When the teenager revealed the assaults to her mother, she learned that several of her sisters had gone through similar ordeals, including one who was 5 years old. “If I broke his rules, he flogged me,” she said. “You have to be obedient to me,” he said during the sexual acts, according to the woman, who is now 44.Īfter the rest of the family returned from vacation, the father prohibited her from speaking to anybody he thought she might confide in. While she was being raped, her father quoted passages from the Bible and referred to verses of Scripture about being more obedient that he had made her put up on her bedroom wall. I was absolutely petrified of him and tried not to make him angry.” “I resisted as much as I could each time, but he was a violent man and prone to snap. “My father touched me and tried to have sex with me on at least four or five different occasions,” she continued. “When I protested I remember him saying to me, ‘Shhhh, it’s okay. “The first time that he tried to have sex with me, he came naked into my bed at night whilst I was sleeping and touched me all over my body,” the woman, who cannot be identified under Australian law, told the inquiry last week. He gave her alcohol and showed her pornographic movies. In 1988, a 17-year-old girl in the state of Queensland was abused by her father, a prominent member of the local Jehovah’s Witness congregation, while her mother and six brothers and sisters were on vacation, according to testimony given to the commission. The church’s deep suspicion of outsiders, who are referred to, derogatorily, as “worldly,” is the reason sex abuse among Jehovah’s Witnesses is rarely reported to authorities, according to Angus Stewart, a South African lawyer who leads the investigation into the church. Leadership in the church and in families is based on a formal hierarchy headed by men. Based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, the rules call for separation from other members of society, who are considered spiritually inferior.
JEHOVAH WITNESS BEDROOM LAWS CODE
Abusers are mostly regular congregants, who are shielded from official prosecution by the church’s strict code of moral conduct. Unlike the pedophile priests of the Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have no paid clergy. “I find their approach to the issue and victims extraordinarily bizarre - almost medieval,” she said in an interview. The church, which was founded in Pennsylvania during the 1870s to promote a 1st-century interpretation of the Bible, has emerged as the least able or willing to deal with sexual abuse within its ranks, said Anne Cossins, an associate law professor at the University of New South Wales and an expert in sex crimes who is a consultant for the inquiry. In a converted office in downtown Sydney, the organization’s doctrines and practices are being parsed by lawyers, victims and journalists, providing rare insight into one of the Christian world’s most conservative churches. Of the religious and nonreligious groups being investigated, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are exceptional, experts say. But a spokesman said it has referred more than 700 matters to authorities and will make recommendations to the government in a final report in 2017. The commission doesn’t have the power to find guilt or issue punishment. To avoid singling out one religion, government officials gave the inquiry wide legal powers to examine any organization that may have covered up abuse. The inquiry’s primary target was the Catholic Church, whose record of protecting pedophiles was almost as rampant in Australia as in the United States. Now, sordid details from the closed world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are being exposed that could severely tarnish the image of a powerful organization that has 8.2 million members and has mostly avoided scrutiny. Child abuse was recorded and hidden away. In all, 127 church officials were demoted. All complaints - which averaged one a month for 65 years - were carefully recorded in sealed files, along with the church’s by-the-Bible responses. Victims, ordered to keep quiet, were forced to confront their abusers in person. When the children reached out for help, the church’s obsession with secrecy and hostility to outsiders kicked in. Victims were forced to pray with their abusers.
From 1950 to 2014, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society amassed 5,000 files detailing sexual abuse of Australian children by 1,006 of its members, who believe that only they - the Jehovah’s Witnesses - proclaim the truth about God. SYDNEY - The abuse was meticulously catalogued.
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