I have written about this in the past, but not in recent years. I'll try to do this briefly.
From the age of 5 until he was 10, my oldest son was sexually abused by a 5-year-older, JW male cousin. My son stopped the abuse on his own when he was 10 by holding a knife on his abuser and telling him that he would kill him if the abuser ever touched him again. Today my son is a carpenter and 175 pounds of gristle and muscle, but even at 10 you wouldn't have wanted to fuck with him, so the threat worked.
When my son was 15, on the night after the Memorial in fact, my son told his older sister and her best friend what had happened to him. The next day she told my wife and I, and the next morning, which happened to be a Sunday, I drove down to Watchtower Farm to confront the cousin, who by that time was in his 20s and a Bethelite.
I arrived at the farm at about 7:30 am, called up to my nephew's room, and went up to see him. He said he wasn't really surprised to see me, and confessed that what my son had said was true. Over the next few months we were to find out that it was considerably more involved than my nephew was willing to admit at that first confrontation, and I can truthfully say that the abuse has scarred my son, who never became a Witness, for his entire life. He's in his 30s now, four children and probably facing a divorce. He's had a long stuggle with proving he's the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the valley, and I have little doubt that all of those things are at least partly connected with his having experienced years of sexual abuse.
My nephew, the abuser, was dealt with privately at Bethel. His father was an elder, (different congregation) and I was an elder, pioneer and assembly overseer at the time. The abuser's father put a lot of pressure on us not to tell anyone about the abuse, even stating to my wife that "Jehovah would judge between us" if we decided to go to the authorities with this. Eventually, we went to the police and reported it. The cousin was fined in our state, but nothing happened in any other state where the abuse occurred. My son has often said that if he'd been a 9 year old girl being raped by a 14 or 15 year old boy, a lot more would have been done to the abuser.
At Bethel, some brothers met with my nephew, and that was how it was handled. He wasn't asked to leave, and the brothers at Bethel never once called my family to see how the victim was doing or to hear our side of the story. We were also ostracized to quite a degree by my wife's JW family for having made as much of an issue out of this as we did. This all happened in the early 1990s.
Over the next few years I stepped down as an elder, and with the 1914 generation change in the mid-1990s, I began a rapid fade. I didn't leave because of how my son's abuse had been mishandled, I left because I realized that WTS teachings were full of shit, but the abuse situation, which I was aware of on several levels since the early 1980s, including now this personal one, helped me to realize that this was NOT a sacred or blessed organization.
Now, a few years after all this came to light, my nephew had left Bethel and is in a congregation. I get a call from an old friend, an elder in that congregation, and he asks me how I would feel if my nephew was appointed as a MS! I got a little upset, because by this time, the Society had finally come out saying that anyone who admitted to or was a known child molester could never serve in an appointed position in the congregation. I pointed this out to the elder, and asked why he would ever need to ask me that question - the Society's direction was quite plain, it seemed to me. I made it quite plain also that I would NOT be happy to see my nephew appointed.
I never heard another word from the elders, but I've read a few things recently that this policy may have changed. If the abuser was not baptized at the time, can they serve as an elder or MS? My nephew was baptized during the time this abuse was going on. Also, I have heard that if the abuse was not public knowledge, and the congregation does not view the abuser as such, he might be able to serve.
Anyone know if this is now the policy?
S4