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Is religion doing enough to root out abuse?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of BBC
Posted: July 26th, 2015
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33609927
From when Karen Morgan was 12, until she was well into her teens, she was sexually abused by her uncle - a ministerial servant with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Christian churches, as well as other religions, have faced claims of child abuse. But what is striking about the Jehovah's Witnesses is their explicit policy of dealing with abuse in-house, [and that] they insist there must be two witnesses to a crime. In Karen's case a second witness did come forward: Wendy, a family friend and fellow [church] member ... had been raped by the same man. Despite a pattern of predatory sexual behaviour, it took more than two decades to bring Wendy and Karen's abuser to justice. He is now serving a 14-year prison sentence. His punishment from the Jehovah's Witnesses? There wasn't one. When the case came to court, the organisation was reluctant to co-operate. Jehovah's Witnesses are not the only religious organisation to try to deal with allegations of sexual abuse in-house. For many decades, that was the preferred method of the Roman Catholic Church. Only this month, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish scholar from Manchester - who fled to Israel after he was exposed as a paedophile - was jailed for 13 years. The court had heard that both women who testified ... in the case had been "ostracised" by their community as a result of speaking out.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sex abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.
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