Fear at Fanda

Sexual abuse | A sexual abuse scandal at a New Tribes Mission boarding school in West Africa reveals a long tale of childhood suffering and the poor record of missionary accountability | Jamie Dean

Kari Mikitson: Handout photos

Warning: This report contains disturbing accounts of child abuse in ministry settings.

The most harrowing hours for the children living at the Fanda Missionary School in Senegal, West Africa, came at night. It wasn't just the country's war-zone conditions of the 1980s and 1990s that brought dread into the hearts of young boarding school students who missed their parents at bedtime: For many of the children, the midnight prowlers they feared most were the missionaries assigned to protect them.

Twenty years later, their dark story of abuse is getting daylight, exposing the victims' ordeal and the child abusers who remain free today. In late August, an evangelical organization called GRACE, an acronym for Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, issued the results of a year-long investigation into child abuse at Fanda, a now-closed boarding school operated by New Tribes Mission (NTM)—one of the largest evangelical mission agencies based in the United States.