For decades, Jonah had no memories of several years of his childhood and early adolescence.
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Jonah was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness in a family he describes as ‘quite dysfunctional’. This was picked up by the elders and other members of their congregation and Jonah remembers that they were offered a lot of support.
He wonders if this may have made him appear vulnerable to the grooming and abuse that was to come.
Jonah was one of five children. He does not remember his father ever showing any ‘warmth or love’ while his mother was a much more affectionate person who was ‘maybe regretting the marriage’.
When he was eight or nine years old, a man, Mr B, joined their congregation from a different part of the country. Jonah relates that Mr B did not enroll in any of the programmes that adult members of the congregation normally did, but he seemed to enjoy making ornaments and giving them to the children.
After a while, Jonah noticed ‘a decided shift’ in Mr B’s behaviour. He singled Jonah out for attention, making sure that they sat next to each other at worship and on coach trips. Jonah remembers hearing an elder saying to his mother ‘it’s better if you sit together as a family’. This struck him as unusual and he wonders today if the elder suspected something was wrong.
Jonah says his family were quite poor, and Mr B began giving him expensive gifts. He ‘got to know mum and dad’ and would be invited over for tea and would sometimes take Jonah to his bedsit and give him ‘incredibly luxurious’ cream cakes.
Looking back, Jonah says he was aware that Mr B was ‘fawning over [him] too much’ and was generally getting ‘too close’. But at the same time, he adds, the older man felt like a ‘grandfather figure’ and it felt good to have someone so interested in him.
Gradually, Mr B’s behaviour began to make Jonah more uncomfortable. One day when they were out together walking a dog, he kicked the dog ‘really hard’. He began sexualising their conversations, referring to the bodies of the men and women that they saw on their walks. Once, after a Bible reading he squeezed Jonah’s upper thigh very tightly. Jonah remembers ‘I didn’t like it … it seemed too intimate’.
When Jonah was about 10 years old, Mr B invited him to a nearby city for a sightseeing weekend. Until very recently, all Jonah recalled about the weekend was eating in a ‘proper’ restaurant for the first time, and walking somewhere.
But he later learned from his sister that shortly after his return from the city trip, he became quite distant and withdrawn and Mr B stopped attending meetings with the congregation for a time.
After that, Jonah remembers seeing Mr B sitting with a young girl in Kingdom Hall and a few more times before he died but, he says, he ‘always felt very uncomfortable about [him], no affection at all’.
Many years after the weekend in the city, Jonah found himself struggling with physical illness and extreme mood swings. For some reason, memories of Mr B had been troubling him. He was referred to a counsellor and he began to experience intense flashbacks that left him feeling ‘overwhelming terror’.
Jonah finds it very hard to talk about what happened to him but is able to say that when they were in the city, Mr B took him to meet another man. The two men subjected Jonah to ‘choreographed … humiliating … sadistic’ sexual abuse. He says ‘I thought they were going to kill me … I still can’t comprehend how he could do what he did’. He remembers that he tried to fight during the abuse, but he ‘couldn't win’.
He also remembers that after that trip, he stopped spending time with the girls who were his friends and began playing rugby, only associating with boys. He believes this was a conscious decision to ‘toughen up’.
For decades, Jonah blocked out the memories, and only managed to describe the abuse to his therapist very recently.
He has contacted the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the hope of finding out some information about the abuser. He says the elder he spoke to was ‘a really nice guy’ who passed a letter from Jonah to senior members of the Kingdom Hall he attended as a boy.
When they responded, Jonah says, ‘they weren’t unfriendly, they were sympathetic…’ and described them as being ‘suitably horrified’. However, they questioned the role of his dad when he was being groomed, and said they did not think they could have done any more in terms of safeguarding. They had very little memory and no records of the abuser.
Jonah accepts that his parents were ‘very negligent’ in keeping him safe and he also thinks that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a duty of care to him which they failed to carry out. He believes that the grooming of him would have been obvious to anyone who was concerned enough to look out for it.
He feels that although Jehovah’s Witnesses consider the sexual abuse of children to be a ‘sin’, the effects on victims and survivors is not one of their paramount considerations.
Jonah would like to see the reporting of any allegations of child sexual abuse to be made mandatory and for clergy privilege to be withdrawn when it involves any safeguarding issues.
He would also like there to be greater awareness and training in safeguarding issues for clergy and congregations, and for this to be carried out by appropriately qualified and informed external experts.