Multi-part Podcast/Articles about the Church in New Zealand

[Nofear]

15 hours ago, Dario_M said:

Did i saw the word "porn" in the tittel?

"Porn" is a colloquial work to refer to (usually) visual fetishes. It need not be sexual. "Food porn" = taking pictures of particularly tasty food. "Car porn" = the enjoyment of fancy car pictures. "Cult porn" = the voyeuristic fascination of another's religious beliefs deemed weird.

[Dario_M]

9 hours ago, Calm said:

Yes, it implies people are highly attracted to even addicted to following such things for less than admirable reasons, as “porn” in the US has a negative connotation.  So it’s similar to “clickbait” if you know what that means. 

I know what clickbait means yeah. That you click on a video and expect something that never really comes. Eventhough the titel said it so. 

9 hours ago, Calm said:

It’s usually done to make money, imo, but it can be done for political or religious reasons…wanting to make the other guy look like trash and to get people supporting the cause, but it can be purely for attention as well.

These days people wanna have attention so badly. 

9 hours ago, Calm said:

I have also seen “porn” used for just something looking indulgent, such as calling something that looks really yummy “food porn”, but I don’t know how common that is and if it has the nuance of making the food look better than it really is or not, since I haven’t seen it used that way a lot.

Mostley on youtube. When people make vlogs and they show how delicious food they are eating. 

9 hours ago, Calm said:

 Not everyone sees porn (actual porn) as a bad thing and so it perhaps it is also something that looks really good (like a high end car photographed really acttractively).  Would be interested to hear if others think “porn” is used that way as well or if the few examples I saw were just clumsy. 

Well.. i though that the video that Zealouslystrivin had posted real straight up porn ment. 

[Dario_M]

8 hours ago, Nofear said:

"Porn" is a colloquial work to refer to (usually) visual fetishes. It need not be sexual. "Food porn" = taking pictures of particularly tasty food. "Car porn" = the enjoyment of fancy car pictures. "Cult porn" = the voyeuristic fascination of another's religious beliefs deemed weird.

Yeah Calm had allready explained that to me thank you. 

[smac97]

An additional story from this NZ journalist: Mormon sex abuse scandal: How a Kiwi Customs officer helped expose the LDS church

Quote

It’s dawn in Cambridge, New Zealand, November 2016. Simon Peterson is about to execute a search warrant on a rural farmhouse.

Inside the home is a suspect Peterson and his team have been monitoring for two months.

Peterson is the chief customs officer in the child exploitation operations team at New Zealand Customs. The team deals predominantly with the movement across the border of child sexual exploitation material or objectionable publications.

 

After initial denials and a six-hour search of the Cambridge home, the officers found the devices they were looking for. In court, the 47-year-old pled guilty to possession of child sexual abuse material and was added to the child sex offenders’ register.

After the dawn raid, Peterson began cataloguing all the files on the offender’s devices. One of those files – a nine-minute video of extreme sexual abuse of a young girl – stood out because it hadn’t been registered on international databases before and had markers for victim identification.

So he uploaded his findings to the international Interpol system and US investigators acknowledged it.

Due to the difficulty in locating victims, Peterson and his team typically don’t hear anything more.

But, one morning, a few months after the Cambridge raid, he opened an email.

“It just had a simple message in there saying, ‘Great news. We’ve identified the offender and he’s been arrested and we’ve subsequently identified and safeguarded the kid as well’.

“I still remember it. I had to get up and walk out. [I was] pretty shaky,” he recalls.

“It was quite powerful. Ultimately that’s the point of what we’re doing: to protect kids and get them out of harm’s way. And it doesn’t happen often, so when it happens, it’s good,” he says.

The man Peterson had seen abusing the girl in the video was Paul Adams – a US border patrol agent living in the small town of Bisbee, Arizona.

The girl was Adams’ daughter. He had been sexually abusing her for years and uploading videos to the internet.

But the astonishing truth, explored in episode four of Heaven’s Helpline, is that Simon Peterson wasn’t the first person outside of the Adams household or a dark-web chatroom to learn about the abuse.

Adams was a member of the LDS church – and two of his bishops had known about the abuse and never reported it to police. The first bishop became aware of it seven years before Adams was eventually arrested.

These bishops didn’t simply make their own independent decisions not to report Adams to the police; they kept this damning information under wraps on the advice of the church’s lawyers, after having called the LDS church’s dedicated 24/7 abuse helpline.

We sought comment from the church in response to the allegations of abuse discussed in this episode. In a statement, the church said, “When a lay leader of one of our congregations learns of abuse, they are asked to immediately call a helpline to assist them to protect the victim and to ensure that perpetrators face the consequences of their actions.” The full statement from the church can be read here.

We have extensively addressed the terrible story of Paul Adams and what he did to his children, and what Adams' bishops knew and did not know, etc.:

• April 2020: What a Nightmare! (also discussed here)
• December 2020: Update on AZ Abuse Case. 
• April 2022: (2nd) Update on Arizona Abuse Case.
• August 2022: (3rd) Update on Arizona Abuse Case
• August 2022: AP Story about Abuse
• October 2022: Lawsuit: Utah firm and lawmaker helped Mormons hide abuse
• December 2022: (4th) Update on Arizona Abuse Case
• December 2022: AZ appeals court issues ruling on the Bisbee abuse case
• April 2023: (5th) Update on Arizona Abuse Case

Long story short: The evidence indicates that bishops involved in this were not aware of Adams' ongoing abuse (see, e.g., here, here, here).

In reviewing the above article in NZ regarding the Church's efforts to address abuse, I was reminded of comments I made previously about a somewhat similar article published in the UK.  See here:

Quote

Quote

Looks like more are going to be suing the church. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12762723/Mormon-church-ignored-rampant-incest-abuse.html

A few thoughts:

First, abuse of this sort is both inherently abhorrent and entirely antithetical to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Second, articles such as this do not adequately address the substantial changes and improvements that the Church has made in responding to allegations of abuse.  By way of illustration, many of these lawsuits pertain to misconduct that occurred decades ago, when neither the Church nor individuals nor families nor society in general were inclined to address these difficult issues.  However, the Church started formally addressing these issues in published form as early as 1985, and created the helpline in 1995, and has substantially improved and enhanced the training and resources available to bishops ever since.

Third, articles such as this also do not adequately address the legal complexities that can and do arise in relation to privileged communications.  I think there is a pronounced animus and prejudice in social commentary about this issue, as nobody is categorically indicting lawyers or doctors or therapists who also receive privileged communications involving abuse, and who are also bound by ethical considerations to not report such matters to law enforcement.  Per this article, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that one in ten children experience some form of sexual misconduct by school employees, yet nobody is indicting the entirety of educational systems for such abuses.

Fourth, articles such as this trade on high emotion and low substantive analysis.  There is precious little evidence that expanding the pool of "mandatory reporters" has had any net benefit in detecting and addressing abuse, and some evidence that expanding the pool is making matters worse for detecting/addressing such issues.  Moreover, these articles are big on sensationalism, gossip and innuendo.  There is no competent evidence of "rampant incest" in the Church.

Fifth, articles such as this are increasingly focused on a pretty narrow subset of abuse allegations, namely, instances where an ecclesiastical leaders receives allegations of abuse and do not report the matter to law enforcement.  These are, I think, increasingly rare because the Church has provided bishops with resources.

Sixth, articles such as this also trade on the filing of lawsuits, with the outcome of such suits garnering far less attention and news coverage.  That the Church is, in the main, winning these lawsuits is a pretty good indicator that the Church is complying with the law.  These lawsuits, then, become considerably less valuable as a metric for gauging the Church's efforts to address allegations of abuse.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited October 30, 2024 by smac97

[Calm]

On 10/16/2024 at 10:51 AM, smac97 said:

Here is the article from Episode 1: Heaven’s Helpline: The secret lives of Mormon bishops, lawyers – and abusers

FAIR podcast series in response to claims from “Heaven’s Helpline”.  The first episode is just a summary with a few specifics on what HH was about and how she will address the claims.  I am asking when we can expect the others.

 

Edited March 5, 2025 by Calm

[Nofear]

Episode 2
 

 

[Calm]

Apparently we will be trying to get them out pretty quickly, so hopefully the others will go up as fast.

Edited March 6, 2025 by Calm

[Nofear]

Part 3:

 

[Nofear]

Part 4:

 

 

[Nofear]

Part 5

 

[Nofear]

Last one.
 

 

[Nofear]

I seems there are more than 6 parts.
 

 

[Calm]

I believe there will be ten total.  I don’t trust my memory though, so when you said the sixth was the last one, I assumed you were right.

Edited March 17, 2025 by Calm

[Nofear]

Episode 8

 

[Nofear]

Episode 9

 

[Nofear]

Last one, I think.