I've submitted this comment on Allexperts in reply to Brenton's claims, it is awaiting approval.
<<You need to be very careful about listening to JWs regarding child abuse and the Royal Commission in Australia, that is because they may mislead you and often do not give ALL the relevant details. Funny but this is how Brenton feels about ex JWs and says so on his profile.
Brenton claims the following:-
" A law firm did an analysis of the data provided by the WTS over that 65 year period the break down into several, various components. Bellow is just one of those that shows what the number of 1006 cases is made up of
Perpetrators
Non family, non Witness - - - - 199 reports
Family, non Witness - - - 470 reports"
Well that's interesting, the Watchtower gave their full list of 1,006 alleged perpetrators to a legal firm to analyse - for their own benefit. They've been claiming client confidentiality for decades but here they're willing to give a legal firm all the details, voluntarily. No one was making them do this or requested it, it's simply something they Watchtower wanted to do to make themselves look better. Ironically, they don't want to voluntarily inform the higher officials of alleged child abuse because they say they believe in this client confidentiality. This is a significant problem that they have and is being pointed out at the RC.
To clarify the "1,006 cases". Let's be clear here. This is the number of individuals that have been accused of child abuse, unfortunately many of these individuals have been accused of abusing more than one child resulting in the number of incidences or cases of alleged child abuse to be much greater than that.
Now out of these 1,006 perpetrators Brenton claims this law firm calculated that 470 of the alleged individuals were non Witness Family members. It's not true. Fortunately we have this public document available to us that we can check. It can be found on the Aust Royal Commission Website under Case Study 29 (JWs) and is on the second page when you click on exhibits. This is the report prepared by the legal firm - "Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (“Commission”) – Analysis Summary – Comments and VerificationDocument ID: WAT.0018.001.0001_R"
The report shows that the 470 individuals were in fact JWs, they were also family members of the victims.
As to quoting a figure of 199 non witness, non family, let's examine that. The report actually states that there was 199 "Not Jehovah's Witness,Unbaptised or Status Unclear at the time of alleged abuse" To be accurate, this does not mean 199 were not JWs, it just means that it wasn't clear what their religious status was. It would also include 'publishers' who are not baptized but counted as JWs.
The Report that the Royal Commission prepared from information given to them by the Watchtower shows approx 87 were not JWs.
Please take note that JWs can't even be accurate about reporting on information that the Watchtower has specifically paid for, for their own benefit. >>