We can now estimate the absolute minimum number of child abuse cases

by Viviane 30 Replies latest watchtower child-abuse

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  _Morpheus

  Darling, im impressive without false accolades. I identified the flaw in your numbers, formulated the fix, did the research and posted the results in about 2 min. That seems pretty impressive ;)

  as for the elders hearing these things and being affected.. I served 10 years and never heard a case of child molestation. There were never any REPORTED in my congregation, not to suggest they didnt occur.

  The only reasonable way to extrapolate would to be do it by country stats. Number of cases per 1000 of child sexual abuse in a given country then reduced it out to the same ratio per 1000 of jw in the same country. That allows for normalization of given societal norms in the statistical compilations.
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  OrphanCrow

  Morpheus: That allows for normalization of given societal norms in the statistical compilations.

  That is the part that I have trouble with. Which "societal norms" do we apply?

  The norms outside of the JWs are being shown to be quite different than the norms of the WT society. The WT norms are heavily influenced by archaic customs and practices.

  In spite of Applewhite giving glowing testimony that the JW religion is at the top of the scale in procedures to address child abuse, it still comes from someone whose own religion has a simliar stucture. Both environments foster abuse, not prevent it.

  I think that this Royal Commission will give us some more parameters to use when trying to correlate numbers. Regardless, the magnitude of the problem of child abuse within the JWs is astounding. They continue to point fingers at the Catholic Church, but the problems that the JWs have with predators goes far beyond their "clergy class".

  Mind you, the JWs are all "ordained ministers", aren't they?
• 

  Heaven

  _Morpheus said: as for the elders hearing these things and being affected.. I served 10 years and never heard a case of child molestation. There were never any REPORTED in my congregation, not to suggest they didnt occur.

  That doesn't surprise me Morpheus. I think a lot of people do not come forward. I can tell you as a child in this religion, I definitely learned what not to talk about with my parents.
  
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  Viviane

  I identified the flaw in your numbers, formulated the fix, did the research and posted the results in about 2 min. That seems pretty impressive

  Two minutes for you is impressive. All the ladies say say. Well, it's in the personal section of CL, anyway, they could be ladies. Plus, I took care of my own problem before you came around. ;)

  The only reasonable way to extrapolate would to be do it by country stats. Number of cases per 1000 of child sexual abuse in a given country then reduced it out to the same ratio per 1000 of jw in the same country.

  I don't think that would works to get us close (but, so far the closest). The reason for that is that insular, secretive religions tend to have serial molesters with victims at the ready, often in a position of authority and friends in power ready to defend him, something an offender in the general population doesn't generally have.

  It's a better number than we have now, but the problem is that this has been hidden for so long, distorted, records destroyed, etc., with all of these churches, that we've no real way to estimate what the number may be because of this and a variety of other reasons.

  We need the LIST!
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  _Morpheus

  First, let me say i agree 100% that access to any documentation from any branch would be a wind fall and welcome but very difficult to obtain.

  
  

  As to the societal norms, im not so sure jw's differ as much as some think. Look at divorce rates: 50% in or out of the org. Look at rates of unwed mothers. Slightly lower than population as whole but the same as other deeply religious groups. Jws are a cross section and tend to reflect that.. Also by their very nature stats tend to balance across a given group being analyzed. Jws tend to reflect the population they are comprised of

  
  

  (2 min isnt a record but its a nice run ;).... And besides thats all it really takes anyway)
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  Marvin Shilmer

  My quick statistical review yields the following:

  For the Australian Branch during the 10-year period of 2005-2014 there was an annual average incident rate of 0.000401 per peak publisher. This amounts to an average annual number of about 0.40 per 1000 peak publishers. There were a total of 257 individual perps reported for this period in the Australian Branch.

  Worldwide this extrapolates to:

  For the 10-year period of 2005-2014 there is an estimated worldwide number of 28,827 individuals associated with Jehovah's Witnesses that have been reported for sexual molestation of a child.
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  Viviane

  That's an interesting way to look at it.
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  Marvin Shilmer

  That's an interesting way to look at it.

  It was in or around year 1990 that Watchtower started taking greater and more specific measures to have elders give special treatment to reports of child molestation. During the early to late 1990s this likely resulted in a surge of reports of child molestation. To reduce the probability of skewing values I decided to ignore all reports except for the last 10 years. For statistical purposes, this gave any initial number surge a good 15-years of opportunity to subside.

  Of those reports I ignored 1) all cases without a clear date (year) of reporting and 2) all cases reported as "Not a JW member".

  To me this provides a pretty clear idea of the magnitude of reported cases Watchtower has received worldwide over the past 10 years, and is also a pretty good indicator of what the problem has looked like for a long time (decades!) before that.
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  Indian Larry

  Question: The stats in the spreadsheet ONLY show abuse that was not reported to the Police. As I understand it they did report (ONLY) when mandatory in apparently two states in Australia. Since the data is missing for those two states would that not throw off the figures?
  
  In other words there are more actual cases than what is shown in the spreadsheet so the numbers would be higher. Do I understand this correctly or are these the only cases period? If these are the only cases then what about the two states that require mandatory notification in these cases?
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  Viviane

  To me this provides a pretty clear idea of the magnitude of reported cases Watchtower has received worldwide over the past 10 years, and is also a pretty good indicator of what the problem has looked like for a long time (decades!) before that.

  Well done!