Reading · AndreaWex's Substack

There are some things you learn about this country that hit you like a punch to the gut. Sexual Abuse and Molestation insurance is one of them.

Most Americans have no idea this even exists. Churches. Camps. Schools. Nonprofits. Any organization that works with children can buy specialized insurance (and most of them do!) designed to protect the institution when abuse allegations surface. Not the child. Not the family. The institution.

Let that sink in.

This coverage goes by different names. SA insurance. SAM insurance. Sexual Misconduct Liability. The branding changes, but the purpose does not. It covers legal defense costs, settlements, judgments, and crisis management when an organization is accused of failing to prevent sexual abuse. It does not insure the criminal act itself. Public policy forbids that. Instead, it insures the negligence. The failure to screen. The failure to supervise. The failure to act when warning signs appear.

In plain English, it insures the cover up.

The insurance industry will tell you this coverage exists to keep organizations solvent and incentivize better safeguards. Sources like Amwins, Gallagher, and Nonprofits Insurance Alliance argue that without it, a single lawsuit could bankrupt a church or school and disrupt services for vulnerable populations. They will point to average settlements hovering around fifty nine million dollars and note that insurers require background checks and training as conditions of coverage.

Critics see something far darker.

Legal scholars and risk analysts have warned for years that SAM insurance creates a moral hazard. When institutions know insurance will absorb catastrophic losses, accountability softens. Incentives warp. Prevention becomes a box to check instead of a moral obligation. History bears this out. Catholic dioceses. The Boy Scouts. Youth camps. Patterns repeat. Abuse reported. Internal handling. Quiet settlements. Survivors silenced. Institutions preserved.

If you want a single story that exposes how rotten this system has become, this is it.

Lincoln was born healthy in Oklahoma in December 2020. His parents tested negative for all substances. His mother was enrolled in a state funded prenatal program specifically designed to keep families together. Despite this, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services obtained an emergency removal order based on allegations contradicted by medical records. Key facts were withheld from the court. Lincoln was taken at birth.

He was placed with a same sex couple who had requested only boys.

One of the adoptive fathers had been arrested years earlier in Kansas on charges including sodomy of a child and indecent liberties with a minor. The case was never prosecuted. Records were scrubbed. The placement went forward anyway.

Over the next three years, Oklahoma DHS ignored statutory deadlines, concealed a lawful kinship placement with Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, blocked internal safety warnings from a permanency worker, and pressured the biological parents into relinquishing their rights under false threats.

Then came March 2024.

While aboard the Carnival Dream cruise ship, witnesses report that the adoptive father became heavily intoxicated, attempted to drown Lincoln in a hot tub, and molested multiple boys. An adult passenger intervened and saved Lincoln’s life. Children reported the assaults. Ship security promised arrests that never happened. The FBI was not notified by the cruise line. Families were warned to stay quiet.

When the ship docked, the parents contacted the FBI themselves.

The FBI investigated. The man was federally indicted for child sexual abuse. Nine days later, before arrest, he committed suicide.

Despite all of this, Oklahoma DHS did not remove Lincoln from the home. The surviving adoptive parent fled to Kansas with him. Referrals were screened out. A DHS worker reportedly donated money to help the relocation instead of initiating emergency protection.

Furthermore, at the time of the Carnival cruise incident, the man who allegedly attempted to drown Lincoln and sexually assaulted other children was not an unknown drifter. He was a licensed sixth-grade teacher employed by Moore Public Schools in Oklahoma, working daily with children! He had been granted an emergency teaching certificate and was actively teaching when the cruise took place. Only after parents reported the abuse to the FBI did the school district place him on leave and then shortly after he took his own life.

Lincoln remains separated from his biological family today.

This case has been meticulously documented by investigative journalists at V1SUT. Without that reporting, the public would know nothing. Privacy laws meant to protect children were weaponized to protect the agency.

This is not an isolated failure. It is a system.

CPS and DHS agencies across the country operate under funding structures that reward custody, not family preservation. Federal mechanisms like Title IV E reimburse states when children enter foster and adoptive pipelines. Consulting firms like Deloitte collect hundreds of millions building systems that never quite work but always require more money. Whistleblowers are pushed out. Bureaucracies expand. Accountability disappears.

Children become revenue units.

Parents become obstacles.

Predators slip through.

What makes Lincoln’s case even more disturbing is where it came from.

The man who later attempted to drown Lincoln, molested multiple children, and then took his own life did not come out of nowhere. He came from a deeply embedded church family in a region already tied to multiple child abuse scandals connected to church camps and religious institutions.

This matters.

According to reporting uncovered by V1SUT, his 2010 arrest for sodomizing a child occurred while he was serving as a counselor at a church camp in Kansas. That arrest was never prosecuted. Court records were scrubbed. Local reporting was quietly erased. The family’s influence within the church community appears to have shielded him from accountability at the exact moment intervention should have happened.

Even more alarming, this church camp environment existed within the same regional ecosystem that later exploded with the Kanakuk Kamps scandal, one of the largest Christian camp abuse cases in U.S. history. Multiple counselors. Multiple victims. Years of institutional silence. A culture of protection, not exposure.

These are not coincidences. They are patterns.

When religious institutions close ranks, prioritize reputation over truth, and rely on internal handling instead of law enforcement, predators learn quickly where they are safest. When abuse is quietly absorbed rather than confronted, it does not disappear. It migrates.

In this case, it migrated from a church camp to a public school classroom, then into the foster and adoption system, and finally onto a cruise ship filled with children.

And every step of the way, the systems that should have stopped it failed.

Church leadership failed to expose it. Prosecutors failed to pursue it. Child welfare agencies failed to prevent it. Schools failed to protect students. And after federal indictment, the state still failed to remove a child from harm.

This is what institutional protection looks like in real life.

It is not one bad actor. It is a network of silence. A culture of deference. A system more concerned with liability, optics, and survival than with children.

When churches purchase Sexual Abuse and Molestation insurance while failing to root out predators, they are not just managing risk. They are signaling that abuse is an expected operational hazard.

Lincoln’s story forces an uncomfortable truth into the light.

Our systems are not protecting children from predators. They are protecting predators through systems.

And hovering over all of this is the quiet presence of insurance policies designed to make the fallout manageable.

SAM insurance does not directly protect child predators. That is the technical truth. But it absolutely protects the environments that allow predators to operate. It cushions institutions from financial ruin. It dulls the urgency to act. It normalizes settlements instead of justice.

When churches, camps, and organizations budget for abuse claims the way they budget for property damage, something in our moral framework has collapsed.

Americans need to know this exists. They need to ask why it exists. And they need to decide whether a society that insures institutional failure while children suffer is one worth defending.

Because if a state can take a newborn from fit parents, place him with a known risk, ignore attempted murder, and face no consequences, then the system is not broken.

It is working exactly as designed.

And that should terrify all of us.

If any of this feels familiar, it should.

The same system that protected predators in churches, camps, schools, and foster systems is the same system that buried the truth about Jeffrey Epstein.

We were told justice was coming.
We were told names would be released.
We were told accountability was inevitable.

Instead, Epstein conveniently died in federal custody under circumstances no serious person believes were accidental. The client list vanished. The co conspirators walked free. The institutions that enabled him closed ranks.

Years later, survivors are still waiting.
Names are still redacted.
Records are still sealed.
No powerful person has paid a price.

And here is the uncomfortable truth no one wants to say out loud.

Epstein was not an anomaly. He was a symptom.

The same mechanisms are at work every time a bureaucracy protects itself instead of a child. Every time liability insurance softens consequences. Every time records are sealed in the name of privacy. Every time whistleblowers are silenced. Every time the public is told to move on.

Whether it is CPS, DHS, churches, elite schools, foster systems, or intelligence adjacent networks, the pattern is identical. Abuse is discovered. Institutions panic. Lawyers intervene. Narratives are managed. Justice is delayed until it disappears.

If the Epstein files were fully exposed, people would finally have to confront how deep this rot goes. That is why they are not.

Until that changes, no child is safe.

When the State Protects Predators and Steals Children

Our systems are not protecting children from predators. They are protecting predators through systems.

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