Arlene felt it was her duty to put up with abuse from her father to protect her sister
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Arlene grew up with her sister and brother in the 1970s and 80s. Her mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, and this was one of many issues that her parents fought over.
Her father was an alcoholic who was extremely violent towards the females in his family. He also sexually abused Arlene for seven years.
Arlene explains that her mother was ‘really strict, and had all kinds of rules about everything’. As a result, at school, she felt ‘different to everyone else’.
She remembers her father first being violent to her when she was about five years old. He punched her in the face and her mother told the dentist that she had tripped going up the stairs. She says this is how she learned to keep secrets about abuse.
Arlene knows that some people were aware of the violence at home because the children and their mother sometimes had to leave the family home when her father ‘kicked off’. However, she explains that, in their religion, it wasn’t acceptable for a woman to leave her husband.
The sexual abuse began when Arlene’s mother had to be admitted to hospital. Arlene, who was seven years old, and her sister were left in the care of their father, while their brother was sent somewhere else.
She says at this point ‘things went from bad to worse’. Her father did not sexually abuse her sister, and Arlene thinks that this was because she was older and ‘quite rebellious’. However, he did physically abuse her. Arlene explains that she felt it was her ‘duty’ to keep things calm and try and stop her father being violent.
She hoped that the sexual abuse would end when her mother came out of hospital, but it did not, and in fact it continued until she was in her mid teens. She said there was no one she could talk to about it, and being isolated at school made everything worse.
She did make a few friends at secondary school. She did well with her studies but she remembers finding PE difficult, because she was concerned about her bruises being seen.
Arlene describes how violence was ‘a regular feature of Sunday afternoons’ because her father would go to the pub and come home drunk. She says her mother was weak and did nothing to defend them. She is not sure if she knew about the sexual abuse.
The police were frequently called to the house because of the frequent domestic violence. Arlene doesn’t remember any of them speaking to her as a child, but ‘just settling down’ her father and leaving again.
When Arlene was in her mid teens she put a lock on her bedroom door. She describes how her father ‘went absolutely ballistic and kicked the door in’. However, it woke everyone up and although he did not sexually abuse her again, he became even more violent towards her after that.
Finally, around the time she was in her mid teens, her mother left her father with approval of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Arlene moved away with her mother. She got a part-time job and started dating someone. One day, when she went to his place, he raped her. She says ‘I hadn’t really expected it … hadn’t wanted it but he didn’t take no for an answer, and it happened’.
Arlene says she felt guilty, and didn’t quite understand what had just happened. But she talked to a friend, who told a Jehovah’s Witness Elder.
Very quickly, Arlene says, she found herself in a ‘judicial committee’ with three men who made her go though every stage of what happened. She says ‘It was horrendous ... the questions’.
The Elders decided that she wasn’t sufficiently repentant for what had happened and she was ‘disfellowshipped’, or excluded, from the church. No one reported it to the police.
The Elders later decided she could be reinstated but by that time she did not want to be a Jehovah’s Witness.
Looking back on her experience, Arlene feels that the professionals involved with their family because of the domestic abuse should have done more to protect the children. She is critical of the lack of concern for safeguarding in the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion. She says they ‘feel like they’re above the law’.
Arlene married and had children. She ran a business for a time, and now works to help vulnerable people.