Reporting Personal Experience On Religious Movements

The following is an information provided by Suzanne Newcombe, Research Officer at Inform. It is posted here as a separate post by kind permission.¹

People with personal experience that they wish to report anonymously on any religious movement such as Rigpa can provide their stories in confidence to Inform, wherever they are located within the world. This may be useful considering the multi-national nature of many contemporary religious movements and the fact that we provide information to a variety of enquirers, including governmental organisations, and concerned individuals.

All enquiries to Inform are kept strictly confidential. There is a statement of our policy on confidentiality here: https://inform.ac/confidentiality. We use the information given to us by enquirers to make statements about general trends in concerns about a specific group and contextualise this information based on the nature of the questions we are asked. So for example, if someone asked about information about a particular group, we might include the information that: ‘Inform has received some reports from former members that they experienced pressure to attend expensive retreats.’ For this example, we may also contextualise this information with the actual price of the retreats in question and a comparison with similar groups’ retreat prices.

Although our primary working language is English, we have staff members fluent in Dutch, French and German, so we can accept testimonies in these languages as well. If you have any concerns about how your information may be used, please feel free to clarify and discuss these before deciding what you would like to report. You can also request information about a religious movement to better understand the type of information we provide.

You could email at: inform@kcl.ac.uk, use the contact form here: https://inform.ac/contact-us or telephone us on: +44 (0)20 7848 1132 (working hours 10 am – 4.30 pm Monday – Friday).

¹ After Inform’s move to the Department of Theology and Religious Studies King’s College London in 2018, the contact details were updated.

3Comments

Add yours

1

Use Common Sense: Khandro Rinpoche about Sexual Abuse by Buddhist Teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition – Tibetan Buddhism :: Struggling With Diffi·Cult Issues on May 21, 2013 at 12:05 pm

[…] Reporting Personal Experience On Religious Movements 2012/05/01 […]
2

Religious Trauma Syndrom – Leaving a Religious Extremist or Fundamentalist Group | Tibetan Buddhism :: Struggling With Diffi·Cult Issues on April 27, 2015 at 12:23 pm

[…] Reporting Personal Experience On Religious Movements […]
3

tenpel on July 6, 2020 at 9:47 pm

UPDATES:

1) https://inform.ac/seminars

Upcoming Seminars
The next Inform seminar will be held online:

Sexual Abuse framed by Faith or Belief – Exploring boundaries and contexts
Wednesday 22 July 7-8:30pm

Please register your attendance by making a voluntary donation to Inform. Please make sure that you share your contact details with Inform so that we can send you a link to the Zoom meeting. If you cannot make a donation at this time, but would still like to attend, please email inform@kcl.ac.uk directly.

Many of the cults and new religious movements of the 1970s were assumed to be awash with abusive behaviour. However, high profile cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have highlighted the pervasive potential of religious groups to be affected by behaviour understood as sexual abuse. This is a problem not confined to any particular religious context.

The dynamics of sexual exploitation of minors have now been well explored and safeguarding frameworks are becoming more standard. Are there lessons that can be learned from working with children which can be applied to situations involving adults?

In many cases abuse appears to be incidental to the theological and ethical frameworks; in other cases, the sexual activity has explicit justification within a belief framework that is later framed as abuse by outsiders or ‘survivors.’

Does the framing of the behaviour make a difference for understanding the harm caused? To what extent are concepts like ‘spiritual abuse’, ‘fraud’ or ‘moral injury’ helpful in understanding the dynamics of adult sexual abuse in religious contexts?

This online Inform seminar will consider the issue of sexual abuse occurring within religious contexts in hopes of identifying new ways of considering the problem and potential ways of mitigating harm. There will be a series of short presentations by speakers, followed by informed responses and then a general discussion.

Confirmed speakers and respondents include:

Eileen Barker, professor emeritus of sociology with special reference to the study of religion, London School of Economics

Leethen Bartholomew, head of the National FGM Centre at Barnardo’s

Mary Finnigan, journalist and broadcaster – co-author with Rob Hogendoorn of Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism – the Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rinpoche.

Amanda Lucia, associate professor, University of California-Riverside, USA

Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey professor of modern theology at the University of Kent

Lisa Oakley, associate professor of applied psychology at University of Chester and chair of National Working Group for child abuse linked to faith or belief

Michelle Tonkin, Rigpa whistle-blower and former Buddhist nun

Theo Wildcroft, visiting fellow, The Open University and alt-ac.uk

Belinda Winder, professor of Forensic Psychology at the specialist sexual crime unit at Nottingham Trent University

Linda Woodhead, distinguished professor, department of politics, philosophy and religion, University of Lancaster

In the organisation of this seminar, we are grateful for the support of the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project, funded in part by the Henry Luce Foundation.

The event will be officially recorded by Inform. Guests may NOT record, film or
take screenshots of the seminar without prior permission.

2) There was also a conference here:
https://bellarmine.lmu.edu/yoga/events/conferencesandpastevents/yogavcon/

covering:

12:00 p.m. | Abuse in Buddhism

Amy Langenberg, Eckerd College (20 min)
Ann Gleig, University of Central Florida (20 min)
“From Sudinna to the Sangha Sutra: Classical and Contemporary Buddhist Responses to Sexual Misconduct”

Since the 1980s, American Buddhist convert communities have been the site of reoccurring cases of sexual abuse and misconduct. This two-part presentation will first canvas what the classical or so-called “canonical” tradition has to offer in terms of ethical concepts, institutional structures, and sexual cultures to Buddhist communities wishing to respond to situations of abuse. Next, it will reflect on how some contemporary practitioners have actually responded, in particular identifying “generative responses” that combine Buddhist and non-Buddhist frameworks to generate new forms of Buddhist thought, community, and practice.

Q&A (20 min)

	tenpel on Who is demonstrating against t…
	Tenpel on Heartwood Hosts Its First Gath…
	Exposing the New Kad… on Who is demonstrating against t…
	tenpel on Who is demonstrating against t…
	Peartree Layne on Who is demonstrating against t…
	astrologerdevanand on Hurts within the Karma Kagyu s…
	mikepazda on Western Shugden Society / New…
	tenpel on Who is demonstrating against t…

Rate this:

Share this:

Related