car Last weekend, I spoke at the annual ExMormon Foundation Conference. The organization supports those who have left, or been excommunicated from, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The “ExMo” conference is always held in “Mormon central,” or Salt Lake City. Many attendees came from Utah but I met people from all over the US. The youngest […]
Breaking Their Will
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“Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel said, ‘Only the victims can speak for the victims.’ In her comprehensive treatise, Janet Heimlich shares the voices of the many victims of religious [child] maltreatment. What’s more, she tells the stories of those too young, too intimidated, too mutilated, too traumatized, or too dead to tell their own tales. . . . She makes a convincing case for the abolition of religious exemption laws and the education of public officials who in the past may have failed in their duties to protect children by allowing their judgments to be obscured by claims of religious freedom. She draws a map for religious communities to follow when they need to confront offenders while retaining their commitment to their faiths.”
— Seth Asser, PhD, Pediatrics Consultant, Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty
“Breaking Their Will is a powerful and deeply disturbing book, wide ranging in its exploration of religiously based physical and mental abuse of children past and present, and richly informed by both personal and scholarly reflections and insights. This book will have a profound impact upon the consciences and actions of readers from a wide range of religious perspectives who surely will be convinced, after finishing this book, that children deserve to be free from all forms of physical violence in the guise of discipline and the other forms of physical and mental abuse explored in Heimlich’s book.”
— Philip Greven, Author of Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse