Salvation Army child sexual abuse scandals

This 5 December 2017 video from Australia says about itself:

Salvation Army child sex abuse survivor speaks out

Merrin Wake was born into one of Australia’s most recognised charities. By speaking out, she hopes other officers’ children will confront the Salvation Army and get redress for their sexual abuse.

Read more here.

At the first public hearing on child abuse in shelters of the Australian Salvation Army, gruesome details became known. Young boys were locked up in cages for days, raped, beaten and in one case a boy was forced to eat his own vomit: here.

Translated from Dutch daily Trouw:

Three victims of abuse at the Salvation Army received compensation last year, according to an investigation by Trouw. They are not the only ones, according to the Christian organization.

By Rianne Oosterom, July 3, 2019, 1:00 AM

The Salvation Army has reached a settlement with at least three victims of child sexual abuse within the churches of the organization. In two of the three cases it concerned crimes committed by Army officers.

Several representatives of the organization knew about this, but did not intervene. The Salvation Army acknowledges that in addition to these three abuse victims “a few more cases are known from the past” to whom compensation was paid. The organization does not want to say exactly how many victims that is.

…

Together the victims received just under 30,000 euros. One of them, Richard Bos, thinks that the Salvation Army is getting off the hook too easily. He received much lower compensation than the other victims, 2500 euros. “In my case, they are getting away with a slap on the wrist”, he says. …

Bos feels humiliated because he showed the courage to remind the Salvation Army of his own past after all the alarming reports of abuse in the Catholic Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “I wanted to break the silence”, he says. That is why he went to the leadership of the Salvation Army with his sister, also a victim, last year. ..

The organization did not consider actively warning about this or reporting these matters to the police. …

The letters to the Compensation Fund show that the two officers who committed the abuse were both transferred to other churches. …

In the nineteen seventies in Winschoten, Richard Bos was abused as a little boy by an officer. He keeps feeling dirty. “It is like taking a shower forever and not getting clean. I brush and scrub and polish and scrub, as if I always want to scrub my past away, but the history stays with me.”