Everyone’s Accountable? Peer Sexual Abuse in Religious Schools, Digital Revelations, and Denominational Contests over Protection

Abstract

Since the emergence of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, online tracts have been employed to publicly reveal experiences of sexual abuse and assault among women and men in religious institutions and to shame abusers, which tend to be examined as an issue of women’s rights or child protection from adult predators. Drawing on the use of digital reporting platforms to testify against peer offences within religious schools, this paper asks how do such testimonies reveal adolescent agency and provoke policy re/actions about the accountability of religious institutions? Digital revelations submitted anonymously to Everyone’s Invited are analysed alongside interviews conducted with educators, parents, and youths in Jewish schools in Britain. Findings indicate how adolescent digital revelations of peer sexual abuse call for accountability by implicating the faith schools in question, which in turn triggers pedagogical and policy debates from educators. Public responses reflect diverging denominational positions on how to balance the protection of young people and safeguard religious self-protectionism. The paper spotlights the agency of youth in shaming peer abusers as much as faith schools and structures of religious authority, and in turn, how online shaming reveals frictions over accountability.