Thanks for the kind responses to this thread, (and COJ, I spoke with him at some length yesterday, thanks.)
I've noticed after reading more posts in this category that there is a strong tendency to expect a black and white (or polarized) answer to the two-witnesses rule: either it should ALWAYS be used for child abuse accusations, or it should NEVER be used for child abuse accusations. I didn't intend to express either opinion, nor did I want to make it appear that this was someone else's opinion.
Considering the very high numbers of child abuse accusations that have been extrapolated from the evidence to date, doesn't the likelihood of false accusations also increase? My guess is that it would be very unlikely that an accusing child on their own would ever dare re-face the accused -- the monster -- unless they were sure of the accusation. But are we going to try to say a false accusation won't or hasn't happened?
The closest analogy I have experienced is truly not on par with child molestation, but there may still be some lessons. I was recently asked to help "arbitrate" an after-school incident. We had a case of a young child who accused a friend's grandmother of swatting/pushing him. The grandmother tends to think that "it takes a village to raise a child" and evidently doesn't always remember to avoid the Biblical principle of "spare the rod, spoil the child." She finally admitted to making the motions that could have been interpreted as pushing and swatting but she denied actually touching the child. She even had her own grandchild with her, who supposedly witnessed it, whose story was obviously prepared to completely clear her. That grandchild "blew it" later by admitting that "she didn't hit him very hard" and I admit that I got him to use those words through some subtle speech cues. I wouldn't have done that, however, if it were not for the fact we already had spoken to three witnesses who all agreed that her grandchild was too far from the incident to see what he was describing. Also, I must note that other children who witnessed the incident could describe real "hitting/swatting/pushing" by this older woman when when they knew a parent was the one actually confronting the woman to "get her into trouble." When asked if they would step up to confront the older woman themselves, they were ready to describe a much more toned-down incident. Only the child who was swatted stood up to her. It was not possible to judge the physical pressure of the swatting/pushing. What I did have was the fact that there was almost a non-existent probability that the three child witnesses to the incident would have colluded in advance about the "cadence" of the swatting and pushing. Yet they were separately in agreement about the number and timing of hits/swats and that they preceded a couple of mild pushes to the chest.
Still, I knew that every one of those children, was susceptible to manipulations by parents and grandparents. Even the "innocent" question, "How hard did she hit you?" which I addressed to the accusing child during the controntation with the grandmother was wrong. It assumes that I was supporting the fact of a "hit." When the child honestly answered that it wasn't very hard, I quickly turned to the grandchild, and said, "Is that true, that she didn't hit him very hard?"
It would be as difficult to claim that a child always tells the complete truth as to claim that an older man who is accused will always tell the complete truth. Therefore credibility has to become part of the evidence. Everyone would expect that the accused in such cases is not likely to admit guilt. Too much is at stake. They could rationalize that hurting their own reputation, their family's reputation, and the organization's and/or Jehovah's reputation is a greater sin than the hurt to the child. An elder may therefore be even more inclined to self-medicate, prescribing a few extra "Hail Jehovah's and a higher dosage of Field Service." After all, they've treated the sins of others with the same formula.
It seems that if we are to be consistent in claiming that so many JW elders are willing to treat children as worthy of being merely used and and discarded, then the following scenario should not be too difficult to imagine:
An elder decides to step down and speak out because he is fed up with the WT judicial system based on some specific wrongdoing covered up by fellow elders, perhaps child molesting. One of those sinister fellow elders has a plan. He knows that a less than mentally balanced sister/child in the congregation once expressed an improper "crush" on the former elder in question. This elder, for the greater good of saving the reputation of the Organization, hatches a plan to see if the sister can "remember" any improper activity and see where it goes from there. Congregations, as I experienced them, had plenty of jealousies, rivalries, envies and a pretty good supply of mentally unbalanced people.
I don't have a good solution to offer, but I believe the WT should trust that the congregation is better served by treating any accusation as a possible crime, and making consistent use of secular authorities, both police and case workers who have expertise getting to the heart of such matters. The secular authorities becomes the second witness, if necessary. Additionally, the elders shouldn't be afraid to share "accusatory" information with a new congregation even if they were forced to treat the person as innocent due to lack of evidence by both their own investigation and that of the secular authorities. Any second accusation anywhere of any kind must serve as a second witness. From a PR perpective alone, the Society would have to see that their reputation is much worse each time one can show that their own rules made it easy to cover these crimes. Also, what would it hurt if any accused brother, after a lack of evidence to convict, still got counselling from a secularly accredited counselor. I don't think the WT track record has earned them enough trust in this matter to rely on their own "spiritual" accreditation alone.
Whether there are more JW abusers than in other groups. I wouldn't know. I would guess that, as religious groups go, Catholics would have the biggest problems due to celibacy in the priesthood. In many countries Catholics still represent the "general" population and wouldn't be expected to have a much smaller proportion of molestors, unless the level of guilt pushed many out of the church before they acted on their perversion. But we know that many feel the guilt and therefore stay to try to get God's help, lay and clergy alike. Any who leave the church might be counterbalanced by any molestors who choose the priesthood since that profession has the highest access to children - much higher I think than JWs afford.
JW's, however, get a large percentage of their number through conversion. Some of those converts may recognize a molestor's paradise, but I would hope the constant hammering about sexual sins of all kinds and maintaining cleanliness, Jehovah's reputation, and all that would effect some kind of filtering process. JWs do choose primarily from "marginalized" classes, and JWs have no real knowledge about counselling for such issues specifically. With other fundamentalists, JWs are very late in catching on to which Biblical principles are obsolete. (e.g., corporal punishment, absolute male headship, subjection of the female, undervaluation of present life based on blood issue, etc.) I was just explaining to my son yesterday on a different topic that in effect, the Mosaic Law, said it was bad to beat your slave to death, but more or less OK as long as it took the slave a couple days to die -- after all, the slave was your money, the Law said. Hammurabi's Law had exactly the same types of problems.
Gilgamesh
