AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
June 18, 2016
Michael Bachelard
Investigations Editor, The Age
Known for its obsession with privacy and its silencing tactics, the Exclusive Brethren has managed to avoid any scrutiny over alleged child sex abuse. Until now.
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.
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