Madeleine was told at a young age by senior members of the church that ‘some women deserve’ sexual abuse
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Madeleine was sexually abused by two men in the Jehovah’s Witness faith.
She is very concerned about the control that men exercise over women in this religion.
Madeleine was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. She is one of a number of children in a large family. Her dad was excluded from the religion, and her mother married again.
She relates that the church ‘rushed my mum into another marriage, very quickly’. She added that her mother’s new husband, Madeleine’s stepfather, was known to have a criminal conviction, but the church did not disclose this during the ‘courtship’.
Madeleine’s stepfather sexually abused her. She was very young when the abuse started, but doesn’t know exactly how old she was. ‘It is my earliest memory’ she says.
She does know that she was primary school age when she first told one of the senior members of the church what was happening.
By this time, her mother had been trying to leave her stepfather for some time to keep the children safe, but the church had been preventing this.
As well as sexually abusing Madeleine, the stepfather physically and emotionally abused her siblings. She says ‘If we so much as spilled a drink, there would be hours of intimidation’.
Other members of the congregation saw that Madeleine and her siblings were often hungry and bruised, and reported concerns about the family to senior members of the church. However, they were told to mind their own business. Madeleine’s mother told people she wanted to leave her husband, but she was punished for this by loss of privileges in the church.
The senior members of the church did not take any action when Madeleine reported the abuse, and she didn’t feel she could tell anyone else. She says that in the Jehovah’s Witness church, ‘They tell you the whole world is full of dangerous people who deserve to be destroyed’.
Madeleine’s stepfather later left the family home. She says ‘I’d been bullied at primary school and I didn’t want to add to it by people knowing I’d been abused … so I closed the chapter on it and didn’t tell anyone’.
When she was in her early teens, a man groomed her and raped her. The abuser was closely involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but Madeleine was treated as the guilty party. She was reprimanded by the church and her family were instructed to shun her.
Madeleine’s academic performance was badly affected by the abuse she suffered. As an adult, she developed severe mental health problems, including PTSD. She suffered with pains, the cause of which could not be diagnosed, and she became addicted to medication.
Madeleine still belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She says that women in the church always have to be obedient to men and she has to defer to the men in the congregation who are supposed to act as ‘fathers’.
She comments ‘But they don’t act like fathers … they don’t understand that by perpetuating this culture where they are significantly more important than women, and women have to be obedient to men, that it’s their responsibility to be good men’.
She continues ‘They tell you some women deserve it, some women put themselves in bad situations. Those conversations happen so young in your life …’.
Madeleine would like to see the abolition of the two witness policy in the Jehovah’s Witness church, which says that for a crime to be proven in the congregation, it must be witnessed by two people.