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…