Can JW Television (digital news) be trusted?

[JW Insider]

On 6/7/2023 at 8:28 PM, Fausto Hoover said:

Could you explain why you rounded the number of reported cases to 1700 while there are many others that went unreported?

Sure. I had added that information to a post a ways back, but I added it by editing the post almost 3 minutes after I first posted it and you had already responded to before seeing the edit. Here it is:

On 6/7/2023 at 7:13 PM, JW Insider said:

If memory serves, however, it was 1006 perpetrators and about 1700+ children. (Many perpetrators are reported to abuse more than one child over long periods of time.) Over a third of the cases were related to their abusers, although this does not always fit the term "incest" which I used rather loosely above. Also although a 20-year time frame covered MOST of the cases, there were several outliers that went further back. I think there might have even been a case where a perpetrator might have admitted to starting his crime spree as early as 1938.

I have the docs on another laptop I stopped using because it was giving me problems. But I did keep notes in OneNote which I can retrieve on any computer. It's not the source, but it says 1,006 perpetrators and 1,732+ children.

When I looked up your link I also noticed that a person identifying as a JW on Reddit is defending against the potential exaggerations. He admits the same thing here:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/exjw/comments/a6cmmo/an_answer_from_a_jw_regarding_the_arc_1006_cases/
He (or she) says:

Quote

These data are based on this official ARC document:

1006 is not the number of cases of abuse but the number of people who were at some point accused of child abuse.

[Pudgy]

All data presented can be completely checked. It is WORK.

[TrueTomHarley]

13 hours ago, Fausto Hoover said:

From the commenter you cited: ‘Of those "902 did not involve a Jehovah's Witness Official. First, the position of the perpetrator within the organization doesn't prove anything.’

Of course it does. Would one hold Macy’s responsible for the conduct of its shoppers?

[Srecko Sostar]

WAT.9999.013.0012 analiza s brojevima slučajeva.pdf

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/WAT.9999.013.0012.pdf

As far as I know the police have not gone into the main WTJWorg branch for Australia and searched/collected  for CSA documents from the closets and archives in the basement . This data was provided by WTJWorg Australia, voluntarily. I guess, the elders at Australia Bethel have decided what to store and how they will classify, mark the cases and what types of people (what kind of relationship were they with JW's) they will list in relation to CSA  and JW congregations.

Is it a question that there should be no CSA among JWs? If someone expects that, then they are naive. But, JWs surely live in the belief that this should not be among them, because they stick to the Bible. There is generally a great deal of mutual trust in JW congregations.
WTJWorg theology teaches believers to trust one another, to have complete trust in their elders, and to be wary of worldly people and governments.
JW members were supposed to confide in their elders, and they told them that the assembly aka elders would solve the problems. And to be careful not to slander (dragging in the mud) YHVH's name in front of the authorities.

 

[JW Insider]

On 6/7/2023 at 9:43 PM, Fausto Hoover said:

Well, perhaps one day. The ARC presented the 1006 cases in their investigation. Perhaps the other cases you have mentioned were rejected by them. Therefore, the total amount after 65 years should stay at 1006.

The thing is, it never was 1,006 cases [instances]. It was 1,006 perpetrators, per the numbers the Watchtower Branch provided to the ARC. It was always at least 1,732 cases, per the numbers the Watchtower Branch provided to the ARC. 1,006 "cases" was just a very common sloppy reading of the numbers. I saw it being misreported that way on the first day of the ARC hearings. Only a few people corrected it. I recalled the number vaguely because when I saw people making the correction, I looked it up myself to make sure it was right before commenting on it.

Although I have looked at my notes, I still haven't got out my old computer with the files (and I don't plan to for at least a week). But I did find a site (unfortunately it is generally an anti-JW site) and that site has numbers that pretty much match all my own notes from MS-OneNote. I won't link to it, but you could look up any of the lines in Google and would probably find it easily:

I don't know if every statement is true. I don't even know if the Watchtower Branch provided all the data. (In fact, I heard from the Australian brother that several Witnesses were already suspicious when some notorious cases were missing from the Gold Coast, Queensland area.) At any rate, here is their summary of the ARC data that generally matched my own notes taken directly from the ARC data:

• There was at least 1732 children who were sexually abused. Over 650 of those children were abused by family members.
• At least 170 of the children sexually abused were under the age of 5.
• There was 1006 alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Of that number, 15 were women.
• 579 of the alleged abusers confessed to their crime(s). 306 did not. Of the remaining 121, it’s unclear whether they confessed or not.
• 95 of the alleged child abusers were not Jehovah’s Witnesses when they committed their first sexual abuse.
• 65 of the alleged child abusers were ministerial servants; 42 were elders;  8 were pioneers; and 1 was a circuit overseer.
• At least 56 ministerial servants and 27 elders were deleted from their roles. 6 elders and 2 ministerial servants were re-appointed to their roles.
• Over 33 ministerial servants, 13 elders and 1 pioneer were disfellowshipped.
• 14 ministerial servants, 4 elders and 1 pioneer were convicted for Child Sexual Abuse by the Australian authorities, yet 3 of those elders and 3 of those ministerial servants were never disfellowshipped for their crimes.
• Not a single instance of Child Sexual Abuse was ever reported to the authorities by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, Fausto Hoover said:

Part of the ARC allegation was the 2 witness rule and how the victim was forced to confront the accused.

The problem here was that much of the data came from a time when the victim really was forced to confront the accused. And there was evidence that it had happened since 1999, too. And the elders testifying at the ARC didn't help when they wouldn't reject the old policy. 

And of course, a similar problem happened when the elders, even Bro. Jackson himself wouldn't completely reject the court's understanding of how we implement the two-witness policy.

[JW Insider]

19 minutes ago, Fausto Hoover said:

Inflating figures without substantial evidence is an unwise decision.

Deflating them is unwise, too.

19 minutes ago, Fausto Hoover said:

You are the original author of the submitted post.

That's a very odd, and unsubstantiated accusation. I'm not the original author. Just as I would not claim that you are somehow the author of the incorrect information about only 1,006 "cases." That same misinformation had been spread dozens of times before you repeated it. It's not your fault. Also, I have never made a comment on reddit, or do I have an account there anyway. So the JW defender who happens to disagree with you, is NOT me. He just happens to agree with me and he happens to agree with the ARC data provided by the Watchtower Branch.

[JW Insider]

9 minutes ago, Fausto Hoover said:

My exhibit of the ARC document proves my point

Sorry. I didn't see your exhibit of the ARC document. Is it in this thread?

[Space Merchant]

3 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Of course it does. Would one hold Macy’s responsible for the conduct of its shoppers?

Or possible the bombshell that is Facebook/Instagram (which was mentioned to Butler as a forwarning) that has recently taken place, and or some diabolical stuff regarding CSA that is associated with other media, even the schools; hence why I believe people such as Mel Gibson, will eventually be a media focus in the coming days or weeks.

Among other things, there is the Non-Institutional stuff that is taking place, which, compared to schools and churches, can often times be as complex to deal with like the social media stuff.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, Fausto Hoover said:

The number you promote. Therefore, it's your contention the information is true.

I don't promote these numbers to be true at all. I can only refer to the numbers that show up in the documents that were, for a time, all available on the ARC website. I have no way of verifying if those numbers are correct. I can only verify what numbers I have seen within those documents. The documents could be completely without merit for all I know. I have made it pretty clear that it is NOT my contention that the information is true. It could be a lot worse than these numbers purport, or it could be a lot better. All I have is the data provided.

This is why my focus was on where that claim of "383 cases reported to the police" came up. It wasn't in any early discussions of the ARC. I didn't see it in any ARC documentation. I vaguely recalled a claim that some [more recent] cases really had been reported to the police, but no one made a claim that reports related to the 1.006 perpetrators came from the Witnesses, or from the Branch, or from congregation Elders. From what I can see so far, it was first on Bitterwinter many years after the ARC hearings. I assumed I must have missed that key piece of data, and it would be very useful data to prove bias on the part of the Australian court.

1 hour ago, Fausto Hoover said:

The number you promote. Therefore, it's your contention the information is true. . . . The false claim was never retracted and that would have been helpful.

Yes, the exhibit information is there in my post. The exhibit information is too lengthy.

I'm not at all concerned about whether you agree with Jehovah's Witnesses who report 1,006 perpetrators vs those who read it as 1,006 cases of CSA. Your Bitter Winter "Holly Folk" link does not deny that they were "perpetrators." On the link you provided, she says:

Based on this document, the media reported that there had been 1,006 perpetrators who had committed sexual crimes in Australia . . .

I have no stake one way or another as to whether these numbers are correct, and it's a bit late to try to get a retraction from Holly Folk, or to get a retraction from all the JWs and non-JWs who reported those numbers as they read them.

You referred to some contention over the numbers, and you indicated that JWs are making a "false claim" when they read this as 1,006 perpetrators. Against that supposedly "false claim" you said: Yes, the exhibit information is there in my post." And you said: "My exhibit of the ARC document proves my point ."

I looked for that exhibit and found nothing that counters the numbers provided by other Witnesses, or the Branch numbers, or Holly Folk. It turned out that your exhibit had nothing to do with the numbers you claimed were false. It had to do with the timing of certain CSA policies.

[JW Insider]

3 hours ago, Fausto Hoover said:

Because BHC did report her claim to the police.

If "BHC" was a victim herself, and reported to the police, then is not related to the common claim about whether any congregation elders, the Branch, or legal representatives of the Branch, ever voluntarily reported any cases to the police. I guess I see your point, though. It's possible that someone could have found a way to add up any of the 1700+ cases that actually did finally make it to the police even if it was from victims themselves. Yet we already know that many of these reports happened many years after the congregation's and Branch documents showed that they already were aware of some of these cases, and had never reported them. Most of the time, the victims who reported also waited many years before reporting. If this is the case, then I am pretty disgusted with Holly Folk's false implication about the 383. I understand that they (at BitterWinter) want to build a niche audience supportive of "new religions" and their support is often helpful. But it should be done honestly or it isn't worth so much in the long run. 

[Pudgy]

Yes, please calm down JWI … and while you are at it, keep it secret behind closed doors … and don’t run with scissors … and don’t track mud across the nice clean agenda!