Dear Friend,

As summer begins, so does the summer camp season. Parents expect camp to be a fun place for their children to deepen friendships, learn new skills, and build their character, all within an environment that practices the highest child safety standards (see suggestions for questions to ask your camp below).

As the largest Evangelical sports camp in the world with thousands of children participating each year - and which starts its 2022 season this weekend - Kanakuk Kamps should be one of those trusted places.

While many children have experienced a joyful summer at Kanakuk, for many others it was a nightmare that continues throughout their life, a perpetual trauma that a growing body of evidence shows could very well have been prevented had leadership acted as they should have.

Kanakuk Kamps is on the 2022 Dirty Dozen List as a mainstream facilitator of sexual abuse exploitation and an example of institutional abuse. You can learn more about our reasons, our requests, and examine existing evidence here.

Sadly, new allegations of systemic sexual abuse of children by adults, child-on-child abuse, and cover-ups at Kanakuk have just come to light through a series of investigative reports.

This morning, USA Today published a detailed report “Survivors ,ex-employees say Kanakuk Christian camp “ministered’ to its sexual predators.” This national story comes a day after USA Today’s Missouri affiliate in Kanakuk’s home region published three stories about the camp. The titles speak for themselves:

      "Unreported abuse at Kanakuk spans decades"

      “Kanakuk camper says she was told to apologize, denied call home after reporting abuse”

      “’It was just a thing at Kanakuk’: Campers and staff say nudity was part of camp culture”

The editor even posted a special piece about the process of investigating Kanakuk, sharing that in deference to the brave survivors who came forward, they were making the articles available for free. We encourage you to read them yourselves or review some key pieces of information below.

Institutional abuse must be rooted out from all entities, but especially within those with the primary purpose of ministering to youth.

Please take 30 seconds to demand Kanakuk leadership do the right thing:

Click Here to join us in Demanding Accountability!

And if you are a parent sending your children to camps or other activities this summer, please inspect their child protection policies, ask about previous instances and how they handled them, speak to other families about their experience, and talk to your children about safety.

Here is a guide parents at NCOSE found helpful 12 Questions Parents Need to Ask Their Child’s Summer Camp Program. We would also ask what is their policy on screens (are their counselors or campers allowed to have them? Can they take pictures of each other? Share content?) What would you add to this list? Tell us!

Wishing you and your families a fun, safe Memorial Day weekend.

Key facts and new revelations about sexual abuse at Kanakuk Kamps:

· No More Victims, a Kanakuk watch-dog created by survivors and their families, has received 60 incident reports spanning from 1950 to 2022: bringing the total to over 100 reported victims with allegations of child sexual abuse against 30 perpetrators.

· In addition to Pete Newman, six other men affiliated with Kanakuk have been convicted of sexual crimes involving children. The new story shares that despite denying it, Kanakuk leadership had been made aware of sexual misconduct by those convicted, as well as several other cases that have just come to light.

· In some cases, Kanakuk did led staff go, but publicly hid the reasons and continued to dismiss and lie to the victims, families, and other parties. In one case a counselor encouraged a camper to pull down his pants and then whacked a boy’s penis with a stick. The employee was fired: but leadership lied about the reasons why.

· In two newly-reported instances, a counselor sexually assaulted a then-8 year old girl and another young camper in the mid-1980s. The accused was fired but then continued on to work at Kanakuk-affiliated KLIFE youth ministry until February 2022. When pressed by reporters, leadership refused to answer whether he had been fired for abusing a child.

· Kanakuk did not report the three allegations above to the police.

· Another survivor stepped forward to share his abuse at the hands of Paul Green, who abused the child in his own home while being hosted by the boy’s family.

· Survivors have also come forward with reports of child-on-child sexual abuse – in other words, campers assaulting other campers. One instance reported was of a male camper who sexually assaulted multiple girls. When two of the girls mustered up their courage to come forward, leadership made the girls guilty for reporting, brought the assaulter into the room unannounced and forced the girls into reconciling. The boy was allowed to remain at the camp and when one girl asked to call her parent was told, “you may only call your parents if you’ve been injured.”

“We believe in salvation, we don't believe in punishment, Jesus forgives, and we are going to forgive the camper,” Caroline said Chancey told her. “We’re going to help him through his problems.”

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation stands with the survivors in demanding Kankuk release them from their NDAs and welcome their public testimony so they could pursue healing (tragically, several victims of Kanakuk have died by suicide – highly suspected to have been due to the trauma of the abuse they endured). And we join survivors in calling for Kanakuk leadership to unequivocally admit to their grave failures in protecting children once and to be fully transparent as to what they knew in the past, as well as about future instances of wrong-doing and crimes against the kids in their care.