The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at Brigham Young University on October 24, 2002 by Officer Arnie Lemmon.

Arnie Lemmon:

I’ve really looked forward to this; if we, if you and I, can just help one person, it’ll be worth our while. And so I approach this with a great deal of excitement. You get it with all my biases, though, as I get into this, and I’m not representing BYU. I told my boss I’m not going to represent BYU here or the Church so that way I won’t be fired, because I feel strongly about some issues. But I believe the victims of sexual assault, and I believe this very strongly, need unconditional love and support, and I believe that they are the choicest of our Father in Heaven’s daughters. I believe that with all my heart. And I believe the perpetrators are evil, selfish, manipulative people and need to be prosecuted and incarcerated. So I’m going to talk to you today from a law enforcement perspective, but with those biases in mind.

Two events shape my career on this particular subject. When I arrived here at BYU 24 years ago, I had never been on this campus in my entire life, and I was pretty much raised in Utah. I wasn’t interested in the Church education vein. I came here as a police officer. I had had some experience at another agency with investigating rapes. I got some intelligence about a woman, a co-ed, that had been raped, and so I got permission to follow up on it because I had a little bit more experience than most of the other guys in the department at that time. Here’s her story--it took me a week to track her down. She was walking home late one night down by what is now the old health center. A man stepped out behind a car, put a knife to her throat, bound her, gagged her, and put her in the back of his station week and drove her to Kiwanis Park and raped her, sodomized her, then threw her out, threw her clothes on top of her and said, “Don’t you tell anyone or I’ll kill you.” And for a period of six months on a monthly basis, he would make it a point to contact her and remind her what he was going to do if she told anyone. Now that’s not surprising to me; those things happen. What really took me back is, I was interviewing her, and I remember like it was yesterday, she said, “I feel so guilty.” And I said, “Guilty?” And she said, “I feel so guilty.” Now in my mind I’m going, “Wait a minute. This is about as clear-cut a rape case as I’ve ever seen: a stranger rape, weapon involved, and she feels guilty?” So I got bold and I said, “Why do you feel guilty?” And she said, “Because I should have died before I let him do that.” And that really, really bugged me. We never did catch that guy. And then the second event that happened to me, I was asked to give a talk in a sacrament meeting in a married ward, campus ward, and it was packed, and I don’t think it was because I was coming; I think the bishop mentioned it was going to be on sex or something, because it was just packed, wall to wall couples. And I made this statement, and I believe it today: “I would much rather have a live raped wife than a dead one. I’d much rather had a live raped daughter than a dead one.” Now you know sacrament meeting generally isn’t a Q&A session, but I thought, “Well, okay.” I said, “Brother,” and he stood up and he said with great authority, he said, “That’s false doctrine. A woman should die before she allows that to happen.” And then the bishop said, “Officer, can I say something?” And I thought he was going to boot me out, so I said, “Yeah,” and he stood up and put his arm around me and said, “I support everything this officer says,” and he sits back down. And all the women in that congregation just kind of shifted and looked at that brother and just glared at him. And it was because of that, I’m a proponent now that we take a bucket of rocks, put it outside chapels, and we stone people like that. I think that’s a very healthy thing to do. So the bottom line is, that was somewhat and still is somewhat of an attitude, especially among some men in our culture. And you know where they’re hanging their hat on it? Let me read you where they’re hanging their hat on that: “Also far reaching is the effect of loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen, it can never be regained. Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation where there is no voluntary participation.” Now listen to this last sentence. “It is better to die”--and this is in the same paragraph--“it is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.” Anybody know where that comes from? It comes from Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball. So how do we approach that? Well, to me it’s kind of easy. I always tell people he was an apostle when he wrote that, and he was a prophet when he wrote this. Have any of you ever read this letter? It’s a statement on rape sent out to all male Church leaders in 1985. It’s never been superceded. It still stands. Let me read, and this is what I like to read to the guys, and I’m just going to read two paragraphs, because you see, sometimes even in a group this size, there’s probably two women in here who are victims of some type of sexual assault or abuse, and when we raise our hand in a sacrament meeting and say dumb things like that, you know, we not only send a message that we’re a Neanderthal, what are we telling that woman who’s a victim? Oh, you’re filthy, you should have died? And that’s oftentimes the message they hear. And again this went out to all general authorities, regional reps, stakes, missions, districts, presidents, bishops, and branch presidents: “Victims of rape or sexual abuse frequently experience serious trauma and unnecessary feelings of guilt.” And I wish more bishops would read this. “Church officers should handle such cases with sensitivity and concern, reassuring such victims that they as victims of the evil acts of others are not guilty of any sin, helping them to overcome feelings of guilt and to regain their self-esteem and their confidence in personal relationships.” Now let me read you the last paragraph. It’s probably the most critical in my mind. “Persons threatened with rape or forcible sexual abuse should resist to the maximum extent possible or necessary under the circumstances.” Now if you just read that sentence, you’d go, “Okay.” “The extent of resistance required to establish that the victim has not willingly consented is left to the judgment of the victim who is best acquainted with the total circumstances and their effect on his or her will.” Nowhere in this letter does it say you’d die before you allow that to happen. Now, see, I’m a big chicken--if somebody put a gun to my hand, or there’s all kinds of scenarios, I’d do just about anything they wanted me to do because I want to live. I’ve got a five-year-old to raise. And then I got some more ammunition. Maxine Murdock wrote an article that was published in the Ensign back in 1981. It’s entitled “When It Happens to One Among Us,” and I’m just going to read you one paragraph out of that. This is so powerful, and we’re told time and time again from the pulpit that we can consider things published in the Ensign as being doctrine. “Virtue is something that cannot be taken away from anyone. It can only be given up voluntarily. If, for example, a person is robbed, does that make him or her a thief? Or if someone takes your life, are you therefore guilty of murder? Certainly not, and of course the same is true of rape. The guilt lies with the perpetrator, not with the victim.” And I think that’s pretty powerful. And see, I think that’s the message we need to be sending to victims, not that you should have died.

I know that there are men that are raped. It’s a very small percentage versus women, and so I’m going to speak more specifically to the gender-based rape and assault, as men as perpetrators. But we do a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking: “Oh, she could have done this; she should have done that.” I’ll give you an example. I worked a case where a co-ed goes on a date. She did everything right, she made sure the kid’s parents were going to be there, and they were, they were upstairs. She was beaten and tortured for about six hours in the basement, and then when she finally escaped, she walked out and she wandered around for about three hours. You know what the criticism was? “Oh, it must not have happened because she would have gone directly to the police.” Well, they didn’t understand the victimology of rape victims. She was in major shock. But it’s so easy for us, especially for guys, because we really don’t understand, we’ve never been there in most cases what she went through. There was an article in The Daily Herald a couple of weeks ago. I managed this case, and I want you to feel the emotion of the responses in it. The article was in the Herald and then it’s obviously on the Internet. These are the responses in the Internet. I’ll just read a couple of quotes from the article. “A senior civilian official at Hill Air Force Base who met a Provo woman on the Internet pleaded guilty Monday on two counts of sexually abusing the woman in a BYU parking lot.” It goes on to describe the perpetrator, and then this is called cheap journalism. And then they quote the defendant’s attorney. Are you going to get a bias from this guy’s attorney? Is he going to say, “Yeah, Garcia here’s a real pervert and he deserves everything he gets”? He’s not going to say that. Here’s what they quoted him as: “Schneider [that’s the attorney] said, ‘The victim was sexually aggressive on the Internet and invited Garcia to meet her in Provo.’” Then they quote him: “Schneider said, ‘The victim made similar charges against a Salt Lake man two weeks after the incident with Garcia. The man has been charged with raping Garcia’s victim in a van at a park but has avoided arrest.’” Cheap journalism? Yeah, they just didn’t take time. Now I’ll tell you what happened to her: Garcia posed as a returned missionary on the Internet, and she was not sexually aggressive on the Internet. He was very religiously aggressive on the Internet. And she made a very deadly error. They agreed to meet. She’s so afraid of men because she was raped when she was sixteen that the only way she was able to communicate with men was over the Internet. Bad mistake on her part. So when Garcia showed up that particular evening, he’s not a 22-year-old handsome young returned missionary; he’s a 53-year-old 350-pound slob. And he talks her into that van to apologize to her. And he didn’t sexually assault her; he raped her and he sodomized her. And then two and a half months later she’s still in a women’s shelter in Salt Lake, afraid of him because he’s threatened her, and she meets a battered woman in the shelter, and they become friends, and the woman says, “Come home and see my children. I’m going to go home tonight.” She takes our victim home, and the woman’s husband, who was a batterer, ends up raping her. Now those are the facts. I worked the case. That’s what the newspaper says. Now let me read to you the response: “I think”--and this guy’s a real educated guy; he can’t spell anything right, but he says, “I think the prosecutor should look into the victim’s background.” Now imagine if she reads this trash. “She appears to have a vendetta against men and is using the Internet to entrap victims by giving a come-on and then hollering rape. Who was the real victim? It certainly appears to be the men, not her. Maybe law enforcement should arrest her for solicitation and making false accusations.” Maybe law enforcement ought to arrest him. Here’s another one: “Twice she found men on the Internet and twice she was raped? Sometimes you have to wonder about victims.” Victims--he’s talking about two of you in here. “You have to wonder about them. This woman needs help; the first help she needs is to have her Internet service discontinued.” One more: “Let me get this right: she was sexually aggressive on the Internet, meets this guy in a parking lot and is surprised she gets raped and then does it all over again two weeks later? I’m sorry she was raped, but get a clue, lady!” “I may be wrong, but it seems to me this girl is intentionally looking on the Internet for sex, and after she found it with two different men, her conscience got the better of her and she called rape. Why did she agree to meet them in the first place?” Are those Monday morning quarterbacks? Yeah. Do you get a feel of what that does to victims? Now there’s the plus side; here’s a little responsible journalism, and you all probably notice we just did a conviction and sent a young man to prison, and the article really builds up this young woman: “She decided to talk to the media, and she’s very heroic. I’ve spent two years knowing her and her family very intimately. She is awesome.” Then the media got to the point where they were beating up on her, but this is a great article. This really champions her. And see, in this case, we get a confession out of the guy, so we’re pretty sure he did it. And you get things like this. I’m just going to read the responses for time’s sake: “Elizabeth is a hero”; that’s all he said. “This is a brave young woman who deserves admiration.” You get my point? Two victims, and I’m telling you, they’re victims, and one just gets lambasted because of some poor information, some limited information, some cheap journalism. And one is made to be a hero, and in my mind, they’re both heroes. They are both awesome women. They are daughters of our Father in Heaven, and they’ve both been through hell. You can find any victim out there in a crime, and I don’t care if it’s a homicide or a robbery or whatever, and they’ve made some mistake. I know of few rape victims that don’t make a mistake or two that you could say, “Well, I would have, should have done that, or she should have done that.” I’m amazed at these idiots all the time who leave keys in their cars overnight and then come wonder why their car’s gone the next morning. But do they deserve to have their car stolen? No. Ten people were just killed in eastern United States, and some of them may have made some mistakes in being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Do they deserve to be homicide victims? No. And there’s not a rape victim out there who deserves to be a rape victim. And sure, they’re going to make some mistakes, and they beat up on themselves, and we shouldn’t be party to that.

Let me talk just about domestic violence, and I want you to ask yourself, in fact, all the time, especially in law enforcement for years we’ve gone on calls and we’d go, “Why doesn’t that woman leave that jerk? This is a bad guy.” And then of course, we know a woman--it takes eight times of leaving before she leaves finally and gets out of that home. And we’re going, and especially us guys--“Well, it’s so obvious, you know, he’s beating the heck out of her.” Here’s why she doesn’t leave, and I’ll just go through a few. This is a short list: economic dependence. She doesn’t have any money. She’s going, “What am I going to do?” Fear of greater danger to herself and her children. Fear of emotional damage to children. Fear of losing custody of the children. Lack of alternate housing. Lack of job skills. Social isolation. I had a young woman in my office yesterday, gorgeous, wonderful, sweet. She’s recently divorced from spouse abuse. She gets asked all the time, “Well, why did you get a divorce?” Her husband was first counselor in the bishopric. The people who were asking those kind of questions, the same dude that stood up in sacrament meeting. They’re not thinking. Fear of involvement with the legal system. The legal system beats up on us sometimes. It took us two years to convict Matt Holme. Fear of retaliation. And that’s a reality. The only homicide we’ve ever had at BYU--it was this gun right here that was used. That gun was used to kill Jessie Americonbare, and Jessie was afraid of retaliation. And rightfully so. I guess maybe that’s one of those life-altering events for me. I was the officer who, one of the first officers on the scene. I led the investigation. I held her 8-year-old son in my arms. He’s the one that found her. He cried, and I cried. And that’s the realities. Fear of loneliness. Guilt about the marriage. And that happens all the time, especially in our culture. We make these, we do this ordinance stuff in the temple. Fear that the husband is not able to survive alone. Belief that he’ll change. I know a woman that spent 25 years believing her husband’s going to change as he beats on her weekly. Fear about making that big life change. I had a victim tell me the other day because I said, “It’s so obvious to me that she’s lived a life of hell for years.” And I said, “Tell me,” because she was really opening up, and I said, “Tell me why.” And she said, “Arn, it’s like I’m on the edge of a black hole looking down, and I’m afraid to make that jump. I’m afraid of what’s down there. So I’d rather stay with him.” And then she has that little glimmer of hope that he’s going to change. Lack of emotional support. Low self-esteem. And I see this all the time: accepts responsibility for her batterer’s actions. And the list goes on and on and on.

Now I want to share with you just some very simple facts, and these are some things that I think we need to be sending to the men out there, and to women, and you name it. Violence against women is primarily a partner violence. It’s an intimate kind of thing, or begins as such. It’s generally men who are the perpetrators. Men, we are the problem, and we’ve got to fix it. And this one would be up for debate, but not in my mind. Domestic violence is a crime, not a civil or religious or family matter. It’s a crime, plain and simple, and that’s what society says it is. And domestic violence is deadly. There’s the gun. Jessie Americonbare is dead. That was the ultimate example of domestic violence. And there is no reason for violence; there are no excuses. I remember when I was a bishop I had this guy in my ward who said, “Well, you know, I only have these outbursts, like, once a month.” I said, “That’s like saying you only commit a homicide once a year; what’s the difference? You’re tearing up your home.” Domestic violence is about power, control, domination, and fear, and that’s it. And until we stand up and say that’s what it’s about, and we don’t make excuses, it’ll continue.

Lest you think that this is a cultural thing, that the Church is just saying, “Hey, this stuff is wrong,” and I don’t want to bore you, but I want to tell you what society says it is. Section 7736 in the Utah State Penal Code; this is domestic violence, this is what society says we’re not going to accept: “Any criminal offense involving violence or physical harm or threat or any attempt, conspiracy, solicitation to commit a criminal offense involving violence or physical harm when committed by one cohabitant against another. Domestic violence also means commissioner attempt to commit any of the following offenses.” When officers now go to the scene of a domestic violence incident, she doesn’t have to have her face beat in for us to do an arrest. We don’t have to just look and say, “Well, where are the bruises?” That’s what used to happen. Back in the ‘80s when I started as a cop, you’d go and you’d say, “Where are the bruises?” And she could be beaten to heck, and then you’d say, “Ma’am, would you like to press charges?” “Oh, yeah, I will, and he’ll beat on me tomorrow because he’ll be out of jail tonight.” And so we didn’t see a lot of prosecutions. Any one of these crimes occurs: aggravated assault, assault, criminal homicide, harassment, telephone harassment, kidnapping, child kidnapping or aggravated kidnapping, mayhem, sexual offenses, stalking, unlawful detention, violation of protective order, any offense against property--the guy grabs the telephone, jerks it out of the wall, and throws it against the wall because he doesn’t want her to call; we got him, he’s going to go to jail--possession of a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm. Any one of those are crimes that society says, “You know what, it’s wrong and you’re going to go to jail for it. We’re going to prosecute you.” Sexual assault, same thing. It’s power, it’s control. Let me read you the words of a young man, 24 years old, who just went to prison, and this is what he says about his actions: “I felt like I was in control for a moment, like I was in control over someone else, like I’m not in control of myself.” Let me read that to you again: “I felt like I was in control for a moment, like I was in control over someone else, like I’m not in control of myself.” That was his whole basis for it. He doesn’t say he likes sex. He says he likes control.

Sexual assault, I want you to know what it means. And it’s important for men to know what it means. A person commits rape in the state of Utah, a person commits rape “when the actor has sexual intercourse with another person without the victim’s consent.” That is one short sentence. You know what I tell young men on this campus? If you want to have sex with a woman, you better get a notarized letter from her, and I said, go the extra mile; get one from her dad, then come see me after you’re out of the hospital. Also under the sexual assault statutes we have object rape, sodomy, forcible sexual abuse, and sexual abuse, and all of those are enhancements of this at trial. And I go back, it says “consent.” You see, some guys have a hard time understanding that no means no. “Well, I thought it meant maybe.” No, no means no. And I believe strongly that no woman, I don’t care what she’s done, deserves to be sexually abused in any form. And sometimes I’ve seen some kind of strange things. But the bottom line is, until she says yes, I’ll have sexual relations with you, you better back off. And again, no woman deserves that.

All right, what do we do? We do what we’re doing right now: we need to be educating one another. We need to be talking about it. When I first came to BYU, and after I’d met that co-ed who was raped, I said, “You know, we’ve got to start saying something,” and so I wrote up a presentation for the department, and the title was--it was going to be for men--the title was “When Sex Becomes a Crime.” And I got shot out of the saddle for that one; I couldn’t use the word sex. Well, I come from southern Utah, and I flunked English, and so I figured out another way to say it, and it went across, and we kind of got the job done, but we have come a long ways. You would not have seen this conference 24 years ago on this campus. But we’ve got a long ways to go. And we men need to take a stand, and women, you need to teach these guys we need to take a stand. We can’t tolerate this kind of stuff. We can’t tolerate downgrading women. I’ve got a friend, and you’d have to know Lee. He’s this--if you met him, he’s kind of a squirrelly little guy, he’s my age and real small, and the other day, Lee and his two brothers were having breakfast at some restaurant in town. Lee and I have talked a lot about respecting women. He was raised by a father who taught him to respect women. And he said, “Arnie, I’m in this restaurant, and in comes this older couple, and they’re dressed very, very nice,” and Lee and I are the same age, so this older couple, these are ancient people. He said, “They sit down; then in comes these three or four guys.” Now the way Lee described them, local rednecks. “And they sit down until there’s these three tables in close proximity, and these local guys start using all kinds of profanity.” Now most of us would just sit there and tolerate it; well, Lee’s with his brothers, and here’s this sweet older woman over here. Lee stands up, walks over to their table and says, “Gentlemen, there’s a woman right here. Knock off saying those things.” And the one guy starts to stand up, and Lee said, “Sit down!” Now Lee probably couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but he said, “‘If you keep standing up and looking at that woman, I’m going to call the cops,’ and I sit down and they all shut up.” Well what they really didn’t know is, I like Lee and I love Lee because Lee’s faced death. Lee was a sniper in Vietnam. And those guys were chump change to him. Lee spent almost a year in a psych ward when he got out of Vietnam because of what he’d been through, but boy, does he respect women, and I respect Lee because he stood up to a couple of bozos, and to me that’s what it’s about. It’s called taking a stand. And I think we guys, we’ve got to be an example. Women, you’ve got to teach your future sons to be examples. We’ve got to treat women like they’re daughters of God, because you are. I was raised by a great father. He was, he had a real short fuse. But boy, he loves my mother beyond measure. No one ever, ever messed with my mama, and I did once. I said “damn” to my mother when I was a senior in high school. I was pretty irritated, and probably now they’ve probably prosecute my dad for domestic violence, because I remember the lights went out, and I remember him standing over me and saying, “Don’t you ever talk to your mother that way again,” and he and I agreed very quickly. Now that’s old-fashioned, I guess. But I grew up respecting my mother and respecting women. And we have to. Women are not second-rate citizens, but there is still a sector out there, even in our culture, that believe that women are back here and to the left five paces, and they hang their hats on a couple of scriptures, and they’re just hanging by their two fingers. It’s okay. It’s okay to teach young men to honor and respect women, because someday they’re going to be married. We’ve got to be an advocate for women, especially victims. We’ve got to. Many of them don’t have the strength to step forward and say enough is enough. And we’ve got to love them unconditionally, even if sometimes we don’t understand why they don’t escape. I have 10000 dollars in cash sitting in the safe in my house from a family member who gave it to my wife years ago and said, “Someday I may have strength enough, and this is my escape money. Will you keep it?” I pray that she’ll leave someday. You can’t assume that all women and all children are going to be safe in the home. That is not an assumption we can make. There are circumstances where women should be encouraged to leave, and I believe that strongly. If we’re worried about temple vows and all of that, the marriage is already destroyed. It’s history. A divorce is simply finishing it off. And I’m a big proponent of counseling. I tell victims all the time, “Your bishop’s great, and he can give you great spiritual counseling, but you need some professional counseling.” I had a 16-year-old in my office during the summer. She was raped a year ago. I said, “Do your parents know about it?” “Yeah, but they didn’t want me to press charges. Besides that, my mother just told me before I came here [she came here to youth conference], my mother just told me now is the time to get on with life and put this behind me.” And I looked at her and I said, “You know, you’ve probably got a wonderful mother, but she’s wrong. You’re not going to put this behind you with a year.” And I encouraged her to get some counseling. And in that case she’s a child, so I had to report it to her local law enforcement. We need to encourage victims to get medical attention. I don’t care how long it’s been. I had a victim in my office the other day, and I said, “Were you ever tested for STDs?” And she said no. I said, “You probably should.” You see, we’ve just got to care.

And if we brethren need to hang our hat on something, let’s hang it on what the prophet says. I want to read you what President Hinckley has said. You’ve heard it a hundred times from him. He’s a no-nonsense sort of guy. “We condemn most strongly abusive behavior in any form.” Now he says “any form.” “We denounce that physical, sexual, verbal, or emotional abuse of one’s spouse or children. When there is recognition of a quality between husband and wife, when there is acknowledgment that each child born into the world is a child of God, then there will follow a greater sense of responsibility to nurture, to help, to love with an enduring love for those whom we are responsible. No man [now there’s no exception clause in this that I can find], no man who abuses his wife or children is worthy to hold the priesthood of God. No man who abuses his wife or children is worthy to be a member in good standing in this Church. The abuse of one’s spouse and children is a most serious offense before God, and any who indulge in it may expect to be disciplined by the Church.” I don’t see any exception clause in there.

I worked with an incest victim. It took her years to get the strength to step forward, and basically what she said is, “I just want to thank you for believing in me.” She is a victim of a recommend-totin’, priesthood-holdin’ stepfather who destroyed all her trust in all of mankind. She gave me a tie, and I’m always going to wear it in honor of her and victims just like her, because she is one moxy, classy lady. She’s putting her life back together again, and it is exciting. Besides, she’s got good taste in ties.

What message does it send the victim, what message does it send women? I know of a case of a young lady who was getting ready to be sealed in the temple, and her father demanded that he be allowed to go to that temple sealing, and he’s a professional and a who’s who in his community. Both his children have witnessed time and time and time again as he has beat their mother, verbally abused her. That young lady cried to her stake president, “Why did you give my dad a recommend?” And the stake president knew everything about this family. And he said, “We’ll let him be accountable, but he needs to go to that temple ceremony.” I don’t see that in President Hinckley’s statement. And here’s my favorite scripture, call it my law enforcement scripture, D&C 134:8-9. Indulge me, because this is powerful stuff: “We believe that the commission of crime should be punished according to the nature of the offense, that murder, treason, robbery, theft, and the breach of general peace [and Lamon will add, “general peace” means rape, sodomy, spousal abuse] in all respects should be punished according to their criminality and their tendency to evil among men by the laws of that government in which the offense is committed and for the public peace and tranquility of all men. And all men should step forward and use their ability to bring offenders to justice and to the good laws of punishment. We do not believe it is just to mingle religious influence with civil government whereby one religious society is fostered and another prescribed in its spiritual privileges and to the individual rights of its members and citizens denied.” We have the ecclesiastical side of the Church, and they should deal with ecclesiastical things. And nowhere in this scripture, nowhere that I can find any prophet says, “Now just because they repent and confess to their bishop, that they don’t deserve and they shouldn’t meet the civil side of the house.” I talked to a bishop the other day in a case, and I’m not bishop-bashing. I’ve been one, but I think we can educate one another. I said, “Bishop, I’d like to interview you about an incest case.” He was fairly familiar with it. And I said, “I’m very, very familiar with priest-penitent privilege under the law. I’m not asking to interview you about any confession.” Well the bottom line was, he wouldn’t talk to me, because he’s been advised. You can’t cover stuff up like that. We’re going to get the guy anyway. We’ve got to stand up. And I’m not telling bishops what to do; I’m just saying it helps to educate sometimes. A young woman in Ogden, Utah, was violently raped. She’d been inactive in the Church for years. After the rape, several months later, she has a consensual sexual relationship, which is very, very common with rape victims. We could talk all day about that psychology. But she wants to get back in the Church, and so she goes and talks to her bishop, she tells him about the rape, she tells him everything. And he held a disciplinary council. Right or wrong, I don’t know, but I do know a good victim’s advocate went and educated the bishop a little bit about psychology of victims. You see, if you get this beautiful building and you burn it down and there’s still a little bit left and you’re the insurance company and so you pay most of the claim and then the rest of it crumbles, you say, “Oh, that’s the fault of the building,” and then you’re not going to pay anything on it. That’s kind of what we do to victims sometimes. We don’t understand what they’re going through, we don’t understand that a byproduct of a violent sexual act is sometimes this. And let me read you, and this is a short list, and I want you to think for a minute if this was your daughter, your wife, your mother: depression, psychotic behavior, suicidal behavior. I worked with a victim; it took her almost a year before she could even talk about it, and at that time, she tried suicide three times. Alcohol or drug use, sexual promiscuity, lesbianism, hatred of sex, shame and guilt, humiliation, nightmares, insomnia, anxiety, flashbacks, loss of self-esteem. And what should we be doing when one or all of these are occurring in her life? We’ve got to love her unconditionally, we’ve got to support her. To do otherwise I think is totally inhuman on our part, un-Christ-like. Now let me read you the words of one victim. This is a letter she sent to her father, and I’m just reading a few lines of it. I want you to feel the power here. I want you to feel the heartache. “I’m having a lot of trouble. I’m plagued with dreams every night, and I’m having an intense amount of flashbacks during the day. I want to get married in the temple someday, but I get such anxiety and flashbacks. I feel unclean. I feel violated, humiliated. I don’t want my wedding day to feel that way. I remember sitting in the bathtub in the dorm after I finally got home that night. Everyone else was asleep or outside partying, so the hall was quiet. I remember lying in the bathwater that slowly cooled and slowly changed color--that color was red--and thinking, ‘It’s discouraging to know that I’m seventeen and I’m going to hell.’ That’s how he made me feel. He shattered my soul, he shattered my spirit.” Teach your sons to respect women. We’re in such a macho society, control. Teach them to be sensitive. Teach them to be caring. I want my little Matt, and he’s a big guy, he’s in the upper 95 percentile--I want him to be gentle. There’s no place for violence in a relationship. Teach him that violence against women’s wrong. Teach him about pornography, that it’s deadly. The Internet’s creating a new sexual predator out there that I’m afraid what we’re going to see in ten years. We in law enforcement are going, “Wow.” And we need to teach our daughters, teach our daughters when they’re going out on dates what to look for with abusers. These guys don’t change. I’m sure there are some out there that do, and that’s wonderful, but as a general rule they don’t. Teach them. I talked to a girl the other day; her boyfriend wouldn’t let her call home unless he was listening in on the conversation. Controlling behavior. Quick involvement--it’s generally under six months, it’s a predicator, it’s not true all the time, if they enter into some marriage agreements. Unrealistic expectations, isolation, blames others for problems, hypersensitive. You see, if she sees it in him now, but sometimes he’ll change. Man, if she sees it in him now, wait until they get married--verbal abuse, Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, rigid sex roles--this is the way it’ll be. A young lady whose boyfriend told her what to order when they’d go to a restaurant. Past battering, threats of violence. If he thumps on her then, what’s he going to do when they get married? I shouldn’t--I’m probably old-fashioned--I told both my son-in-laws when they got married, you know, I had the little PPI with them, it’s great. I said, “If you ever touch my daughter in an act of violence--I’m old, but I don’t fight fair.” I didn’t tell him I was going to kill him, though but it did cross my mind. We’ve got to break the cycle, okay, bottom line. You see, what’s really sad too, is a young man who is in a domestic violence home, a home filled with all that, the probability’s extremely high he’s going to be doing the same stuff. In homes where spousal abuse occurs, children are abused at a rate 1500 percent higher than otherwise. 1500 percent--those kids are going to be abused too. And then I would ask you, and I beg for you, if you’re ever aware of sexual abuse or any abuse of a child, you need to report. In fact, guess what, it’s the only law on the books in the state of Utah that it mandates you to report it. There are criminal sanctions if you do not report it; the law says you need to report it to the nearest local law enforcement agency or division of Child and Family Services. Somebody needs to stick up for these kids.

And I want to leave with this, and I want you to remember: “He shattered my soul, he shattered my spirit.” I bear you my testimony that I know that Jesus Christ lives, that I know that he cares, and I just feel it in my heart that he cares a little more for these victims that are out there. He feels and knows of their pain, and he’s experienced that pain. I know we’re led by a prophet, and if we’ll follow his guidance, we’re going to eradicate this stuff, but it takes you and I to stand up to do it. I leave you this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.