At their worse, “zero tolerance” policies reward naïveté about the prevalence of sexual violence, fuel cynicism and moral injury among well-meaning church leaders and sheer exploitation among abusive ones, and drive further experiential wedges between survivors and everyone else. This isolation of survivors creates more vulnerabilities that perpetrators can exploit.
Note: What follows is the talk I gave at the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project conference, Surviving the Law: Legal Advocacy for Survivors and Scholars, on May 31, 2025 at University of California-Riverside. This talk was part of the panel “Institutional Firewalls: Bankruptcy, Insurance, Legal Teams, and NDAs.” The panel was a such a rich experience that I can’t possibly do it justice in a paragraph; stay tuned for further reflections on what I learned from my co-panelists.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you may recognize some themes, as well as a few sentences and paragraphs that I borrowed from myself.
Additional note: This conference was a safe space for sarcasm. Be forewarned that I rose to the occasion.
In the Shadow of “Zero Tolerance”: When Liability Avoidance Leaves Survivors Behind
Nine years ago I co-founded a small nonprofit focused on advocacy for survivors of sexual abuse in Christian organizations. Our goal felt fairly simple when we started: help survivors confront institutions, and prioritize the autonomy of survivors over the reputations of institutions.
In the time since, no single force has confounded and stymied me more than liability. I’m not speaking here about the liability my organization incurs. We knew from the outset that we were going to get legal threats from perpetrators, and David Clohessy, former Executive Director of SNAP and a longtime mentor, told me to start framing my cease and desist letters alongside my diplomas. As disconcerting as those letters have been, I’ve been rendered far more helpless by the legal risk aversion that characterizes the responses of nearly every church organization we’ve dealt with.
The longer I’ve advocated for survivors, the more I’ve come to see liability as a hidden system of meaning-making in churches. Liability avoidance isn’t merely about learning what we’re allowed to write or say or do without getting sued. It’s also about how our legal environment shapes what we allow ourselves to know, and what kinds of knowing we’re willing to integrate into our understanding of the world.
Church institutions, no matter how many sexual harassment training modules and “healthy boundaries” trainings they mandate, seem to steer away consistently from opportunities to learn about the lived experiences of survivors, away from the reality about what this kind of violence looks like in survivors’ lives. Their insurance companies and legal counsels stifle their curiosity and replace it with a decontextualized, hypervigilant anxiety about liability exposure.
The operative ethic has become, “let’s set things up so all instances of sexual abuse become an individual matter and we’re able to take on as little organizational responsibility as possible.” The insurance industry encourages institutions to view sexual abuse through the prism of liability, and liability avoidance is heavily reliant on methods that passively silence victims. When the institutions in question are Christian, those methods can be—and in my experience, usually are—justified through theological means. People in the pews don’t generally want to talk about liability insurance, but they do want to feel protected by God. And God, it seems, is forever calling churches to “move forward,” away from the narratively inconvenient needs of traumatized or grieving people.
The institutionally-mandated silences that are characteristic of this legal risk aversion help to perpetuate and reproduce norms that feel comfortable and familiar for many people in Christian environments, particularly those with theologies that are heavily reliant on shame around “gossip.” When the comfort of silence is threatened, many Christians fight back as though their lives depend on it. Survivors are their frequent targets.
These patterns are why I’ve become reluctantly wary of “zero tolerance for abuse” models of addressing systemic harm. I’m reluctant because I’m old enough to remember far worse approaches in the same institutions. But I’m wary because the “zero tolerance” approach incentivizes an institutional image of moral infallibility, and disincentivizes genuinely listening to people whose experiences threaten that image. And because I’ve been watching survivors live with the fallout of that for almost a decade.
Moreover, among many church-goers and church leaders, the “zero tolerance” approach can foster the illusion that categorically eliminating sexual abuse through correct policies and best practices is an attainable goal in our current context. But “zero tolerance for sexual abuse” does not mean the same thing as “zero tolerance for liability,” and it bears asking who profits from the conflation. At their worse, “zero tolerance” policies reward naïveté about the prevalence of sexual violence, fuel cynicism and moral injury among well-meaning church leaders and sheer exploitation among abusive ones, and drive further experiential wedges between survivors and everyone else. This isolation of survivors creates more vulnerabilities that perpetrators can exploit.
The reality is that if you’re a church leader, no matter how “zero tolerance” you are, you’ll encounter a survivor at some point who needs you to care, and you’ll have to decide if you do, actually, care enough to treat that survivor like a human being who might have relevant input into the impact of your policies on their lives. At that point, a question arises: has your system been set up to serve the needs of survivors, or has your system been set up to preserve your ignorance of what has happened to them? If you do find out what has happened to them, are you equipped to make things better? Or are you equipped to make things worse in the name of making things better?
Here are some options that might arise for you.
Find out that the perpetrator is one of the following: a) dead, b) not an ordained leader, therefore not really your problem, c) an ordained leader who voluntarily gave up their ordination to avoid accountability and slipped away to find another system that enables perpetrators, or d) just not nearly as important of a concern for the survivor as is a long list of enablers that may include people you respect. Fortunately, there are ways to interpret your policy whereby none of these situations are your problem, and you have lawyers to help you do just that. Look at you, you solved sexual abuse!
Try to convince survivors that your reporting systems are safe and trustworthy, rather than asking survivors what protective measures they need and prioritizing their wishes. Speak with confidence about processes that you have rarely if ever seen tested, because they are so rarely used. This is probably because they were written with zero regard for survivor experience, but the alternative narrative is that they work so well that you don’t have abuse! That makes sense! Let’s go with that.
Present survivors with options that completely eviscerate their autonomy, such that they’re better off not reporting to you in the first place. Dismiss survivor objections as unreasonable and fueled by trauma. Then blame survivors for not using your options, suggesting or asserting that they are impossible to please. If only they would trust you and your zero tolerance policies!
Assume that law enforcement is an adequate tool to protect survivors from perpetrator retaliation during a church investigation, and use this assumption to downplay survivor concerns about safety.
When survivors criticize your church, conference, or denomination publicly for ineffective policies that harm survivors, be outraged! Some people think your policies are pretty great! If your insurance company provides you with litigation specialists, threaten survivors and whistleblowers with defamation lawsuits for mischaracterizing your excellent policies and responsive systems.
Bring up “model survivors” who are loyal to the institution as evidence that the institution has done its work, and therefore the claims of these other, more demanding survivors who critique the institution are without merit, or at least exaggerated.
Coerce survivors into non-disparagement agreements, preferably after disparaging them in a targeted fashion to ensure that a shady narrative about them will be floating around out there, with them now defenseless unless they risk your church’s legal retaliation against them. And may I add, bonus points to you if the survivors are already suffering economically, if their therapy bills are so high that they’re desperate for money, or too broke to afford the hourly rate of a lawyer who might read over the NDA and advise them before they sign it.
While I think churches resemble each other more than they differ in responses to sexual abuse, my own advocacy experience is such that I’ve encountered the patterns I just described primarily when confronting mainline denominations. These traditions cherish a liberal discourse of reasonableness that is particularly well-suited to the “zero tolerance” model. Where they fail, as where most churches fail, is in how they interpret the challenge that systemic sexual abuse presents to them.
When confronted with grim reality, their responses invariably focus on fixing their systems to better serve their systems. What is lost is any genuine opportunity to learn about the real human outcomes that these systems produce.
My organization rarely accepts consulting jobs with church organizations, because it creates too many conflicts of interest with our survivor advocacy. (This is a great strategy for financial success, by the way.) But I will generally make myself available for a free hour of consulting if clergy who seem well-meaning reach out to me with questions, because I really want them to have questions. Sometimes they will tell me about how their church really botched its response to sexual abuse in the past, and how the known survivors of that abuse are long out of the picture, but somehow the church still isn’t really okay.
Then I tell them what clearly no one in their denominational leadership has told them: Let go of the idea that you can “fix” this. Your work is just beginning. Begin by assuming that at least twenty percent of your congregation is made up of survivors. And assume there are perpetrators in there too, looking for opportunities. And then, you start thinking about how your services, your liturgy, your sermons, your community practices, your availability and your presence, are impacting all of those people.
And you make the choice, again and again, to choose compassion over convenience, care over liability worries, survivors over perpetrators. You do that whether or not survivors are talking to you; you do that even if that lawyer on the church board is begging you to please stop talking about sexual abuse. You assume there is no end to this, and that if you persist, you will have to build your tolerance for conflict. And you’ll also learn more than you ever thought possible, about survival, and community, and hope.