No moral crusade against Mercy Ministries

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You know I find it irritating that moral crusader’s can get all upset and panicked about filtering and protecting the children (and adults) from child p-rn (which by all accounts is not the greatest threat to their safety on line) yet we have a very real case of abuse against women by a fundamentalist sect and nobody does a god damned thing about it.

No, it’s left to the “consumers” of the service to fight for their own rights, to fight for their dignity.

Ruth Pollard from the Sydney Morning Herald has written another timely piece about “Murky” Mercy Ministries. Here are some highlights from her article:

Multiple government agencies and investigating bodies are aware of its activities and yet 10 months after the Herald revealed that Mercy Ministries’ staff and volunteers were performing exorcisms on mentally ill young women to drive the demons out, not one of those agencies has found a way to hold this fundamentalist Christian group to account.

Social security-funded exorcisms. That’s your taxpayer dollars at work, folks. Yet no one, beyond the brave young women who spoke out about the abuse, has done anything to stop it.

Mercy’s tactic has been to ride out the allegations, to file off the serial number of the Restoring the Foundations program†, pump out a positive message and present one face to the outside world while displaying their contempt for government agency and the medical profession privately (not privately enough that you can’t watch Nancy Alcorn spew her anti establishment rubbish on television). Nancy and Tom Cruz would get on well if well Nancy was a little younger and not a repressed lesbian‡.

If their was a muslim facility exorcising women with mental health issues their would be a furore, but no. Mercy takes ample advantage of the remnants of white christian privilege in Australia.

Want to read more about Mercy?

Check out the Category under Bad Religion (if you have a day or two to spare).

† I find it odd that they recenty changed their program after using Foundations for so long. They get caught out with a dubious program that has been accepted and hey presto in under six months they are using their own.

‡ Nancy denies these claims of homosexuality by an ex- live in maid.

Mercy Ministries opens up on the reasons for organisational change Sean questions the reason for the reformation of Mercy Ministries...
Mercy Ministries – Honest at last ? Mercy Ministries has been repeatedly criticised for the claims in...
Mercy Ministires of America not Affiliated with Mercy Ministries Inc Mercy Ministries of America, headed by Nancy Alcorn has contacted...

Morphine

January 17th, 2009 at 3:58 am · Reply

I think the short answer is that unlike the censorship issue, the misdeeds of Mercy Ministries don't affect the public directly. Nobody really cares about a few hundred mistreated girls, but threaten to take people's porn away and the excrement hits the fan. There seems to be an extraordinary amount of apathy in some elements of the community. I posted a link to an article about the MM scandal on a message board I belong to. The general reaction was that this sort of thing was perfectly common in the USA (where many of the members are located), and I should stop bitching about it, as can be seen here:

http://z4.invisionfree.com/Fools_Paradise/index.p...

Then there's the whole "freedom of religion"/"Christianity is good m'kay?" thing. It's another one of those little psychological buttons that send people ducking for cover.

Plus, Mercy are so secretive about their methods that it is a case of the Mercy Girls' word against Mercy's, and the sad truth is that people are more inclined to take the word of the charity with deep pockets over a few former patients many of whom, by their own admission, mentally ill. As someone who has worked with the mentally ill, I'm sure you are painfully aware of the stigma attached to mental illness.

The more pressing question is what to do about it.

Pat

January 17th, 2009 at 7:12 am · Reply

Actually there is a lot of documentation coming from Mercy Ministries that does link them to using the Restoring The Foundations materials. It's not simply former residents' words against the organisation.

With 1/3 of the Australian intake of former residents reported to have come forward, I don't think it's just a "few" girls.
- Morphine
  
  January 17th, 2009 at 8:45 am · Reply
  
  First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I don't doubt the truth of the allegations against Mercy, and I'm not trying to say that the danger posed by MM's unethical practices or the damage they have done to former residents is unimportant. I'm just trying to put them in the context of public perception and the much stronger public interest in the internet filtering controversy, and explain why the Australian public, who are politically apathetic at the best of times, are slow to rush into the fray.
  
  Admittedly I was unaware that the number of former residents coming forward had grown so much since the initial allegations (Could you give me a source for that? I like to have solid information to back up my rants), however even then, they are still in a relatively weak position to stand up to Mercy and its backers. Compare this to the anti-filtering campaign which has the weight of organisations like Electronic Frontiers Australia and major ISPs who have a lot to lose if the initiative goes ahead, behind it. Plus, internet filtering will affect every internet user in Australia. Even the total number of people who have passed through MM's doors is quite small in comparison.
  
  And even demonstrating that Mercy used [i]Restoring the Foundations[/i] as part of its program isn't enough. The public needs to understand that MM was unethical in the way it represented itself to potential residents, particularly in terms of any misrepresentation about the provision of professional counselling and psychiatric care. Activists such as Sean and the people at Mercy Survivors are doing a great job in aggregating information about MM's dodgy practices, and trying to raise awareness.
  
  Sean posed the question "Why is there no widespread moral outrage about Mercy Ministries?' practices?", I am offering a hypothesis as to why this is so, and pondering what can be done to remedy the situation.
  - SeandBlogonaut
    
    January 17th, 2009 at 11:01 am · Reply
    
    Morphine,
    
    I really appreciate you considered reply. The numbers of women who have come forward is 20 -30 from memory. This is the number that have presented to Mercy Survivors, though I think only 4-5 have had the ability to peak publically about it. If the Mercy Survivor who runs the site is around she can tell us.
    
    You are right, this post was one of frustration. The problem is simply not big enough, nor does it effect enough people. I do see it it as part of a larger problem of non-evidence based forays into health care in general along with homeopathic remedies, and general woo related self help rubbish.