AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
July 28, 2015
Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter
As a child growing up in a strict Jehovah’s Witness household she was taught to obey her father as head of the family and warned that outsiders were “worldly people” who served Satan.
In a harrowing day of evidence before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the woman detailed how her father repeatedly sexually abused her and her three sisters.
I wanted to dig a hole and die.
The father, given the pseudonym BCH, was a respected figure in the church who would conduct door-to-door preaching and deliver talks from an elevated platform at his congregation’s kingdom hall in Queensland.
At home the man became a tyrant, with the commission hearing that he would beat his daughter so hard with a leather belt she would bleed from the welts.
The woman, now 43 and using the pseudonym BCG, told the commission that her father repeatedly molested her.
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