Jehovah’s Witnesses Elders Agreed To Hide Pedophiles From Exposure

tay

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May 20, 2012
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The leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses – one of the world’s most insular religions – for 25 years has instructed its elders to keep cases of child sexual abuse secret from law enforcement and members of their own congregations, according to an examination of thousands of pages of documents in recent cases.


The religion’s parent organization, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, issued the directives in at least 10 memos dating back to 1989. Although the memos were anonymously written, Watchtower officials have testified that the organization’s Governing Body approved them all.

The most recent letter, dated Nov. 6, 2014, instructed elders – the spiritual leaders of local congregations – to form confidential committees to handle potential criminal matters internally.

“In some cases, the elders will form a judicial committee to handle the alleged wrongdoing that may also constitute a violation of criminal law (e.g., murder, rape, child abuse, fraud, theft, assault),” the directive stipulates. “Generally, the elders should not delay the judicial committee process, but strict confidentiality must be maintained to avoid unnecessary entanglement with secular authorities who may be conducting a criminal investigation of the matter.”

Within the organization, the Watchtower has final say over who is considered a serial child abuser. According to a 2012 Watchtower memo: “Not every individual who has sexually abused a child in the past is considered a ‘predator.’ The (Watchtower), not the local body of elders, determines whether an individual who has sexually abused children in the past will be considered a ‘predator.’ ”

The directives are part of a pattern for the organization, which has more than 8 million members worldwide and preaches that Armageddon will soon release the world from Satan’s grip. In the U.S., the Jehovah’s Witnesses operate more than 14,000 congregations with about 1 million members.

Internal documents obtained by Reveal show that the Witnesses have systematically instructed elders and other leaders to keep child sexual abuse confidential, while collecting detailed information on congregants who prey on children.

Having successfully leveraged the First Amendment as a defense of their right to not serve in the military or salute the American flag, the Jehovah’s Witnesses now are using a similar legal strategy to defend policies that shield serial predators from law enforcement.


For Jose Lopez, it took almost three decades to find some semblance of justice after he’d been molested – when he was 7 – by a predator who’d operated within a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in San Diego.

When his case against the Witnesses concluded in October, a judge awarded Lopez $13.5 million, a remarkably large sum in an era of frequent payouts in abuse cases. The decision rested in part on the Witnesses’ refusal to hand over documents in the case, prompting the frustrated judge to ban the organization from making a defense.

The Lopez case was remarkable for another reason. It forced the Witnesses into a rare admission: Somewhere within the organization, there is a trove of documents with the names and whereabouts of known child sexual abusers in its U.S. congregations.

During the trial, a senior official from the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters, Richard Ashe, told Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, that the organization had collected and electronically scanned internal documents on decades of known abuse cases. Ashe said that the Witnesses keep their child sexual abuse reports in a Microsoft SharePoint database but that it would take years to extract the information because it was mixed up with millions of other documents.

“Honestly, Mr. Zalkin, the efforts that we’ve made up to this point is just trying to figure out how on earth we could ever do that in our filing system,” Ashe said. “You’re talking about 14,000 congregations and over 3 million documents that have been scanned and that would have to be searched. … It would take years to do that.”

Zalkin called in a software expert who testified that by using simple search terms, the Witnesses could produce the information in less than two months, or maybe two days. At that point, the Watchtower simply refused to provide the database.

During the case, Lopez said his mother reported his abuse to the elders in 1986, but they didn’t call police or warn the congregation. Lopez and his mother left the religion soon after.

Even as the abuser, Gonzalo Campos, continued to sexually assault children, the elders promoted him within the congregation, first to ministerial servant in 1988, then to elder in 1993, according to a 1995 letter from elders to the Watchtower.

A pair of sisters in Vermont filed a suit in September claiming that a member of their congregation molested them when they were as young as 4. When they reported the abuse to the elders in the congregation, they said, they were called liars. The next month in Dallas, five women and one man filed a joint lawsuit alleging that an elder in their congregation sexually abused them while they were all younger than 13.

In Oregon in December, two former Witnesses sued the Watchtower and a local congregation, claiming the defendants kept silent after learning that an elder had sexually abused them when they were in grade school. Since 2012, attorneys have filed more than a dozen similar suits against the Watchtower in Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and other states.

The Watchtower’s frequent defense – that such cases violate protections under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment – has led to the dismissal of several lawsuits. Watchtower lawyers argue that judicial questioning of the spiritual beliefs and practices of Jehovah’s Witnesses would trample the organization’s religious freedoms.


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http://www.revealnews.org/article/j...1st-amendment-to-hide-child-sex-abuse-claims/






http://www.revealnews.org/article/j...1st-amendment-to-hide-child-sex-abuse-claims/
 

Serryah

Executive Branch Member
Dec 3, 2008
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New Brunswick
I find it interesting that the more a religious organization has obvious sins to hide, the more effort they put into demonizing others.

Honestly I would more likely trust a group that admitted "yeah we had people like this but we dealt with the issue legally and will continue to do so" than some who are bending themselves into pretzles to hide the fact that these so called religious leaders are just as corrupt, twisted and effed up as every other human being on this planet.
 

MHz

Time Out
Mar 16, 2007
41,030
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Red Deer AB
Where would they get an idea that would work. Correct me if I am wrong but when you say something was not made known before and it is being made known now king of takes away the secret label, true or false?
 

tay

Hall of Fame Member
May 20, 2012
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A woman who claims that Jehovah’s Witness elders failed to protect from abuse by a known paedophile, has won a six-figure pay out from the church.


The woman, known only in court as C, alleges that she was abused between the ages of four and nine in Loughborough by ministerial servant Peter Stewart. She claims that the church was made aware of allegations of abuse made against him in relation to another child in the religious community.


However, she says that despite this being acknowledged, Stewart was allowed to remain in the church performing duties because he told them that he had “repented” over the abuse. C says that this meant he was able to abuse her for four more years.


In 1995, he was convicted of rape in an unrelated case. In 2001, he died shortly before police arrived at his home to question him in relation to C’s allegations.


The London High Court heard that the woman had “suffered hugely” as a result of the alleged abuse and that she had attempted suicide.


She told the BBC that Jehovah’s Witness organisation saw child abuse as: “a sin that can be dealt with within the organisation- they don’t feel they have to look outside themselves in any way.”


“All they want to do is pray for you and promise you that God’s going to wipe away all your pain. It is just unbelievable.”




Jehovah's Witnesses ordered to pay six-figure sum to woman over sex abuse claims - Crime - UK - The Independent
It is the first civil case to be brought against the religious organisation in the UK. A representative from the church said that they will reflect on the ruling.