Jehovah's Witnesses 'use the Bible to victim-shame,' sex abuse survivor says

[Space Merchant]

1 hour ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

By the Fourth Grade, I had read two, twenty volume sets of Encyclopedias.

It made me appear to be VERY smart, when in fact it was only memory.

There is a difference ... but I tend not to correct people about that.

Silly of me.

Hahahahaa

Or in another situation, you study hard, you study like no one else have studied, you read the books and crunched the numbers. Then the day of the test comes...... Your mind goes blank and you stare at the clock and your paper, knowing that all you have worked for, all you have sacrificed is for nothing, but you did the test anyway.

A day later, you received an F

and your reaction........?

 

That being said, knowledge is key, knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.

[JW Insider]

I don't know if anyone provided an update to this story, but the "brother" finally pled guilty, and was sentenced to five years, for three felony counts of child rape with two different victims.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-who-raped-jehovah-s-witness-girls-sentenced-5-years-n1082136

Elihu Rodriguez, 32, of Yakima, Washington, was given five years, the maximum sentence prosecutors had asked for, after Rodriguez pleaded guilty to three felony counts of child rape in the third degree in September. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender. Both of his victims attended the sentencing, which took place Friday at the King County Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, Washington.

I believe this was the case I was told something about in 2018, which is why I mentioned then that I couldn't say much because it was an upcoming court case. If it's the same one, then someone (parent?) convinced her not to report it because it was just a matter that this 25-year-old was in love with her, and so they told her it was actually multiple acts of fornication, not child abuse or child rape.

She agreed not to report on the basis that she would be considered guilty of fornication, too. So the family moved to another congregation, and within months, she got to a point where she decided she needed to report it to the elders. (I don't think it was because she learned about another girl being raped/abused by the man, even though this would make sense.) When she did report it to her new congregation's elders in 2013, they actually called the legal department just as they were supposed to, but evidently someone thought it was going to be possible to treat this as "consensual" and the elders tried to get her to say it was consensual. She refused to agree with the elders that it was consensual, and took it to the authorities.

When I heard about this case (or perhaps another one just like it) I was only told the general area of the US, and some circumstances, but no names. I was only told that this was disturbing that someone would try to turn a child molestation case of a "16 year old girl" into a consensual case in spite of the young age. (I was not told that she was actually 14/15.) Years earlier, J R Brown, as a spokesmen for the Society, had tried to minimize a lot of these cases by saying that a lot of them are like cases of an 18 year old boy with a 16 year old girl, which sounded a bit like the old "boys will be boys" excuse.