Kerri says ‘I know I’m allowed to be angry but I don’t want the anger to control my life’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Kerri gives an emotional description of her feelings when she was sexually abused at the age of 13.
‘Overnight my whole world turned upside down … my own father, who I loved, became a person to fear.’
Kerri was brought up in a family of committed Jehovah’s Witnesses. She first experienced abuse by a member of the church when she was 12. The son of a senior figure – an elder – in the church invited her to play. He was older than Kerri. While they were alone, he exposed himself to her.
She says that at the time she knew very little about sex, but she knew something was wrong with what had happened. She confided in a close friend who was in the church, and following that, her father took her to see the father of the boy.
The elder told her to stop spreading lies, and made her apologise to his son.
Kerri’s father was also an elder in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When she was 13, he began sexually abusing her.
She tried to tell another elder what her father was doing, but neither he nor her mother would believe her. They told her that her father ‘would never do such a thing’ and that it must have been her imagination.
Kerri says ‘I had to live with the effects of my abuse from my father every day of my life, with no one to turn to or believe my story’.
She married before she was 20, to the son of the elder who disbelieved her when she disclosed the abuse by her father.
Kerri found sexual intimacy difficult, so she told her husband about the sexual abuse she had experienced. She was suffering with poor mental health and went for counselling.
Later, she tried talking to different elders about the difficulties she was having. When she became upset talking about the sexual abuse, one of them told her ‘Stop crying, face the facts, no emotions should be shown’.
Another elder asked her if she thought she had caused the abuse. ‘I still feel haunted by those words’ she says.
The Jehovah’s Witness church has a policy that allegations can only be investigated if there are two witnesses. When Kerri questioned this, she was advised that she needed to take medication to make her ‘easier to live with’.
Her husband agreed with the rule of two witnesses and gave Kerri absolutely no support. ‘I felt so let down and abandoned, just like the child that had no voice’ she says.
After some years, Kerri found the emotional strength to break away from the church. She wrote a letter explaining that the reason she was leaving was abuse, and the fact that she was not believed when she told the elders.
As a result, she was shunned by everyone in the congregation. She says ‘This makes me so angry, that I am paying the ultimate price for something they did to me’.
She also left her husband because he put his belief in policies that she felt were wrong before her welfare.
Kerri lives with several life-changing impacts of the abuse. She has suicidal thoughts, PTSD, depression and low self-esteem. She suffers with flashbacks and anxiety. She struggles to work, and to maintain relationships and trust people.
Kerri would like to see the Jehovah's Witness church held to account for the ‘extreme damage’ she believes they have caused. She believes that the two witness policy enables abusers, and that victims and survivors should be encouraged to report allegations to the police rather than untrained men in the congregation.
She would also like there to be more mental health support available for victims and survivors.
Kerri says that after a lifetime of feeling controlled by the church, and years of being affected by the abuse, she wants to move on with her life.
She concludes that in sharing her experience ‘I needed to be heard, without judgement, which I have never experienced’.