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Heddi

(18,312 posts)
Tue Mar 7, 2017, 01:39 PM Mar 2017

Dozens Say Christian Leader Made British Boys Bleed for Jesus

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/europe/britain-mansion-child-abuse-archbishop-canterbury.html?_r=0
Dozens Say Christian Leader Made British Boys ‘Bleed for Jesus’

YORK, England — Having disclosed his “sin” of masturbation, Mark Stibbe, age 17, was ordered to strip naked and lean over a wooden chair in the garden shed of a lavish Hampshire mansion on the southern coast of England.

Then came the first blow from a cane, its impact so ferocious that it sent the boy into a state of paralysis that lasted through at least 30 more strokes that left him collapsed on the floor, blood oozing down his legs.

“I remember being so appalled by how vicious the first lash was that I couldn’t scream,” Mr. Stibbe, now 56 and an acclaimed Christian author, recalled on a recent afternoon in his Yorkshire home. “You’re in this tiny shed full of canes with this man. I felt utterly powerless.”

Until that day in the late 1970s, the man he says beat him, John Smyth, was known to Mr. Stibbe and his friends as a charismatic lawyer and influential evangelical Christian leader who regularly attended the Christian forum of their nearby boarding school, Winchester College, the oldest in Britain. Now, Mr. Smyth, 75 and keeping a low profile in South Africa, stands at the center of a widening scandal of sadistic abuse of dozens of boys over three decades that has ensnared the leader of the Anglican Church, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, though only peripherally.

...
Mr. Stibbe said, “The sin that seemed to preoccupy him more than anything was masturbation, and he managed to persuade me that I needed to purge my body of that sin.”
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Mr. Smyth would explain to the boys why they needed to be punished so severely. “He quoted from the Bible and told me I had to bleed for Jesus,” said another victim, who attempted suicide on his 21st birthday, after Mr. Smyth promised him “a special kind of beating” for the occasion.

“When he was done, he would lean in towards me and put his face on my neck telling me how proud he was of me,” said the man, who asked that his name not be used because of the deeply personal nature of his remarks.


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In court documents in the case, he was accused of brutally beating five other boys at the camps there.

“He would strip us naked and hit us with wooden bats to purge us of sin,” said one of the victims in Zimbabwe, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal by Mr. Smyth.

In 2002, Mr. Smyth moved to South Africa, where new accusations of abuse have surfaced in news outlets in recent weeks. Last month, he was removed from the Church-on-Main in Cape Town, where there were claims of inappropriate behavior but not proof of criminal acts, the church said in a statement.
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None of the victims said they had been sexually assaulted, but one of them said Mr. Smyth had occasionally stripped naked and groaned in “spiritual ecstasy” during the lashings.

The Smyth case has led other victims of vicious boarding school thrashings to reveal the abuse they endured.

“The church’s reaction has been to paint Smyth like a one-off single incident, but it’s not,” said Giles Fraser, a priest and journalist, who recently wrote a column about the beatings he endured at boarding school.
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