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All this jumping around about the Catholic Church, you do know about the rate of child sex abuse in the Jehovah's Witnesses, right guys?

When I was working in the SS, we had several rings of paedophiles uncovered who had joined the JWs, because of the way in which JWs don't trust external things like the police, the social services, the school authority etc and instead govern all aspects from inside the community via 'Elders', several of whom were themselves child molesters. The traditional stance as ordained by the watchtower is that if an allegation is made by a child, that it's best for the family to try to work it out themselves over the course of several weeks before the elder should take any further action...

Quite terrible things are going on, even when the reports are made by children to elders, the elders simply submit the reports back to the watchtower. The Governing Body of Elders is reputed to hold a database with the largest list of unreported child sex attack allegations in the world.

This mentions the database:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silentlambs

Frazzled wrote:Churches are particularly choice targets for pedophiles due to the kids. We have serious back ground tests and procedures for any volunteers with children. We also will exclude people who check out but don't feel right.

We don't let damnyankees in either, but thats a whole different issue.

See, that's why certain churches/denominations are going to be lower risk, the open style and freedom of expression seen in a modern baptist church for example, or methodist, would be extremely difficult for a predatory paedophile to operate in, since they rely on being left alone with children in a religion that teaches silence and ingrains guilt and a sense of sin. JWs and Catholic backdrop is based around absolute authority of the elder or priest as the living word. Much emphasis in those faiths is built around suppression and obedience and silence.

Your average, open, lively church that encourages interaction and community is far less likely to be targeted and far more difficult for a sexual predator to commit crimes in.