When Sherry Johnson was eleven, she found one day that she’s gonna marry a 20-year-old member of her church who had raped her. She became pregnant and in order to avoid investigation and criminal case, her family and church officials decided to make the girl a legal wife of this monster.
“My mom asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said, ‘I don’t know, what is marriage, how do I act like a wife?’” Johnson remembers today, many years later. “She said, ‘Well, I guess you’re just going to get married.’”
However, her case is one of thousand cases of child marriage. According to statistics, children 16 and under are still being married in Florida at a rate of one every few days.
Johnson and her family also attended a conservative Pentecostal church and that other girls of a similar age periodically also married. One girl said when she was 10 she was raped by both a minister and a parishioner and later gave birth to a daughter. There were all documents confirming her and her child’s age, but still, the judge approved the marriage to end the rape investigation, telling her,
“What we want is for you to get married.”
And nevertheless, America prefers to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, like in Syria, calling it “defending freedom” rather than to change states’ laws and to protect American children from rape, coercion and molestation.
Today, Johnson is campaigning for a state law to stop underage marriage that has already become a norm in some states.
Please, help me to raise awareness to this issue. No one can remain indifferent to the problem of child molestation.
Do me a favor and reblog this. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a high control cult most known for their door to door evangelicalism work. Recently, they have been outed for their backward “two witnesses” policy that allows abusers and pedophiles to stay in places of power in their congregation and abuse others.
Do not open your door to them, do not stop at their witnessing carts, do not read their publications, do not interact with them. As well as being complicit in thousands of child abuse cases, they are a cult that uses mind control tactics and fearmongering to keep their members isolated from the rest of the world and reality of what their cult is doing to them. They are dangerous and interacting with them is dangerous.
I know OP personally and they’ve told me a lot about this and i cannot stress enough how serious of a matter this is. please spread awareness about this!!
I don’t normally reblog stuff like this but I was born and raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and I can let you know right know that this problem is much, much more common than you’d initially think.. and there’s so much more than just this.
End the idea that Jehovas witnesses are just annoying door to door salesmen- cults arent punchlines
Wide Spread Interests 