Christian group Ethnos360 accused of failing to protect girl from abuse, years after ‘significant child safety training’
A lawsuit alleges that a girl who lived with her family at the religious organization’s center in Missouri endured years of sexual abuse from another child.
Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of abuse.
A Christian organization long plagued by allegations of child sex abuse is now facing a lawsuit that accuses the group of failing to protect a girl from one of her peers at its missionary training center.
Ethnos360, a religious nonprofit group based in Sanford, Florida, that was formerly known as New Tribes Mission, sends missionaries and their families to far-flung corners of the world. In 2019, multiple women told NBC News that they had been sexually abused decades earlier by their “dorm dads” — missionaries tasked with caring for children at New Tribes Mission’s overseas boarding schools while their parents served in the field.
The group issued a public apology to the abuse survivors following the NBC News report and said that it had “incorporated significant child safety training” after an independent party commissioned by New Tribes Mission shared recommendations in 2010 amid abuse allegations.
But Monday’s lawsuit alleges that six years after those recommendations were issued, a girl was repeatedly sexually abused by another child on Ethnos360’s missionary training property in Missouri. The lawsuit was filed in Florida’s 18th Judicial Circuit Court and obtained first by NBC News.
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