How Ethnos360 turned its back on abuse victims... again

Survivors accuse the Christian ministry of covering up abuse and failing to follow through on its own stated reforms

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A Christian ministry formerly known as New Tribes Mission has been hit with yet another lawsuit alleging sexual abuse by one of its missionaries and a failure by the group to handle the situation properly.

It’s the latest in a long line of claims against the religious organization now known as Ethnos360.

Ethnos360 (Image via Facebook)

New Tribes Mission once aimed to reach and convert uncontacted, isolated tribes around the world. In countries like Brazil and the Philippines, missionaries set up boarding schools for their own children while the parents went on their trips. But the staffers at some of those schools—the “dorm dads”—were later accused of heinous crimes by the children. In one case, a man hid a seashell in his bathing suit and told the little girls to find it. That same man would tuck another girl into bed—in the same room as his own daughter—and sexually assault her before telling her it was their “secret.”

In a separate case, a woman said her own father molested her and her roommates for years. She told her “dorm mother” about it only when she was 15—years later. New Tribes Mission sent a few leaders to her school to investigate matters, but they told her to keep quiet. If she didn’t, they said, “my dad would be thrown in a Filipino jail.”

Her family was soon sent back to Missouri for therapy with a church-approved counselor. Two weeks later, they were declared “healed.”

In 2019, NBC News spoke with five women who said they were assaulted by New Tribes Mission employees in the 1980s and 1990s.

The women say New Tribes covered up the abuse for years and scared the victims into silence by telling stories of Africans going to hell or missionaries ending up in foreign prisons if the allegations ever got out.

The Christian group used faith-based fear tactics to keep the kids quiet. It’s truly despicable behavior. It’s also not surprising.

Years earlier, in 2010, knowing about some of these allegations, the organization conducted an independent review into one of its schools in Senegal. That review found a “culture of systemic abuse” that included more than 20 kids. By the time NBC News spoke with some of those survivors, it had been more than a decade later and their assailants had never been punished for what they did.

"The scariest thing is thinking that they're still out there," said Jaasiel Mashek, 38, who says she was abused by the dorm dad at the Philippines school. "Who knows what has happened since they've been back?"

One of the attackers, NBC News found, was living in Georgia where he occasionally preached at a local church.

How bad was the situation? Consider this: When the independent investigators looked into the matter, they found an internal policy from 1992 that explained how to handle allegations of abuse: It said anyone who abused a child of the same sex would be expelled from the group immediately and forever. But people who abused a child of the opposite sex could return in due time.

More importantly, adults were told not to report abuse to local or U.S. authorities.

"If it is a homosexual act with a child, the person will be dismissed immediately and may never be considered for membership in the mission again. If it is a heterosexual act the person will be dismissed immediately but could be considered for ministry again in the future depending on the case. If it occurs in the field, it is not necessary to report it to the Senegalese or U.S. authorities. It must be investigated as not doing so could be ruinous for the mission."

That investigation made specific recommendations that seem like common sense: All abusers needed to be fired. Authorities needed to be alerted about misconduct. The group needed to fund counseling costs for survivors.

New Tribes Mission said they were implementing these changes, improving their policies to protect kids, and putting into place “recurring child safety training for all members.”

They also said they would report two of the named abusers to local law enforcement… but NBC News said local law enforcement “had no idea an accused pedophile was living within their jurisdiction.”

What about the counseling? In one survivor’s case, New Tribes paid for some of it, then stopped because they said the woman reached a “financial limit.”

And then New Tribes stopped working with the independent agency that released the report.

And then—a coincidence I’m sure—New Tribes changed its name to Ethnos360.

Again, all of that was revealed in 2019. It came out years after New Tribes settled a lawsuit filed by one of the survivors.

Ethnos360 soon released a statement in response to NBC News’ reporting saying that there were “no words” to describe how bad they felt.

We recognize that mistakes have been made over the course of our history with respect to our handling of child abuse allegations. There were few laws or processes in place to protect children who suffered abuse overseas. Today’s leaders have a different and better understanding and training to address abuse issues than was available to the leaders during those early years.

Since then, our organization has incorporated significant child safety training, updated policies, and incorporated extensive screening and background checks that we repeat every few years. These are mandatory for all members and employees. We have been active participants in the mission community and very vocal in promoting that proactive child safety policies and procedures be put in place for every organization. Ethnos360 will continue to review our policies and safety procedures to better safeguard children.

Calling repeated acts of child abuse and the refusal to report those acts “mistakes” drastically understates just how awful the criminal behavior was. But at least they were going to do better moving forward, right?

Of course not.

Last September, NBC News published a story detailing how, years after those promises were made, a new lawsuit said the abuse continued—this time, in the United States. The plaintiff said the group failed to protect her despite their assurances to the contrary. (Her attorney, Boz Tchividjian, had previously led the independent organization that investigated New Tribes Mission but he no longer worked with them.)

The complaint says that both the girl and her alleged abuser, also female, were living with their families on campus while their fathers worked in Ethnos360’s IT department. Tchividjian said the alleged abuse started in 2016 when the girl, identified in the complaint only by her initials, A.W., and the alleged perpetrator were both about 9 years old.

The lawsuit says the abuse took place over several years and ranged from unwanted touching of A.W.’s chest and genital area to penetration of her vagina with a stick and hairbrush. It accuses Ethnos360 of failing “to provide any education or training regarding anything related to peer-on-peer child sexual abuse to anyone living on the Ethnos Campus” and failing to adequately investigate abuse allegations.

…

The girl was interviewed by Florida officials, who “verified findings of child-on-child sexual abuse” and expressed concern that the alleged perpetrator may have victimized other children and may be a victim of sexual abuse herself, the lawsuit said. Yet Ethnos360 “made no effort” to find out where the alleged perpetrator would have learned about the sexual conduct from, it says.

That lawsuit also said the girl’s family told Brian Coombs, the ministry’s “director of child safety,” about the situation, but he didn’t do much of anything to prevent further abuse. Not only did he allow the perpetrator to be around other children by herself, he told the survivor’s family that what occurred wasn’t sexual abuse but rather “inappropriate sexual behavior between peers.”

They were furious to hear that so they took their concerns to the ministry’s leader… who also dismissed their concerns:

Discouraged, her parents met with Ethnos360’s then-CEO, Larry Brown, in June 2022 to discuss the situation. Brown allegedly told them “to leave things between God and others because it would be hard on everyone to re-do everything,” the lawsuit says.

Since then, Ethnos360 has tried to have the case dismissed in court, claiming that it’s not their problem because the alleged assaults didn’t happen under their supervision but rather in private homes… on their property.

You would think all these allegations, and allegations about the ministry ignoring allegations, would eventually lead the ministry to either shut down or take this stuff seriously for once.

And yet none of that seems to have happened.

Recently, NBC News published yet another story about Ethnos360… and it’s as damning as the previous ones. It turns out the group has been sued (again) for failing to offer help to the family of a child despite saying publicly they would do that.

Kayla McClain says in the lawsuit that she was only five years old in 2005 when she was living in Indonesia with her missionary family. She shared a house with Nate Horling and his family, including a daughter who was Kayla’s age.

… the alleged abuse by Horling started with inappropriate touching while McClain was playing with his child. Afterward, Horling would allegedly tell McClain “he was sorry and instructed her not to tell anyone and blamed her for what occurred,” the lawsuit said.

He allegedly told Kayla, when her clothes were off, that she had a “pretty body” and it “made him want to do things with it.”

In 2009, she says, the two families had moved to a different part of Indonesia and Horling assaulted her. She was playing with her friend (Horling’s daughter) with their clothes off when Horling entered the room, told Kayla to go into the closet, and made her lie on the floor. After he was done assaulting her, he told Kayla that “what he had done was her fault because she had her clothes off.” (He denies all charges.)

A few years later, Kayla told her parents she was engaging in “sexual conduct” with other kids, which the lawsuit says could potentially be a sign that a child is being abused herself. So the parents reported this behavior to the ministry’s child safety team in Indonesia in 2012. But the response was muted. They treated this as “typical sexual exploration” not worthy of further examination. They never bothered to ask where Kayla may have learned these behaviors at such a young age.

It wasn’t until after that, struggling with her own mental health, when Kayla told her parents she had been abused by another adult. She didn’t want to file charges at the time—her lawyer said “her emotional state was too fragile” at the time—but this is exactly the sort of situation that people trained in these issues would know how to handle. Ethnos360 wasn’t prepared.

Kayla finally reported all this in a formal way to Ethnos360 in 2021. She thought she was sending the information to independent investigators known as IHART, but she didn’t realize that was really just another extension of Ethnos360. Much like the Mormon Church’s “Help Line,” which is basically run by the Church’s own lawyers whose primary obligation is to protect the Church, IHART exists to protect Ethnos360 from its own abusive staffers.

So you can guess how that went:

After several hours-long interviews, Ethnos360 allegedly offered no counseling to McClain and did not report the allegations to child protection agencies, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit accuses Ethnos360 of negligence in failing to protect McClain from abuse and failing to provide adequate training to its employees to identify and report child abuse. It seeks unspecified damages and a jury trial.

In fact, the lawsuit says one of the IHART investigators told Kayla it would be ideal if her memories turned out to be false so that “she could move on and not focus on it.” The investigators later told her that her situation was “outside of their team’s mandate” and they would hand her files over to another team… for what Kayla called more “trauma-inducing” interviews.

All these times, Kayla said, the investigators didn’t seem to know what they were doing. They didn’t behave “in a way that demonstrated knowledge or experience with a trauma informed interview.”

It seems clear that Ethnos360 is more committed to pretending to help abuse victims than doing anything of value to actually help them. Instead of cracking down on abusers, they’re doing everything in their power to look the other way. It would honestly be cheaper and easier at this point to do the right thing, but the organization is acting like acknowledging the very real problem they have would deter from their religious mission—and turn off potential donors.

Tchividjian, who helped file this lawsuit as well as the last one, says Ethnos360 needs to figure out why they keep dealing with the same problems year after year. “It’s not in a vacuum. This is over, and over, and over again,” he said.

What they’re doing is not that different from a random person who wants to open a daycare facility. Your heart may be in the right place, but if you can’t protect children—and you’re not trained to deal with situations that absolutely occur in real life whether you want to admit that or not—then you’re better off never doing it than doing it this poorly.

Ethnos360 is so hellbent on converting random people that they refuse to protect the families who carry out their orders. They would rather let children suffer than shut down altogether. I don’t know if that’s religious delusion or willful ignorance. But either way, NBC News has done more for these survivors than the Christian ministry ever has. At this point, anyone who donates to the ministry is committing a sin if not abetting more crimes.

One other side note: In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping through the world, New Tribes Mission purchased a helicopter that one group critical of their actions described as an attempt to “contact and convert isolated indigenous groups in the remote Western Amazon.” But as many people know through the irresponsible idiocy of missionary John Allen Chau, there’s a good reason you’re not supposed to contact those remote tribes: You can spread a disease they’ve never been exposed to, destroying their entire community. Also, they might kill you to protect themselves.

Just another example of the ministry putting their religious delusions ahead of common sense and basic decency.

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