These are personal accounts of the negative consequences that inappropriate interviews have had on people.
While my story is a bit different, I feel compelled to tell it to you in hopes that maybe it will show light on another issue facing youth within the LDS faith. One day, while my regular teacher was out for a teaching conference, my class and I were substituted by a different. He was…
I began dating my husband when I was sixteen and he seventeen. I lost my virginity after we had been dating about a year. I felt an immense amount of shame and guilt and went to my bishop. He wasn’t loving. He was cold and condescending. He told me that I could go through the…
Bishop’s interviews made me feel like my sexuality belonged to everybody but me. I lost my right to secrecy, and that has had dire consequences. From those interviews, I became so uncomfortable with sex, that I was already too weak to defend myself when I needed to. Aged fourteen, I was raped by my best…
I was 14 when I was raped by a young man in my ward. I kept it to myself, shamed and fearful of telling anyone, because this young man was the son of my parents good friends. Two weeks after that event, I returned home from family vacation with a message on the answering machine…
Told of sexual abuse in my home multiple times from 8 to 16. I was never taken out of the home. Case was sent to LDS family services where we did 1 supposed therapy session. No authorities were ever called. This bishop also was my high school counselor. It was overlooked until I was 15…
I didn’t realize what masturbation was until I was 13 and went to church. It began at the stake center, when I attended the audio portion of a general conference priesthood session. This was in the days when it wasn’t broadcast on TV. One of the speakers described a terrible, vile practice. Slowly I realized…
I remember having to decide whether to confess to masturbation at my baptismal interview a few months shy of my eighth birthday. I decided to confess, since it was what god wanted, but chickened out when I was actually sitting in a room alone, across a heavy desk from my childhood bully’s dad, in my…
When I was 16, I was dating my first real boyfriend. We would make out often and each time got more intense. When we began touching under our clothing my boyfriend decided we needed to go talk to our bishop (we were in the same ward). We went together and our Bishop reacted surprisingly appropriate.…
I began masturabting when I was six years old and somehow already knew that I was “filthy” and “unloved by God”. I didn’t know it was called masturabtion until I was 17 years old, at which point I went and confessed to my bishop whom I loved and adored. I was terrified and although the…
I’ll keep this short because I’m happy to have put the LDS church in my past. When I was 16 years old I was raped and impregnated by a 20 year old male acquaintance. I blamed myself. Based on the lessons regarding modesty and sexual morality at church, I concluded I must have done something…