The abuser was my father, we were all (7 children) abused severely (including our mother) as a child i did not understand what exactly was going on but after many years of councelling and so-forth (my counceller tells me, my case is the most severe she has had in her 12 years as a counceller) i discovered that my father was (is) a sado-masichist. He got sexual enjoyment from beating us all. I already knew this to an extent i just never realised there was actually a name for what he got out of it.
after 20 odd years of this abuse, my mother had tried to go through the right channels (the elders, in several congregations we moved to etc) in order to get permission to take her children and live separate to her husband who was a constant threat to our very lives (he was a diagnosed Paranoid Schizophrenic & incrediably unpredictable) She was however told time and again that if she left her husband she and her unbaptised children (under 18) would most certainly lose out on everlasting life. We left temporarily many times & lived in refuges but after 2 months we had to find our own home & move out of the refuge it was then that my mother would pack us up & take us back to the monster.
Finaly one day a man whom my mother had been studying with visited the refuge (my sister had told him we were there) he took us to a lion safari park and brought us lunch. When our time was up at the refuge my mother told us that this man was living alone in a big house (he had been through divorce & his family weren't speaking to him) and had offered us to live there with him. At this time my mother had no relationship with him, he was just showing kindness (and probably a little lonely). My mother was disfellowshipped shortly after we moved in.
My father then moved into a caravan on the front lawn of my sisters property and when i visited i saw him treating my little niece (4 yrs old) the same way he had treated me (abusing her) to make matters worse my niece had a condition of the spine which rendered her speachless (she coul not speak only make noises) i couldn't stand to see her being treated like this so... my eldest sister (then 21 yrs old) and myself (11 yrs) went to the police and filed a complaint of sexual abuse (she had actualy been raped) against our father.
The witnesses were not shunning us at that time (only my mother) as my sister had never been baptised (kicked out of home at 13 yrs old) and i was a child. After the allegations had been made & investagations (by the police) were underway however we were shunned on the street. Unfortunately the case was eventually (after 2 yrs of investagation & multiple statements) abolished and discharged due to a lack of witnesses . None of the rest of the family were willing to colaborate with us on the case as they said they wanted the past to be left in the past. My mother told me she never knew (about the sexual abuse) she just thought we were getting beaten. Yet many years later she informed me that "HE" had told her that he got off on beating us (but thats another story).
I am now 33 yrs old and have just been told that HE (re-married many years ago) is not only still a practising witness but an ELDERin his congregation. He is fostering children who are removed from abusive homelives and are placed in the care of welfare and also works for Barnados (an organisation set up for taking in-home care of preschoolers who's parent is on a benefit and part-time working).
my mother went to the authorities over this and was told that when the police check was done on him a red flag was beside his name but that it said he was not convicted the case was inconclusive etc etc.
At the moment my councelloer is helping me to write a letter to the authorities regarding this...