LATE ONE night, a frightened girl whispered a terrible secret into her mother's ear. It was about the man in whose house she was living – an elder of the Christian sect to which they all belonged.
But if the girl thought telling her mum would make it stop, she had not reckoned on the power of the Exclusive Brethren.
Just days after her disclosure in mid-2002, the girl's mother brought her back to the man's house in a NSW regional town. The elder's wife took the child into the room where it had happened. Then the interrogation began. For hours the woman questioned the little girl. She made her act out the attacks. "She wanted me to show her what [her husband] had done to me, she wanted me to demonstrate," the girl later told a judge.
So long did it go on that the child's own mother left the room to sleep.
Later still, the perpetrator himself, Lindsay Jensen – nearly two metres tall, weighing 100 kilograms, rich, pious, respected in his religious community – came in and confronted the girl himself.
"My memory is that I said to [her], 'Just tell the truth … tell me what I am supposed to have done,' " Jensen told a court in 2005.
Finally, the girl relented to the pressure and signed a note on a little lined page saying that she had lied. "I have always thought of the relationship between Lindsay and I as a father/daughter relationship," she wrote in childish script, "and I was glad for it because I needed some sort of father.
"The things that I said that happened, I don't believe they happened at all."
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Former Brethren member and spokesperson Tony
McCorkell: “I deeply regret my part in keeping
the lid on this,” he says. |
IF THE Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse tells us anything, it's that rule-bound, male-dominated hierarchies, such as the Catholic Church, private schools and corrective institutions, create the environment for some men to commit crimes against the children over whom they hold sway. The power of the institution is then bent to covering it up.
The Royal Commission has examined everything from Sydney's Knox Grammar School to the Jehovah's Witnesses; Cardinal George Pell to Tennis NSW. But not the Exclusive Brethren, a wealthy Protestant sect of 40,000 worldwide (including 15,000 in Australia), led by Sydney-based Bruce Hales. Among the Brethren (now rebranded as the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church), public scrutiny is shunned just as surely as are radios, TVs, voting and other trappings of "worldly" society.
So far this group has managed to fly under the radar.
That is about to change. (
more...)
