Here is another story about our time at Bethel that relates to my association with Harry Peloyan. He said that he would never allow articles critical of the Catholic Church that were related to the subject of child abuse to appear in the Awake! magazine. He felt that because JWs had similar problems, it would be hypocritical to “throw stones” at a group that was doing exactly the same thing as the Watchtower.
If Joe and I had remained at headquarters, the April 8, 1993, Awake! magazine would have been placed in our living quarters about four weeks before its publication date. I would have known then that Harry did not keep his word.
Four years later I received the following letter from Harry. It is clear that his attitude had matured quite a bit in four years and that he realized the importance of actually taking action to correct the problem of child abuse. A question he posed then is still valid to this very day…
“…but I wonder who is going to answer for the many Witness children who in the past five years of inaction have had their lives ruined by baptized Witness molesters.”
That, unfortunately, is still an open question.
Please keep Harry’s letter safe!
Interesting….Thanx Barbara….despite …Jw.org still protects the pedophiles…No peeking under the rug of JW GB, That’s a No No….but go peek under the Popes robe…Hmmmm
they will never again print anything against child molesters. I wonder why? Come on wt print your anti Catholic priests that molested children. I don’t hear you.
The difference between the Catholic Church versus Watchtower Society’s protocol of how they deal with victims of either child sexual abuse, rape, and incest is that elders will tell all the friends and family not to associate with/talk to the victims and pretty much treat them as a disfellowshipped person if they report any crime against humanity committed by a spiritual “brother” to law enforcement. That is if they “do not have 2 to 3 preferably male Jehovah’s Witnesses watching the crime in action and of course not involving the police in any way.”
a : a person not actually or constructively present but contributing as an assistant or instigator to the commission of an offense — called also accessory before the fact
b : a person who knowing that a crime has been committed aids or shelters the offender with intent to defeat justice — called also accessory after the fact.
By not reporting to the police, the elders and other witnesses who are in the know are actually guilty of the crime along with the pervert they are covering for in a court of law.
I say Deuteronomy 19:15 is the get the pervert out of trouble card. So is telling victims that they had to scream “Help” instead of “No, don’t do this to me…please NO…please do not kill me!” The Catholic Church does not do this. The Catholic Church moves their priests around like chess pieces and places them in another parish only for sexual predators to re-offend. The Catholic Church’s thinking/imagining is that the perpetrator will come to his senses and turn around from his ways and start clean somewhere else. Sadly, a perverted leopard does not change his spots…ever! = Psychology 1A. As a whole, most people in the Catholic Church do not know who is sitting before, next to, and in back of them at mass. The psychologically evil, cruel, abusive, and destructive game of shunning someone who is a victim of rape, pedophilia, and incest does not exist in the Catholic Church. The Catholics are way less psychologically abusive to the victims than Jehovah’s Witnesses are. I’m speaking from experience. Kingdom Halls have their cliques. If you are a single woman, or a woman who is married to an unbeliever with no family in the organization, you are the easiest target for elders and their minions to demonize. What I learned from my experience of being the woman married to an unbeliever, is that my “friends” were not there for me in the storms of life. Neither were my elders. They do not know the first thing about being a good friend or care about my well being and they would certainly NEVER lay down their lives for me. My elders put me on a do not call list the moment I went to police years after my rape. When someone* shot off a gun at 4 AM in front of my house the morning after my rapist was told by the elders that I had finked on him to them. Oddly, at first I wanted to keep things among the elder body and not involve law enforcement. All I wanted was for my rapist to apologize to me, his two daughters he had driven to almost taking their own lives, his wife for hog tying and sodomizing her, and for attacking her friend when she and her husband went to their house for dinner. The elders all demonized and blamed my rapist’s victims. It gave me ulcers knowing what a monster that guy is how they are helping him get away with incest, assault with a deadly weapon, rape/death threats, stalking, etc.
My unbelieving spouse called “brother” rapist after he had been driving by our home and we had been getting many hangups, and angrily told the societal termite, “Stay the hell away from my wife and family. You got that?” The creep’s response which my husband will never forget, “I haven’t been around her (laughing)…lately.” Again my husband told him “Stay the F— away from my family otherwise you’re going to deal with me.” My husband hung up on him. Instead of taking that conversation into account, the elders have stood by the rapist. They think he is the injured party since his wife in their opinion left him and did not give the rapist a scriptural divorce. The elders told her after she told them he had raped their daughters and raped her, ” that incest does not fall under fornication and adultery,” and that they “cannot police their bedroom” for hog tying and sodomizing her which he had admitted to the elders he did. The elders blame me for the demise of “brother” rapist’s wife dumping him. Like I have said before, Kingdom Halls are really just men’s clubs where women and children have absolutely no public platform to be heard.
It is unreal the extent they will go to to preserve their so-called God approved appearances! I remeber the article referred to here, as to uncovering the sins of the Catholic Church…I made a special effort to deliver it to the Priests in the area I lived…I have had to…”eat crow” and go back and tell them…” Guess what…Jehovah’s Witnesses cover over for pedophiles in their religion…and shun and victimize the abused!…Sorry for pointing out this article to you. I thought Jehovah’s Witnesses were a clean religion…How wrong I was! I thought my being sexually abused as a child in the Jw religion, by Jwt’s, then being abused as a wife of a Jw was something that did not happen to anyone else…again, how wrong I was! Shame on JW.org and the leaders and all who do as they say…revictimizing people who do not deserve it. Disgusting cult!
I remember reading this Awake when I was a few months pregnant with my daughter. After hearing my rapist had raped his own daughters, I imagined I was safe telling the elders this brother had raped me at gunpoint a year later. How wrong I was. He shot off his gun in my rural front yard early one morning. The elders came and rummaged through the ivy and found and removed the shotgun shell casing and I was demonized and shunned. They never brought back the forensic evidence. My “friends” were told to dump me. They did what they were told because they were threatened to be treated the same way I was being treated. What would Jesus do? I prayed about it and told the police the TRUTH. I knew the statute of limitations was up but I just wanted it to be on record so that he would not look like a first time offender when and if he were ever caught.