Since its start-up in March 2013, AAWA’s mission has been: To educate non-Jehovah’s Witnesses (those who are not JWs and not ex-JWs) around the world about Watchtower abuses. By working behind the scenes, we have seen steady progress from our efforts.
Before we share some of our successes, we would like to report what did not work for us.
In the beginning, the founders of AAWA thought that building a large social network made up with hundreds of volunteers would be the road to success. That did not happen.
However, with very little fanfare and some significant help from just a few well-informed and dedicated volunteers, AAWA has managed to produce some significant results.
Our most successful strategy was creating a network of support outside the ex-JW community. Among those important partners from around the world are mental health care providers, writers, educators and members of the media – individuals who are familiar with and understand cult dynamics and unethical persuasion methods.
Because of these alliances, three milestone successes achieved in 2015 were:
1) Securing 501 (C) (3) status for AAWA from the Internal Revenue Service in the United States.
2) Helping authors publish books about the Watchtower’s culture of coercion, manipulation, undue influence, brainwashing, and mind control – or whatever word or words one prefers to use.
3) Creating and helping to fund an international organization called Open Minds Foundation. One of the key strategies for Open Minds will be to shine a bright light on all groups, including Watchtower. That applies to anyone that uses social, physical, emotional or spiritual pressure on individuals as ways to persuade them to align with someone or something against their own better interests. The Open Minds Foundation website, which is still under construction, can be accessed at http://openmindsfoundation.org/.
Other successful 2015 activities and 2016 projects are:
• Working closely with AJWRB.org (Advocates for Jehovah’s Witnesses Reform on Blood) to ensure that current and relevant information is available about Watchtower’s blood policy to doctors, hospitals and the media.
• Providing information related to abusive Watchtower policies and making it easily accessible to the press and media, by using up-to-date videos, articles, fliers, research, arguments and evidence.
• Assisting film makers, writers, websites and bloggers to report Watchtower abuses (i.e. Gregorio Smith’s current documentary, Truth Be Told, can be accessed at http://buy.hereliesthetruth.com/
• Working with several writers and educators to co-author and produce a book which will be titled Unethical Persuasion: Undue Influence, Psychological Manipulation and Brainwashing.
• Partnering with other influential and successful organizations like Survivor’s Network of those Abused by Priests (www.snapnetwork.org); Child Friendly Faith www.childfriendlyfaith.org (support for faith communities); www.infosekta.ch (helps members of sect-like communities); and www.icsahome.com (an international cultic studies association).
• Working with expert researchers and mental-health practitioners to compare the abuses and methods used to control Jehovah’s Witnesses that are similar to those of other cult-like groups, and to sharing our findings.
• Drafting and sharing personal interest stories, press releases and op-ed pieces to newspapers and other media outlets about Watchtower abuses.
• Organizing and convening conferences, meetings and events to provide evidence of abuses to investigators and the public.
• Meeting with and educating hospital personnel, resident doctors and medical students at their Universities to explain Watchtower’s blood transfusion policy.
• Convening a think tank of scholars, lawyers and politicians to make the public aware of policies, from groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses, which violate basic human rights and break up families.
• Working with legal experts and other authorities to bring attention to the Watchtower’s fraudulent misuse of their charity status to gain tax breaks and their misuse of public money to maintain their vast real estate holdings.
• Helping to conduct a study to see if Jehovah’s Witnesses (a pseudo-religious group) use a disproportionate amount of social welfare systems due to Watchtower policies. We suspect that a higher percentage of JWs are subsidized by the public financed welfare system than members of other more benevolent religious groups.
• Working with universities and research teams in the USA, Canada and Europe.
• Assisting AAWA qualified volunteers and supporters to take legal action against the Watchtower’s harmful policies.
• Assisting writers to tell their personal stories about how they were able to leave the Watchtower and move on to lead more productive and happier lives.
By Richard E. Kelly, Lee Marsh and Lee Elder
Slow and steady is a great way to make significant progress – congrats AAWA!
Congratulations for the achievements! But be prepared to a long walk and difficult job that will require to be even more courageous. you will need to resist attacks like this one recorded in JWs publications.
*** w94 7/1 p. 12 par. 11 At Which Table Are You Feeding? ***
For example, away back in 1909, the then president of the Watch Tower Society, C. T. Russell, wrote about those who turned away from Jehovah’s table and then began to mistreat their former fellow slaves. The Watch Tower of October 1, 1909, said: “All who cut loose from the Society and its work, instead of prospering themselves or upbuilding others in the faith and in the graces of the spirit, seemingly do the reverse—attempt injury to the Cause they once served, and, with more or less noise, gradually sink into oblivion, harming only themselves and others possessed of a similarly contentious spirit. . . . If some think that they can get as good or better provender at other tables, or that they can produce as good or better themselves—let these take their course. . . . But while we are willing that others should go anywhere and everywhere to find food and light to their satisfaction, strange to say, those who become our opponents take a very different course. Instead of saying in the manly fashion of the world, ‘I have found something which I prefer; goodbye!’ these manifest anger, malice, hatred, strife, ‘works of the flesh and of the devil’ such as we have never known worldly people to exhibit. They seem inoculated with madness, Satanic hydrophobia [rabies]. Some of them smite us and then claim that we did the smiting. They are ready to say and write contemptible falsities and to stoop to do meanness.”
The above quotes are quite reversed as former JW’s experiences show. It is the organization and blind members who mistreat their former ‘brotherhood’. Those who have cut loose from the Society DO fare better then before and have a steady heart, mind and better outlook in the present life, now!, The ‘Real Life’ ‘Better Life’ instead of the mysterious stories of everlasting life. Obedience to the ONE and only potentate is better than the forced sacrifices of the Organization.