The Church's role in the community war against the evil of abuse is to learn what we can, deal with the problem as it exists, and share our experiences with others who are equally motivated.

That's a little of what appears on the Mormon (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) web site says under Child Abuse.

Here's a little more:

The abuse of a child awakens in us an intensity and breadth of emotion that is beyond adequate expression. Perhaps this crime moves us so personally because we remember what it was like to hold our own children for the first time — the overwhelming feeling of love and the deepest parental instinct to nourish, teach and protect. It is shocking, almost inconceivable, that someone would hurt a child. It is the ultimate form of betrayal.

Society is uniting, rising up and rooting out child abuse. Over and over again, we see entire communities mobilize to search for children feared kidnapped and abused. It is national news when a single child is in danger.

But child abuse was not always the subject of national media reports. This evil lurked in the shadows, mostly unseen, almost always unmentionable. Yet even before the issue first came to the forefront in the United States, Gordon B. Hinckley, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, publicly denounced child abuse as a terrible evil. In the early 1980s, he captured our thoughts and feelings when he said in a worldwide conference broadcast: "I am glad that there is a growing public awareness of this insidious evil. The exploitation of children . . . for the satisfaction of sadistic desires is sin of the darkest hue."