Purity culture and sexual shaming culture have a lot to do with Evangelical and Catholic churches failing to recognize or address sexual abuse.

When almost all sexuality outside certain highly prescribed limits is “sinful" or pathological, then it becomes more difficult to distinguish genuinely harmful, power-imbalance abuse.

I’ve written before about how churches will address sexuality problems by lumping together consensual adult sexual activity with child sexual abuse or abuse of women.

When it’s all equally bad, and when churches claim religious forgiveness can heal, then leaders set themselves up for crises.

For a recent example, a scandal went down in Italy not too long ago at a Catholic seminary where young men in their twenties had sexually abused boys of 12 and 13 at a related institution.

The local diocese produced a long, detailed report that, astonishingly, spent most of its words addressing the “sinful scandal" of young men in their twenties having consensual sex with one another.

The religious men charged with producing the report clearly could not distinguish the moral difference between that consensual sex and the abuse (sometimes forceful or violent)of the children at the other institution.

As a result, seminarian authorities are focusing on the problem of men having sex with one another in non abusive ways rather than concentrating on child sexual abuse.

Sadly, this is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature that can and often does lead to abuse like Duggars’ being minimized or excused unless or until civil authorities got involved.