The July/August issue of THE GAY & LESBIAN REVIEW WORLDWIDE / The Sex-Priest Scandal Issue arrived in the mail today. I can now post the 3 1/2 page story they commissioned from me. They gave me a coverblurb: [I'll paste here just part of it, since it is 4000 words long. They also include major excerpts from my book, Father's Touch]
Donald D'Haene : Papa was a Jehovah's Witness
Two decades ago, I was among the first men to break the barrier of silence and come forward to speak openly about being sexually abused as a child. Since that time, more than a thousand victims have told me their individual stories. From them I have learned that, while each victim's experience is unique, we are united as comrades in a battle by the common experience of abuse by an adult. After more than a decade of sexual abuse, my siblings and I finally came forward and told ministers, police, doctors, and therapists. And we took the perpetrator, our father, to court. How this journey of revelation and recovery unfolded is a story that I have told in a memoir called Father's Touch, which tells the story of my father's physical and sexual abuse of me and my siblings, as well as my mother, and of my personal struggles with my faith and with my sexual orientation as we fought back against the abuse.
We were Jehovah's Witnesses, and my father used our religion - its patriarchal structure and ideology - to manipulate and control the rest of the family. My father, Daniel D'Haene, was a man who lusted for power and craved complete control over those around him, especially his family, and he used the theology of the Jehovah's Witnesses to support this craving and to subject his children to years of abuse. Initially he instructed us that if we disobeyed him in any way, we would be disappointing God. Indeed, he assured us that his authority over us was God-given, a claim that did seem to be supported by our religion. All four of the children in my family - including my two brothers and one sister - were involved in the abuse over a period of thirteen years. It started with my older brother Ronny, three years my senior, when he was just six years old. This was in 1963, two years after I was born. I was introduced to my father's touch at the age of three.
When Ronny began to put up resistance a few years after the abuse started, our father came up with another recipe. Shifting the metaphor from theology to play, he introduced each of us younger children in turn to what he called The Game. His new strategy was to start the child playing The Game at an earlier age so that there would be no resistance. Want to play a new game? All Papas do this with their kids, he explained.
Our father cloaked The Game in an air of importance and secrecy, telling us, "It's our little secret. Mother would be jealous, so don't tell her." Since it was a game, there had to be an element of reciprocity and taking turns. "Ill do you and you do me," he would urge. "Isn't this game fun?"
This suggestion was calculated to turn us into co-conspirators, and it was successful on a number of levels. Since secrecy was an intrinsic element of The Game - talking about it would ruin all the fun! - this brought us into our father's conspiracy of silence. What's more, The Game itself was defined as part of God's plan for families - a secret game that every Christian father plays with his children. Why would we question our father's authority when God had made him head of the household? If we loved God, wouldn't we obey his servant's wishes?
In the ensuing years, our father used his fanatical interpretations of church doctrines on male authority, discipline, and obedience to perpetuate his crimes. When he was finally busted and brought before church authorities and, much later, the criminal justice system, he mustered every excuse to justify his crimes. In letters, tapes, and testimonials, he tried to diminish his culpability by claiming that his wife wouldn't give him his marital due, that his faith in the Jehovah's Witnesses had confused him, that he was an alcoholic or a drug abuser, that we was possessed by demons or had experienced nervous breakdowns. To this day, he has refused to admit that the molestation of his children was calculated and premeditated.
The Witnesses and the D'Haenes
The Jehovah's Witnesses cite scriptures from the Bible to back all their beliefs, and in turn believe that every word of the Bible is directly inspired by God. While conceding that some parts of the Bible are symbolic, they take other verses quite literally. Thus, for example, when it comes to dealing with errant members, they follow the example of the first-century Christians as reported by the Apostle Paul: A member can be removed from the congregation for sinning and not repenting, and once someone is disfellowshipped all must ostracize this person until he or she repents. If a member does associate with the excommunicated, that person is to be ostracized as well. (However, in the late 1970s the Witnesses' Watchtower Society counseled members to have limited contact with an erring member if it concerned family matters.)
A common practice of the Witnesses is to berate someone publicly who fails to show repentance for committing acts contrary to church doctrine. This denunciation can be part of the sinner's penitence, as an ex-member is permitted to continue attending meetings even after hes been disfellowshipped. The congregation is not allowed to acknowledge his presence and goes on denouncing him as if he werent there. Once he repents, an ex-member can be reinstated within six months.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the world as we now know it is coming to an end. Only a few people will survive Armageddon, namely those who believe in its imminent reality, which is to say the Witnesses themselves. In this respect, the life of a Jehovah's Witness is comparable to that of someone on the Titanic in its final hour. Everyone knows that the ship is going down, but only some people have access to the lifeboats, of which there are too few, while the rest of the passengers face the prospect of certain doom. The Jehovah's Witnesses believe they have been chosen to bear witness to the truth of God's Plan, even as the rest of humanity drowns in ignorance all around them. This belief gives the Witnesses an inevitable if seldom acknowledged air of superiority. For my part, I always felt like an alien sent from another galaxy and dropped on earth. Why me? Why had I been chosen to bear this terrible Knowledge? Was I being tortured now as penance against some future reward? The sense of being a freak became at times overwhelming.
We are in the world but not of the world, the Witnesses are fond of saying. The everyday world in which others are immersed is something separate, temporary, illusory. Holding such a view, the Witness organization is loath to become involved in civil affairs; problems within the congregation are handled internally by a local body of Elders. Thus when it came to the attention of the Elders of our church that my father was sexually abusing the entire family, there was no talk of contacting the police, reporting our disclosure to the Children's Aid Society, or the like. Instead, the Elders met and held what had many of the trappings of a court trial, allowing each family member to tell his or her story, albeit under conditions that did more to intimidate the children than to encourage their honest testimony.
The church's separation from worldly affairs led to an unspoken taboo against outside interference and also a desire to remain innocent of the world. This created problems in how the Witnesses dealt with our particular case. In general, if someone has clearly broken a civil law, the Elders encourage him or her to go to the appropriate law enforcement officials. For example, a murderer had recently been encouraged by the Elders to confess his guilt to the police. But it appears they applied a double standard in our case. While recognizing the seriousness of his sinful, incestuous behavior, the Elders did not encourage Daniel D'Haene to turn himself in to the civil authorities.
This murder case - and the fact that our case followed closely on its heels - undoubtedly worked against us. One of the Elders handling our father's case, Elder Surin, was married to a relative of the murder victim. So here were four physically healthy children coming before him to testify against their father. We were seen not as victims but as participants in a series of sinful acts. And we were alive; what right did we have to complain? Such was the depth of ignorance of sexual abuse within the Witness society of 1973. (Still, Elder Surin wasn't completely nave. He later told me, I warned my wife to keep our children away from your father.)
The case was conducted by the Elders as a trial of sorts. Each of the children was questioned individually by the Elders in a highly structured format that didn't leave any room for compassion or tears. In the end, the Elder's decision was to disfellowship our father - a severe punishment from the standpoint of his immortal soul, but scarcely satisfactory for those of us who still had to live with this man. They also reproved our mother - who had known about the situation for two years (courtesy of my younger brother) - for not having reported it to the church authorities.
I wished at the time that someone would take us away from my father, but the Elders judgment seemed final and irrevocable. I was twelve years old and scarcely understood the legalities of the situation. If anything, the whole family now suffered from guilt by association with our excommunicated father. A condescending attitude from certain ministers - Gods chosen Elders - fed the feeling that a kind of negative energy was descending upon us from God. One traveling Witness overseer told me that from the moment he heard about our father's crime, he vowed never to touch another glass or cup in the Aylmer Kingdom Hall - because it was tainted by, your father's touch.
For a while at least, father was chastened by the Elders' decision - or at least by the fact that the secret was now out. "We have to stop," he said us at one point. But even at age twelve I found that statement laughable. We have to stop? The implication was that we had been consensual sex partners. His excommunication had him sufficiently worried that he decided to lay low for a while, but I guess we all knew that eventually hed be back. The abuse soon resumed and continued for another three years, ending only in 1976 when we escaped taking our mother with us.
Edited by - morrisamb on 22 July 2002 17:31:20