What are the allegations?

What kinds of abuses or issues are alleged against Bob Jones University? What are the specifics? Is this really such a big deal?

The allegations appear to fall into three basic categories:

(1) Abuse at the hands of a BJU graduate or faculty/staff or student (also including BJA), whom BJU allegedly has refused to call to repentance but instead has allegedly helped to protect, having sometimes allegedly accused the abuse survivors of lying or of acting consensually or provoking the attack, and allegedly acting to silence those who would speak for them.

(2) Abuse at the hands of a man in a church or ministry that is headed by a BJU graduate, even a board member or adjunct faculty, who has then allegedly refused to deal appropriately with the crime.

(3) Abuse by an non-BJU person before coming to BJU as a student, and then receiving counsel by BJU counselors that the abuse survivors have claimed re-traumatized them by shaming and blaming them, while failing to report the alleged offender to legal authorities, even allegedly in cases when minors were still in danger. Commonly, it has been alleged that the University has used Scripture in ways that compounded suffering rather than relieving it, e.g., Matthew 18, Ephesians 5:12, I Corinthians 6:5-7, and others (as are addressed on the FQBV page).

Among us we know more than one abuse survivor in each of these categories. One of GRACE’s jobs has been to hear testimony and review evidence, verifying the allegations whenever possible.

We would say that this is a big deal. Since we didn’t suffer abuse, we didn’t understand it either until recent years. Once we began to understand, we began to see what a big deal it truly is.