I'm reading "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout, PhD. The current chapter is about how parents and society unwittingly set their children up to be victimized. The following passages could easily apply to Mormonism.

>> We raise our children, especially girls, to ignore their spontaneous reactions—we teach them not to rock the societal boat—and this is a good and necessary lesson when the spontaneous reaction involved would be to strike out violently with fists or words, or to steal an attractive item from a store, or to insult a stranger in a supermarket line. But another kind of spontaneous reaction, equally suppressed by our conflict-avoidant society, is the “Ick!” reaction, the natural sense of moral outrage. By the time she is thirty, the valiant little girl's “Ick!”—her tendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are “really mean”—may have been excised from her behavior, and perhaps from her very mind.

[...]

>> A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

[...]

>> Do not set her up to be gaslighted. When she observes that someone who is being really mean is being really mean, tell her she is right and that it is okay to say so out loud. <<

While parents might do it unintentionally, I think the LDS church (and other institutions) do it on purpose in order to create followers who won't call out the abuses and stupidities of the leaders, followers they can exploit. The church wants sheep, and the wellbeing of individuals is unimportant. In fact, it makes willingness to be victimized a virtue.

My brother and I have talked about how we were vulnerable to men who wanted to rub against us when we were boys. There is a subspecies of young men who like to wrestle with boys in dark rooms. Those men found us and took us to their rooms. Because our father was cruel and distant, we were ripe for seduction. We were given candy and attention by these men and older boys.

Our idiot father didn't even know where we were. But on Sunday morning, our location was all-important. We were to be at "church."

That's an awful experience, I'm sorry that happened to you

>> ...reflexive obedience can consume the individual before he even has a chance to wonder whether he himself might be the best authority when it comes to his own life... <<

Those who want to control and abuse us don't want us to be the authority of our own life. So beware of anyone who talks too much about obedience and submitting to authority.

"Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation" by Leora Tanenbaum to get more perspective on what women deal with on a daily basis.

*I am NOT saying men don't go through bullshit either, this is strictly a statement to understand the shit women go through that men rarely deal with*

An awesome companion book is Snakes in Suits which is about sociopaths in the workplace. http://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893
I was singled out at a previous job by someone I believe to be a sociopath. I was an easy mark - turn the other cheek, go the second mile, never make waves. I learned a lesson, for sure. On second thought, that sociopath started me on a round of self examination that, 8 years later led me to have enough self respect to leave TSCC. Yeah. I'm a slow learner, but I CAN be taught.

>> Parents, especially fathers, typically teach their sons to obey authority no matter what, and given the wrong cultural and political circumstances, circumstances that have occurred with morbid regularity throughout history, this is a lesson that may well come with a suicide clause. That parents wish to foster a certain respect for legitimate authority is understandable, and probably important for the functioning of society as we know it. But to drill children in reflexive, no-questions-asked obedience is to beat a horse that is more than half-dead already. Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most people quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic “authority” who may come along later in their lives. <<

Thanks for sharing this.

Another eye opener for raising daughters: See a showing of Miss Representation. (You can see if there is one near you at www.missrepresentation.org) It discusses female representation in the media and is really thought provoking. If you have a teenage (high school) daughter it is really great to see together and then see where your discussions go. If you are a repressed mormon woman redefining herself it is interesting also. If your a man trying to peel off your patriarchy this could help you shed some of it.