Hypersexuality in Christian Spaces

How scripts of male behavior make it hard to tell sheep from wolves

Photo by Long Truong on Unsplash

Content warning: sexual abuse, sexual abuse of minors

In 2014 in Cartegena, Colombia, an operative for Operation Underground Railroad (of recent Sound of Freedom fame) named Paul Hutchinson reportedly groped a minor he was there to rescue.

This story dropped with Vice on Monday of this week but I’ve known about the existence of this footage for awhile. Hutchinson had sat for an interview with Lynn Packer (Hutchinson actually said in an interview with Lynn Packer that he tried to touch her arm, but this is the only instance in which he’s made this claim), and other interviews have confirmed the existence of this footage and the extent to which OUR has tried to prevent it from getting out. The issue under debate does not seem to be whether or not this incident actually happened. The debate is how old is the girl, and why did Hutchinson touch her. The age of the girl is apparently under dispute (Hutchinson said later that he had a document from police stating she was over eighteen, but as we will see the footage strongly suggests that everyone involved thought she was younger). Hutchison also said that a trafficker actually lifted his hand to force him to touch her, and if he had not done so then he would have risked the mission and his own safety by revealing himself to not be an actual sex tourist. 

But the Vice report challenges this narrative. The report comes from a public records request into material sought for a criminal investigation into OUR (which has since been closed without charges filed). Bryan Purdy with the Davis County Attorney's Office apparently saw this footage and wrote an audio transcript with time stamps. In it, Purdy recounts that an alleged trafficker lifted a girl’s shirt, and Hutchinson put both his hands on the girl’s naked breasts (investigator notes deny a trafficker lifted Hutchinson’s hand). After Hutchinson pays the trafficker, apparently as part of the operation, the operatives then go outside and this exchange happens:

Hutchinson: Yes, let’s get out of here, I’m down a grand.

Male voice: For a thousand bucks, you got your hands on some breasts.

(laughter)

Male voice (probably Hutchinson, but it’s not explicit): What was I going to do? (continued laughter) Okay, she’s sixteen, here, feel them, they’re nice. I’m like, shit, those are sixteen.”

First male voice: You think they’re under age, huh?

Third male voice: Oh yeah, I would put money on that…

First male voice: Yeah, those girls were young, man.

Second male voice: I don’t know how wise it was to grab that girl’s boobs, though.

First male voice: You didn’t get that on video, did you?

So, here’s what I’m noticing. However old the girl actually was, no one in the immediate aftermath thought she was an adult at the time. Second, at this point in the conversation, the men are in absolutely no danger. They talk openly about the fact that they have a camera with them. There are clearly no traffickers in sight. And yet, the tone is seemingly very jocular. No one seems particularly disturbed by the idea that, in order to stay alive, one of their own has just assaulted a minor. 

The concern that Operation Underground Railroad volunteers would struggle with the desire for sexual contact with the girls and women they were supposedly rescuing was apparently not limited to this incident. A young man named “William,” in an interview with Vice News, applied to go on a mission at age 20 with OUR and was accepted into the training program. According to William, on the last day of the training, the head trainer raised the issue that “red blooded American males” and “visual creatures” might feel tempted to sexually assault women and girls in the field. (And yes, it is assault. If these are women and children in exploitative or trafficking situations, they cannot consent). If this happens, operatives are supposed to alert someone so they can be removed. This has apparently happened to multiple operatives. William, who was from a Southern Baptist family, was profoundly disturbed by the implication, and widespread agreement, that the sight of a woman or child being abused might be arousing to field operatives. He ended up not going on the mission, feeling both underprepared and alarmed at what he had heard. 

Mormonism and evangelicalism are obviously different movements of people who worship in different institutions and have different cultural pressures. But this language – “visual creatures,” “red-blooded males” – probably sounds familiar to anyone who grew up in evangelical spaces. OUR didn’t invent this language, and I don’t want to place the entire culture that endorses this mindset at their feet. What I am more interested in is why.

Why would a bunch of men from a conservative Christian background believe that it would be normal to be aroused by women, and even tempted to assault women, while on a mission to save those women from sexual violence — simply by virtue of being male and “visual?”

I don’t think the problem is just OUR. I think the problem goes deeper in how we socialize men in Christian spaces to think about themselves as sexual — specifically, reactively sexual. And I also think it has to do with how we socialize men to think of women as parts, not people.

Modesty and Dehumanization 

Many Christian women who grew up in Christian spaces remember the experience of being challenged about your “modesty.” The risk in these contexts, we were told, was that the men and boys around us were visual, and were tempted to lust after us. In order to help our brothers out, we had to dress modestly. 

But what did it mean to dress modestly? Well, it meant all kinds of things. Obviously it meant having a shirt that showed little cleavage and shorts that went past a certain length. It also included fit – clothes could not be too clingy and show too much of your body. But it also included things like posture – bending at the knees, and not at the waist. Not walking with too much bounce in your step, because it could cause your breasts to jiggle. Not having wet hair, because that could make men think of showering, and showering involves nudity. And on, and on, and on. 

As I’ve said before, this is a vicious cycle: creating a context in which men are encouraged to be hyperreactive to feelings of attraction to women, and then anger at those women for not doing more to prevent it, and then urging women to stop doing or wearing that thing, and then reacting again. From a past article:

When I remember getting sexually harassed in churches as a younger woman you could absolutely see the effects that surveillance-based purity culture had on the men in those churches. A shirt is close to being acceptable but is slightly low in one spot. A skirt that was fine when you were standing up is sexual when sitting down - or the other way around. Your clothes were fine but then you picked something up and now you are standing in a sexual way even though your clothes were fine. All this required comment and critique, because The Rules were the line of what was sexual or not… 

As The Rules become longer and more consuming, being on the wrong side of them becomes more and more eroticized. Today it's nursing moms, but tomorrow it'll be women holding babies, because babies make men think about nursing and nursing makes them think about breasts (if you think I'm exaggerating, remind me to tell you the story of the time I was reprimanded for hanging a swimsuit to dry where boys could see it at church camp). The rules create the fetish, not the other way around. For us, making sure we followed the rules, and noticing and pointing out and sexualizing us when we didn't, became the new fetish.

But as Sheila Gregoire has noted, a lot of men in this system who have “struggled with lust,” actually seem like they might not be. In a survey she conducted, initially seventy five percent of Christian men she interviewed said they “struggled with lust.” But when she broke down responses by what they mean by this, what they didn’t report is that they would have intense sexual fantasies about the woman then or later. What the majority of men said is that they would notice a woman is attractive, or be surprised at how attractive she was, or occasionally want to keep looking at her. But we use the same pathologized language for all of this. 

Nonetheless, this language of “lust” encourages this hyperreactivity to women’s bodies. It encourages men to fixate on what they’re seeing about women, read it as sexual, and experience themselves as having a sexual reaction. 

But all this is totally decontextualized. It treats women as a series of body parts that cause problems for men. It encourages men to think that they can’t help “lusting” when all they really can’t help is noticing that people around them have bodies and look nice. But the emphasis on modesty encourages us to continuously locate the problem in the female body as an object of fascination and fixation. 

It’s not surprising that someone raised in this context where girls are encouraged to think of themselves as protecting men around them from having sexual feelings (including children to adults) would arrive at a place where he was totally unable to separate female bodies from male arousal – including, but not limited to, a context in which a woman’s body was visible because she was for sale to him. Seeing women and girls who have survived trafficking as sexualized, needing to be desexualized/covered after rescue, is not a problem limited to OUR. It’s a common phenomenon among faith based groups that see the female body as inherently sexual, and men’s sexual responses to it as inherent.

So this explains why men in contexts where they are supposed to be rescuing women from sexual objectification might objectify and sexualize them themselves. They even might be, I would propose, uniquely badly suited for any work that involves interacting with women who have been sexually exploited.

Now, what I don’t want to leap to is that men raised in these contexts are inherently sexually aggressive or even abusive, though. Clearly, lots of men raised in these environments are able to still humanize women who emerge from situations of sexual exploitation – after all, William the volunteer was so disturbed by what he heard had dropped out. 

However, I would argue that this culture of fixation and objectification can also create a system where men whose intentions are less than noble can slip through without being noticed.

Sexual Frankness and Male Power 

Would it surprise you to know that in an interview with Lynn Packer, Paul Hutchinson described himself as a person with a recurrent problem with porn? And that he told Tim Ballard and other operatives about this after he was invited to volunteer in the field?

Probably not, right?

Now, here’s what I want to clarify. My point is not that people who watch porn are somehow inherent deviants (and the language of porn addiction is complicated to say the least). My concern is with people who think about, and are open about their sexual habits in highly public and religiously-coded ways, and the way in which this kind of sexualized language is incorporated into religious spaces. 

Sexual frankness was frequently celebrated in the evangelical church in the last twenty years. I’m not entirely sure how much this applies to Mormon spaces, but these cultural spaces do tend to hold hands. But of course, in any patriarchal or heteronormative space, this isn’t actually sexual frankness. It’s frankness by and for men.

As I have argued:

The right to insert sexuality into a discourse, and to speak of sex from your own perspective, is a way of demonstrating power. Men and women in church do not share this right. Men have the right to speak about sex from their perspective and set the priorities. Women don't.

This phenomenon encourages Christian men to think of themselves as sexual, and overtly sexual. It encourages them to think about their sexuality as a public conversation. It allows for behavior that would not be appropriate in other contexts to be appropriate and spiritualized in the church. 

And, of course, we also teach women in patriarchal spaces not to have boundaries, and to be forgiving and graceful towards people who make them uncomfortable. As Sheila Gregoire and Becca Lindenbach note, girls in Christian spaces are often reminded in the face of bad behavior that they themselves are not perfect, that they should not judge, and that everyone does things that are wrong. These same ideas are also repeated to men.

So, in a context where men with power are encouraged to be sexually frank, and this language is often seen as a sign of “authenticity” and admirable “vulnerability” – how do you distinguish between someone who is admirably honest and forthcoming about their spiritual experience of sex, and someone who has poor boundaries, a misogynist approach to women, and is looking for the thrilling experience of being involved at the intersection of danger and sexuality by getting involved with anti trafficking? Because it seems like Tim Ballard and the rest of his team didn’t. Even though Paul Hutchinson told them outright that he liked to look at porn of very young women, they still thought it was a good idea to bring him into contact with sexually exploited teenagers. 

It seems obvious to me that anti trafficking vigilantism is exactly the kind of work that could draw people with less than outstanding motives. It’s hard to deny that there is something alluring about being involved in these raids. Elena Shih’s ethnography of Christian civilian vigilante anti trafficking groups makes it hard to escape the conclusion that people involved in these operations experience the work as thrilling. Volunteers participate in the undeniably sexually coded work of “creat(ing) user profiles and searched online erotic services forms, ranging from Craigslist, Redbook, Troothsayerz, and the Erotic Review, among others. On their own, they would each patronize a select number of the sites to visit individually and report back to the group.” The work also creates contexts in which it is morally acceptable for a group of religious men to gather, observe, and discuss the bodies of women on the street (“Volunteers speculated on the possibility that the woman was a victim of human trafficking, using as their evidence discussion on her dress and appearance. Dressed in a tight fitting mini-skirt, high heels, and an equally snug-fitting tank top, the group collectively mulled over their approach… ‘Look at what she’s wearing.’”), and to go into brothels and massage parlors privately with women:

Like others before him, Matthew saw a virtuous behavior in entering a room through the premise of an intimate commercial encounter, but disavowing the sex industry by indicating to the massage worker that he just wanted to “talk.” Journalists like Nicholas Kristof, who has conducted a series of exposés, raids, and rescues of alleged child sexual exploitation in Cambodia, and elsewhere, have used this method of paying for intimate and sexual services only to use the time to conduct interviews, or as the premise for extractions.

I don’t doubt that some of these people actually are just naive idealists who want to do something meaningful with their weekends. But surely not everyone who gets involved with this work is there for the right reasons. How do we tell the difference? If we’ve already allowed for men with power to boundary stomp and celebrated them for it, how would we even recognize what dangerous, red-flag behavior is? 

Two Objections 

Now, the first thing you might be thinking is that an incident of a man sexually assaulting a girl he is supposed to be saving is horrible and wrong, and yet we cannot discount this work because those girls and women were ultimately saved.

This is patently false. As we have argued, the view that this style of “rescue,” in which a man goes to South America, offers lots of money to anyone who will sell him a woman, then insists on a teenager, and then arrests that man depends on a view of trafficking we have called “cabal goggles.” The traffickers do not simply have the children. This is not analogous to a situation where you go into a store and would like a shirt in a size 4, but it’s not displayed on the table out front and you ask a store employee to see if there is more in the back. What actually happens in these incidents is that pimps go and recruit girls who either are very young, or who they can pass off as very young. Multiple pimps confirm to OUR operatives in their own footage that this is what they’re doing, if you watch The Abolitionists TV series. 

So here’s what I want to be clear about. Even if a girl or woman has been sold a thousand times, it’s still absolutely wrong to sexually assault her. Even if you intend to help her later. It always is. 

But what is even more reprehensible is to go into a country and incentivize people to bring you children and then assault them yourself. In fact, one could argue that that is just trafficking, even if you’re working in conjunction with the Mexican police. I personally fail to see the difference. 

Now, the second objection – indeed, the one that Hutchinson made himself – is that this is simply the consequences of being in the field. Sometimes people who go undercover have to do bad things to keep their cover. If Hutchinson had not touched the girl, he would have been in danger of his life.

Now, here’s where I’m going to strike a note that some of you might find uncomfortable. I could emphasize the fact that these people are all volunteers, not cops or official investigators, and have no claim to be working in the “line of duty” in any legal capacity. I could say that, as an expert Vice talked to emphasized, that going to a strip club looking for paid sex is actually not very dangerous work, and the idea that this pimp would have killed Hutchinson for failing to touch a girl’s breasts is a somewhat hysterical reaction. 

But I’m actually going to make a stronger claim than that.

If you decide to put yourself in a situation where you have a choice between assaulting a child or dying, maybe you ought to just die. 

I don’t think I’m in bad theological company making this claim. Jesus said that if anyone offends “one of these little ones,” it would be better for that person to have a millstone tied around their neck and be thrown into the sea (Matt 18:6-7). The Christian martyrological tradition has a long and proud history of celebrating those who, rather than offend against God and their consciences, chose to die instead. Perpetua had a thousand opportunities to do the simple work of denying she was a Christian and be spared a death in the arena. There are many, many others who did the same. 

If Christians of the past were willing to accept death instead of sacrificing a pinch of incense, or saying a few words denying their faith, and we honor them for it – why wouldn’t we make the same claim about someone who chooses to die instead of hurting a child? 

Now, you might be saying that that’s a very easy claim for me to make from the comfort of my own desk. You are exactly right. I would not go into a situation that could end in a choice between death and violation of my conscience – of my own volition – without previous, extensive spiritual preparation for the possibility that I might have to make that choice. And neither should anyone else. If you’re going to go to a place where women and girls are being exploited, and you’re not ready to die for their sake, you should not be there. I don’t care if your friend or a guy soliciting donations from you told you it would be safe. I don’t care if he promised you would get back in one piece. You do not have a right as an American or a Christian or a man or anything else to be safe when you are doing something that any reasonable person would understand to be at least a little unsafe. If you want to be safe, you don’t go. You do not go anyway and then buy your safety on a child’s body.

I don’t particularly care if Paul Hutchinson felt he would be in danger if he didn’t assault someone he believed to be a child. I don’t care if it turned out she was eighteen after all. I don’t think it makes a difference. I think that is theologically irrelevant information to anyone who claims the same faith of the early church. If you have a choice between doing the wrong thing and saving your life, picking your life is the wrong choice for anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus. 

I worry that the Chrisitan culture around male sexuality and frankness has made it all but impossible to spot wolves from sheep for many other men and women, even if they try their best to do it. I worry even more that the world of Christian comfort and entitlement has led us to believe that missions are there for our benefit, that we go on them to get something out of it, that we have a right to be safe during them, and what we do to other people in the process of this is not relevant. This is not a Mormon problem. This is not an OUR problem. This is an “all of us” problem. 

There is a lot of work and a lot of listening and humility that has to be done before Christians involve themselves in the majority world, or with women and girls who are vulnerable to exploitation. I don’t think we’ve done it. While the tide may turn with the news that has dropped this week, I think the glorification and admiration of the anti trafficking media that surrounds OUR – even in non-Mormon circles – has significantly set us back. Good intentions, when they are uniformed and careless, do not save. Frankness and authenticity, when it blends effortlessly into crass and boundary-crossing behavior, is not a virtue. Objectification of women, even when done by men who think they are trying to preserve their own virtue, does not liberate. Until we have dealt with these issues in ourselves, maybe we ought to leave the rest of the world alone.