This just rolled in from silentlambs...
JW silent lambs protest
September 27 2002
is a day the Watchtower Society is likely to remember.
Protest marchers are due to walk just seven city blocks in Brooklyn, New York to 25 Colombia Heights, the headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses, now considered one of the world's wealthiest religions.
Compared with most protest marches the participants will be few in number. Some will be JWs or ex-JWs, other people may have no religious affiliation at all. Yet the marchers will be united by a common theme: they will all have experienced or been eye-witnesses of the machinations of the secretive Governing Body running the cult, which, it seems, has allowed Watchtower policy to physically harm and emotionally ruin children.
Woolly lambs
Outside the headquarters individuals will speak briefly about the hurt they have either witnessed or personally experienced. It is intended that each individual should carry a small toy woolly lamb, to represent themselves or another person. The event will be unique as, although protest marches among JWs are very rare, protest marches against the Governing Body are totally unheard of.
The lambs are not just for ornament. They have become a symbol for a rapidly-growing group of people who have suffered at the hands of the Watchtower Society. This group, calling itself 'Silentlambs', was begun by Bill Bowen, a JW of 43 years' standing, 20 of them as an elder. While an elder Bill had become aware that a fellow-elder had abused a child several times. Bill wanted to notify the police, but found the matter was being covered-up in his local Kingdom Hall. Eventually he telephoned the legal desk at the Watchtower headquarters, and was told not to get involved. Stunned and profoundly shocked, he resigned from his eldership and went public. But how to reach out and help those abused ones?
Bill had no idea where they were or how many might be suffering. So was born the website 'Silentlambs'. Bill may have expected a trickle of emails, but he suddenly found himself inundated. Many months later he still gets emails every day, and has had over 27,000 visitors to the site.
Silentlambs became for so many hurt souls their first chance to write and tell of their personal grief and pent-up guilt and anger. Some, incapable of speaking openly of their ordeals in the cult, chose to write poems. Again and again the themes were played out in the emails, as abusers were often believed, but the children were branded as liars by disbelieving elders. The correspondence confirmed to Bill that the cover-up mentality was not just a local one, it was endemic in the entire cult. As he expressed it, the movement was a 'paradise for paedophiles'. Since the group began Bill Bowen estimates that he has received around 1,000 stories while another 5,000 people have emailed or contacted him via the internet or by telephone. In May members staged a candle-lit vigil outside the Kingdom Hall in Benton, Kentucky.
BBC Panorama
When the BBC's Panorama investigated the problem in mid-July it dealt with cases in the UK and the USA. Following the programme the Silentlambs website logged around 200 emails in the first 24 hours. By the end of July around 50 new cases of abuse had been reported over the net. Interest in the programme can be gauged by the email response of over 1,000 letters to the BBC, the second highest the Panorama programme has ever received.
The responses to the programme were split 50/50, with JWs in the main stressing there were no serious problems, but others telling a rather different story. Viewing figures indicate this was the most-watched Panorama of the past ten productions.
Sara Poisson
Particularly tragic was the story of Sara Poisson. A battered wife, with daughters whom she suspected were being abused by her JW husband, she went to the elders at her Kingdom Hall for help. Rather than dealing with the problem they told her to go home, pray more and be a better wife. As time passed and the evidence of ongoing abuse continued to mount, Sara went again and again to plead for help and protection. Still she was turned away - with the same instructions. As she was totally dominated by the eldership it never occurred to her to seek outside help.
Eventually, when the school reported substantial bruising on her children, social workers stepped in. The ultimatum was clear: leave your husband or your children go into care. Knowing that to leave him would see her cast out of the local congregation she did just that. This left her homeless, penniless and shunned by all her former JW friends.
Some time later, Holly, one of the abused daughters, went to the police and told them all that had happened at the hands of her father. It was another four years before the father, Paul Berry, was charged with 17 charges of aggravated sexual assault. Even then, after the testimony of the family to the court, some two dozen JWs came forward to offer character witness for the accused.
Phone-in
Following the Panorama presentation the BBC ran a phone-in programme on Radio 5. Again and again individuals called in (often using assumed names) to relate their own experiences of child abuse in the Watchtower cult. Running through the narratives was a theme of guilt and pain combined with an eldership that often seemed not to believe or did not want to believe the facts presented to them.
The response of the JW movement is that for someone to be found guilty of anything there must have been two witnesses present. This may be well and good, but it must be admitted that paedophiles do not usually operate with bystanders about, unless they are fellow paedophiles.
It goes without saying that the vast majority of JW parents are loving, kind people who cherish their children and the idea of abuse is total anathema to them. The Watchtower movement is not unique in having this problem. Yet it is also very plain that something is seriously wrong with any organisation that cannot face the reality of what is going on inside it. The Panorama programme noted the reticence of some elders to co-operate with police even when individuals were reported by their victims.
One officer spoke of elders as being 'criminally negligent' when they failed to pass information to the police. In some cases recorded on the Silentlambs website, Jehovah's Witnesses who reported abusers to the police have been excommunicated from the cult.
Sorry?
One thing was very noticeable in the Panorama presentation: the lack of the simple word, 'sorry'. No one from the movement expressed any regrets to the poor traumatised individuals who painfully told their experiences. If we take the material on the Silentlambs website, there are many hundreds of people whose lives have been wrecked and defiled at the hands of evil individuals. What of those elders who have disbelieved suffering children? Can we expect apologies from them? Or does an external sanitised version of the cult come before truth and justice?
Is it possible that when that little band of sufferers stand outside the Brooklyn headquarters in late September at least someone will come out to them and say 'sorry'. It would be a kindness to do so but the Watchtower has a very long history of not apologising for its errors. It is doubtful if it will do so now.
Richard E. Cotton
[email protected]
http://info@silentlambs.org
Copyright Evangelicals Now - September 2002
Edited by - Grits on 3 September 2002 17:16:33
Edited by - Grits on 3 September 2002 17:18:29