I too was molested by 2 Jehovah's Witness brothers - one was an elder. I was victimized....my childhood damaged, too...
I'm as disgusted by child molestation as anyone else. You have every right to be angry. If anything like that happened to my daughter, I'd be furious. And if an elder did that then it's twice as bad because he betrayed his trust.
I went to the congregation for help. What help did I get...silence (no word on if anything was ever followed up on), and then silenced (don't tell anyone in the cong. or I could be faced with "discipline" for causing divisions)
If that is actually what happened, then the elders failed to follow the instructions. The letters to elders telling them how to handle these cases have long been on the internet. None of them say that you should have been treated that way. There is certainly no instruction to 'discipline' persons making abuse allegations. And I've never heard of a single person who was disfellowshipped for making an accusation of child molestation. How could they be? There'd need to be two witnesses that the allegation was false.
Fast forward a few years...one of these @$$holes abuses my younger sister (10 years younger than me.) It is the congregations fault 100 percent for what happened to my sister. I told them. They chose to keep their reputation than deal with either of these men. My sister had to pay the price.
What happened to your sister is 100% the abuser's fault. He should take responsibility for what he did.
It isn't your fault (even though you could have reported the matter to the police).
It isn't the congregation's fault. They have to balance all sorts of legal requirements and principles.
It's not about keeping their reputation. It's about common sense. The reporting requirements are no different from any other church or professional counselling association. As for the two witnesses, if only one person made an allegation, then it was one person's word against another. Do you want congregations to disfellowship anyone just on one person's say-so? As I've told others, you might think differently if things were the other way round and you or a loved one were falsely accused of child molestation.
That's just one story...there's also the fact that my ex-husband's father had a baby (he was an elder) with my ex-husband's sister (a pioneer). My kids have a cousin who is also their aunt. It's sick. The lengths the organization went to hide this story (Lake Simcoe, Ontario - early 70s) to when in finally came to public knowlege (Ladner, BC apx 1985) is unbelievable.
Again, that sort of filthy conduct is appalling. You aren't the only one who is disgusted by it. I am, too, and all Jehovah's Witnesses would be.
But you're confusing confidentiality with covering up. Members of religious groups go to ministers/priests/pastors/elders to confess their sins on the understanding that what they have done will not be discussed with others. In many places, they have a legal obligation not to divulge what they've been told. (Even more so in the 1970's.)
The policies of the organization make it the congregations fault. Take your head out of the sand Jordan12, your ignorance is foolish.
The policies of the organization are excellent and no other church has anything near as good. They include: disfellowshipping of unrepentant wrongdoers, immediate removal of repentant wrongdoers from all positions of responsibility and scrupulous adherence to legal requirements.
I'm 100% sure the elder you mention was removed, if he was not disfellowshipped.
If there were problems, then they arose from failure to follow the policies, not from the policies themselves.
