The Washington Post, along with other major newspapers, reported on November 28, 2016, that during the past sixty years in Australia not one of hundreds of alleged child abusers identified as Jehovah’s Witnesses were reported to police or civil authorities.
According to the report, even when those accused of sexually abusing Australian children admitted to committing their crimes, their victims and family members were ordered or intimidated to keep quiet.
The Australian Royal Commission found that local congregation elders and Watchtower’s headquarter’s leadership were guilty of consistent “serious failure” to protect Jehovah’s Witness children from the risk of sexual abuse. Instead, all levels of JW leadership at local and national levels relied on outdated policies and practices to respond to such allegations. Essentially, Witness children were left unprotected from even clearly identified “admitted abusers” and pedophiles attending their local or regional Kingdom Halls.
The Australian Royal Commission released a 107-page report on Monday, November 28, 2016. That document outlines and details a number of “ancient policies” that exhibit what the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified as a “serious lack of understanding of the nature of child sexual abuse.”
One such practice “based on Biblical references” requires church elders responsible for investigating incidents of abuse or sexual misconduct to secure a confession from the person accused. If a confession is not forthcoming, then the testimony of two “credible” witnesses to the same incident, or two witnesses to separate incidents of the same kind, or other strong circumstantial evidence must be testified to by at least two witnesses.
That is not all: The accuser (often a minor child) also has to justify his or her allegations to church elders – often in the presence of the alleged perpetrator.
The commission’s findings were based on a close examination of the allegations — which averaged one a month for 65 years and were recorded in sealed files along with the church’s responses — along with the findings of a 2015 public hearing.
The report also found that the Jehovah’s Witness organization’s internal system for responding to complaints of child sexual abuse was not child or survivor-focused, “in that it is presided over by males and offers a survivor little or no choice about how their complaint is addressed.”
LINK to Sunday Morning Herald (Australia)
In Sebastopol, California when two preteen daughters reported their father raping them to the police, when the police came to arrest him, he and his wife were escorted out the emergency exit in the bathrooms and told to hide out somewhere until the heat died down. The serial rapist/psychopath and his wife came back months later after hiding out on his father’s land up north in another county I would not be surprised if there are bodies buried there. He attacked another brother’s wife who had helped the rapist and his wife paint their house. The sister and her husband that helped, brought a bottle of wine to go with the dinner to be served to four people….one glass per person. Because they brought the alcohol to the rapist’s house, the elders blamed the helpful brother and sister for the incident. The rapist’s own now ex wife reported to the elders that “he had hogtied and choked her and raped her and sodomized her against her will.” The elders told her that she “should be a better wife and render to her husband his sexual due more often.” She “reported to the elders that not one but two teenage girls told her that her husband had raped them at gunpoint. Because they were worldly, the elders urged her not to believe them, even though he would take his father’s gun and go hunting for a week at a time and never bring home any game, and he admitted to her to picking up hitchhikers.” The psychopath’s father and mother came into the Truth through the elderly elders and because of that relationship, their judgment was biased. Not to mention nepotism played a part. Sadly for the daughters, they ran away, and were labeled bad kids and not victims of sexual assault. One tried to commit suicide and the other got into a relationship with a young man and got pregnant at age 14 and had a baby. Both have survived their childhoods but at a price. The elders not having any psychology classes under their belts and thinking that any outside help was going to be from Satan, chased those girls and their mother right out of the congregation. Not to mention any sisters that he attacked that came forward and spoke out against their good friend that five female Jehovah’s Witnesses had reported on.
I learned that the Kingdom Hall is just a men’s club where women and children have absolutely no public platform to be heard when things are really, really, really sick and wrong. So called “friends” (really fair weather people who would NEVER lay down their life for woman and child) are told to not associate with anyone that is a victim of sexual assault. Without disfellowshipping, public or private reproof, they are treated like someone who has been. It is unloving and unkind and really the elders are a party to the rapist’s actions against them. On the other hand, the elder body will go to the rapist’s house to encourage him to come to meetings not caring about the safety of the hordes of clueless women and children, study with him, etc.
I believe the person was a sex offender themselves that wrote the “two witness” biblical rule because anyone with a 12th grade education knows that rapists/pedophiles NEVER do things in front of other adults. Maybe a group of drunken high school football players do in front of each other as what happened in Northern California where they even filmed it and put in on You Tube. It is rare but when there are others there, they are usually taking part in it! The other rule that was written by a sex offender is that one must “scream for help.” I find it misogynistic and biased toward those born with penises that the elders do not take into consideration that psychopaths that commit rape use a knife or a gun to intimidate their victim, and have no problem with ending their victim’s life to silence their only witness! Truly the whole situation is set up so that male sex offenders get off the hook and it opens up his victims to be demonized by the congregation at the direction of the elders, and sadly disfellowshipped unfairly for fornication, adultery, and even slander. I find it highly suspect that the elders do not take into consideration that multiple victims unrelated to each other are not considered as a witness to the rapist/pedophile’s behavior past and present.
I find the elders and the entire association of brothers and sisters are lacking a moral conscience by not reporting ANY incidents of child sexual abuse and rape to the police and or Child Protective Services. I find it evil that the elders will scare victims of sexual assault along with their friends and family with “disfellowshipping them on the basis of slander if they talk about it, or go to the police because their ways are not Jehovah’s ways.”