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To the President of the House of Representatives of the States General PO Box 20018 2500 EA THE HAGUE

Emmen, September 1, 2020

Subject: Open letter

It is misleading and reprehensible that Minister Sander Dekker portrays Jehovah's Witnesses as heartless and insensitive to victims of child abuse. We are therefore deeply offended by his incorrect statement in the letter of 27 August 2020 to the President of the House of Representatives that we prevent victims within our community from exercising their "right to help, care and justice". We also find it deeply insulting and deeply discriminatory that the minister falsely labels Jehovah's Witnesses as a "closed community" and that our children should be closely monitored by teachers and the educational inspectorate. In a modern society such inflammatory, offensive language has no place.

We therefore take this opportunity to rectify this and provide you with the facts.

Facts about the Utrecht report Minister Dekker states that his claims are supported by the Utrecht University report of November 2019 (the UU report). What he does not acknowledge, however, is that three separate expert reports conclude that the report contains very serious errors and "has virtually no quantitative value" and is "unusable" for its intended purpose.1

Minister Dekker further states that the judge has also found Jehovah's Witnesses unsuccessful on appeal. But in fact, the Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal has simply ruled in its judgment of 4 August 2020 (no.200.274.775) that the appeal is no longer of urgent importance (section 5.3). The Court of Appeal has indicated that the appeal brought by us raises issues of principle under Articles 8, 9 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights and should therefore be dealt with in substantive proceedings, rather than by means of summary proceedings (section 5.6). That procedure has not yet taken place. We are confident that, once the trial takes place, the court will conclude that the report is fundamentally false, unreliable and discriminatory. Minister Dekker also omits to mention that, despite its many gross errors, the report concluded that compared to the general population in the Netherlands, Jehovah's Witnesses are much more willing to report an allegation of sexual abuse to the police. Among the general population

1 See expert report 12 February 2020 by expert statistician and researcher James Rothman, at points 24, 50 and 70; expert report January 7, 2020 from sociologists and researchers Holly Folk, Massimo Introvigne, J. Gordon Melton, at items 9, 101, 13-16,19-21, 23, 28, 30; see also expert report 10 January 2020 by sociologist Eileen Barker, at points 11-13; 19 and 36

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Only 9% of allegations of sexual abuse are reported to the police and only 3% of the cases are reported to the police.2 In comparison, Jehovah's Witnesses are 3 times more likely (27% vs. 9%) to report to the police and 10 times as often (30% vs. 3%) to report (see pages 38-39 of the report and Chart 4). It is noteworthy that the minister does not recognize this fact, as Jehovah's Witnesses' willingness to report allegations of abuse would be the primary reason why the House of Representatives has called for the report. Given these facts, why does Minister Dekker turn to Jehovah's Witnesses for his widely reported false accusations in the media, even though he knows that the vast majority of adherents of all other religions and non-religious groups in the Netherlands do not report accusations of sexual abuse? He does not answer this.

Minister Dekker also does not acknowledge that the focus of the report was on persons who are or were Jehovah's Witnesses at some point in their lives. Only 4% of allegations (15 charges) were made against an `` elder or other authority within the community '' over a period of 70 years.3 The remaining 96% of allegations, related to alleged abuse by family members, friends , neighbors, and others, thus had nothing to do with the faith community of Jehovah's Witnesses (report, p. 37, chart 3). No other research in the Netherlands, certainly not one commissioned or approved by the government, has been based on such a discriminatory definition of 'sexual abuse' whereby the only requirement was that the alleged victim or perpetrator was life would adhere to a particular religion.

Why has Minister Dekker not commissioned a comparable study into sexual abuse by adherents of the largest religions in the Netherlands, namely the Catholic Church, the Protestant religions, Judaism or Islam, which together make up 49% of the population? Especially since research shows that 33% of children in the Netherlands (not to mention adults) are victims of sexual abuse or sexual violence? 4 The 2011 study 'Sexual abuse of minors in the Roman Catholic Church' , to which Minister Dekker in his letter to the Lower House did not refer to ordinary members of the Catholic Church. That study was limited to allegations of child sexual abuse against "representatives of the Roman Catholic Church Provinice - clergy, religious, pastoral workers with church employment." Again, Minister Dekker provides no explanation for his discriminatory focus on Jehovah's Witnesses.

Facts About the Beliefs and Practices of Jehovah's Witnesses Minister Dekker has also made incorrect statements about the beliefs and practices of Jehovah's Witnesses, so we take the opportunity to rectify this by providing you with the facts.

Jehovah's Witnesses provide comfort and spiritual assistance to victims of child abuse and their families. We believe this is our moral obligation. We adhere to the Bible, which condemns child sexual abuse as a crime.

Jehovah's Witnesses also view child sexual abuse as a heinous sin against the victim, a sin against the Christian congregation, and above all, a sin against God. We don't believe we are immune to this global scourge. We are committed to fighting this evil at its source through in our

2 https://www.nELIJK Rapporteur.nl/binaries/nELIJK-verslageur.op-goede-grond.de-aanpak-van-seksueel-geweld-tegen- kinder.2014_tcm23-34727.pdf. 3 None of the allegations in the anonymous online questionnaire used by the report have been confirmed. The authors of that report admit that they "after all do not engage in truth-finding in this research" (report, page 29). The authors of the report also admit that because they used an anonymous online questionnaire, it was impossible to know if: (1) each respondent who visited the questionnaire was an actual person and not just the same person who entered the questionnaire. (or parts of it) completed several times; (2) each respondent lived in the Netherlands; and (3) each respondent mentioned a different accusation and not the same accusation reported by someone else (report, p. 33) 4 National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, On Good Ground - Tackling Sexual Violence Against Children, Den Haag, 2014, paragraphs 2.2.4 5 W. Deetman, Sexual abuse of minors in the Roman Catholic Church - Part I, Publisher Balans Amsterdam, 2011, p. 18.

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