Welcome to the Leadership Now podcast with Dr. Aaron Rock, hosted on Beachhead Media.

Aaron has served as a pastor, a professor, a chaplain, a writer, and a preacher,

and he has a keen interest in helping other Christians to think Christianly about all life.

On this show, we like to talk about the nuts and bolts of theology, church life, leadership, ethics, and other relevant matters that will help you to lead better now.

My name is Eric Oltrop. I'll be your host for today. And we are continuing on in our series called Sex 101, where we just dive into God's view, sex, what it means, how it benefits us.

And today, we're going to address the sensitive topic of sex crimes.

So many people have been abused by predators and they suffer deeply to this day because of it.

So are Christians supposed to just forgive and forget it ever happened? Or is there a place for law enforcement? And what pastoral counsel can we offer to the abuse? So we're going to dive into all that today. And Erin, I think we'll start off. It's just the simple question. What is a sex crime? Well, Eric, I've been a pastor for 30-ish years and had lots of opportunity to counsel people

and just have conversations with people.

It's not always in a counseling session.

It's just conversations as you get to know people in the life of your churches.

And we have a lot of other folks on our staff. We probably have a combined

total of a couple centuries of experience. And it's very common for us to encounter people

who have been sexually violated, who've been sinned against is what is really what it is.

They've been touched inappropriately.

Others have been raped.

Probably the most common thing would be some sort of molestation whereby a person in a

position of authority is molesting someone, sexually assaulting, sexually abusing someone that is a minor.

And it's sad to hear these accounts that people have experienced.

Most of the time, it's from someone they know, which makes it extra vile because it's someone that

they trusted. It could be a family member. It could be a clergyman. It could be a close family

friend, a babysitter, whatnot, a teacher. And while there are the, there's the odd case of false allegations, sometimes people for whatever reason falsely accuse someone else of having done something to them that never happened.

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