Former Minister confesses to child abuse

Robert Corfield, a man who abused a boy in Canada in a secretive Christian Church in the 1980s, has spoken publicly about what happened for the first time.

He was confronted by the BBC as part of a wider look into claims of child sexual abuse spanning decades within the Church, known as The Truth.

His name is one of more than 700 given by people to a hotline set up to report sexual abuse within the Church.

The sect says it addresses all abuse allegations.

The Church, which has no official name but is often referred to as The Truth or The Way, is believed to have up to 100,000 members worldwide, with the majority in North America.

The potential scale of the abuse has been captured through a hotline – set-up last year by two women who say they were also sexually abused by a Church leader when they were children. People have phoned in claiming they too were abused, with testimonies stretching back decades through to present day.

The highly secretive and insular nature of the Church has helped abuse to thrive, say former and current insiders who spoke to the BBC. It has many unwritten rules, including that followers must marry within the group and keep mixing with outsiders to a minimum.

The Church was founded in Ireland by a Scottish evangelist in 1897 and is built around ministers spreading New Testament teachings through word-of-mouth.

One of its hallmarks is that ministers give up their possessions and must be taken in by Church members as they travel around, spreading the gospel. This makes children living in the homes they visit vulnerable to abuse, the insiders said.

Former Church member Michael Havet, 54, told the BBC he was abused by Robert Corfield in the 1980s, from the age of 12.

“People called me ‘Bob’s little companion’ – I just felt dirty and still do,” says Mr Havet, speaking from his home in Ottawa.

After abusing him, Mr Havet says Mr Corfield would force him to kneel beside him and pray.

“I had to work hard to get past that and find my prayer life again,” he says.

When confronted about the child abuse allegations by the BBC, Mr Corfield admitted that they had taken place for about six years in the 1980s.

“I have to acknowledge that’s true,” he said.

Mr Corfield was a minister – known within the sect as a “worker” – in Saskatchewan, Canada, at the time of the abuse.

This is the first time he has publicly admitted to child abuse, though he has previously been confronted by church members and wrote two private letters to Mr Havet in 2004 and 2005 which asked for forgiveness and said he was seeing a therapist. In one letter, Mr Corfield said he was “making a list of victims”.

“We don’t want to miss anyone who has been a victim of my actions,” he wrote.

However, when asked about this by the BBC, Mr Corfield said that there were no other victims “in the same sense that Michael was”, and that he had given two or three other teenagers massages.

Mr Havet is among a dozen people who have told the BBC that widespread abuse has been ignored or covered up in The Truth for decades – with some of the accused remaining in powerful positions for years.

The way his own case was dealt with by the Church is a prime example, believes Mr Havet.

He reported his abuse in 1993 to Dale Shultz, Saskatchewan’s most senior church leader – known as an “overseer”. Overseers are the most senior members of the church and there is one for each US state and Canadian province where there is an active following.

But Mr Shultz didn’t go to the police – and, says Mr Havet, violently assaulted him a few weeks later because he thought he had told others of the abuse claims.

“He grabbed my shoulders yelling at me, slamming my head against a concrete pillar,” says Mr Havet, “splitting it open and causing it to bleed.”

Source: BBC