Viv: Or more than 3 times the amount we know about.
In Australia alone.
Think about that.
Yes, the numbers that Toole presented don't quite jive. On one hand, he claims that the 1006 cases are correct. But, that works out to about 15 per year - a bit over one a month. And then Toole goes around and says - he hears about 3 to 4 per month. But...apparently the Service Desk are the ones who hear about them...mostly. I guess...
Well, Mr. Toole. Which is it? I have a sense that neither figure is right as to the true magnitude of the chid abuse within the JWs. Assuming that figures collected within the general population can be somewhat taken to be similar within the JWs, American statistics on child abuse point to the following:
http://www.naasca.org/2012-Resources/010812-StaisticsOfChildAbuse.htm
- 20 to 25 percent of all children will be abused during their childhood
- Somewhere between 2/3 and ninety percent of sexual abuse victims never tell !!!
If those statistics even loosely hold up within the JWs, given that the WTS guys are trying to make the case that the cases are actually more exposed by their judicial system and therefore higher, it would be difficult to evaluate the full extent of how many cases there actually are.
Instead of the problem being lower than national averages, however, I would guess that the rates are higher. Justice McClelland has called the Jehovah's Witness environment a "perfect storm" for child abuse to occur.