to Recovering Grace, a group of Gothard refugees who helped expose him as a serial harasser and molester last year, it's theoretically possible for a woman to defraud a man just by tossing her hair.
Another way is if you do something to put yourself outside the protection of your father. According to Gothard, as long as your father has no sin in his life, nothing can happen to his wife or children. However, if you sin, you open yourself up to evil. So if you're sexually assaulted and your father did nothing wrong, supposedly you brought it on yourself by being outside his protection.
Can you imagine the Duggar girls being told that they somehow brought their ordeals on themselves because they "defrauded" Josh or they did something to put themselves out of Jim Bob's protection? I can't even begin to express how callous, degrading, and just plain wrong this is. If I found out that any counselor or pastor told my kids this--well, suffice to say there would be a VERY big problem. And the possibility that Jim Bob and Michelle at the very least sat there and let someone tell their girls this--or worse, said it to them themselves--is so damn obscene that it alone removes any defensible reason for bringing back "19 Kids and Counting" in any form.
Seen in this light, a blog post Michelle wrote in 2012 about her family's uber-strict modesty standards should send a chill down anyone's spine. Michelle explains why the Duggars consider shorts to be anathema--even in 90-degree heat.
This isn’t for everyone, and we don’t push this on anybody. And we don’t judge anyone that doesn’t have this perspective, but for us, we felt like we needed to be covered from our neck to below our knees mainly because God talks about the thigh being uncovered, and how that’s nakedness and shame.
And so in our dress — whether we’re doing activities that require us to climb, ride a horse, bike, swim, whatever — we just want to keep the thighs and torso covered; we don’t want to play peekaboo so that there’s a visual element that might defraud someone.
At first blush, this sounds like Jim Bob and Michelle decided on a rather extreme solution to the trend of oversexualizing our kids too early. But seen in light of what we know about the Duggars,
I wondered--is Michelle telling her daughters, "If you don't dress the way we tell you and someone violates you, it's your fault"? Sure sounds that way.
It's rather interesting that the Duggars at the very least condone their girls being told that they may have "defrauded" Josh. It's clear that their girls were the ones being defrauded--that is, defrauded of a chance to make an informed decision on whether to speak out. Benner put it better than I can--the Duggar girls are being raised in a system that "does not promote healing. It promotes shame." As far as I'm concerned, when you tell a victim something like this, you're violating them all over again.
It's also clear that the Duggars have defrauded this nation for the better part of a decade. THey have used their facade of a devout, if quirky, Christian family to hide the fact that they at the very least condone victim blaming of the worst type. All things considered, you have to wonder why TLC is even debating bringing the Duggars back. If they're concerned about fundie backlash, then they should weigh it against the appearance they're condoning victim blaming and say, "Bring. It. On."