Chrystal's Case

“This story was provided via Human Rights and Equalities. Names and some details have been changed for anonymity.”

Crystal is a Lesbian who attended a Christian Church. The minister suggested that she undertake Bible reading with him, to help her move away from what he described as her ‘ confused sexuality’.  He informed her that many young people are confused about their sexuality and that all that was needed was for her to engage more with God’s word and to explore her feelings and desires in more depth within the loving words of God.

For several weeks she attended Bible sessions with him. They read passages in the Bible and he explained to her how it was God’s will for men and women to procreate. Part way through these sessions, she started to feel increasing discomfort around him, but her parents insisted she was reading things into him touching her and said he was only showing fatherliness towards her. He had started off resting his arm on the back of her chair, then it went on to stroking her heir, then holding her hand, then brushing his thigh against hers. Crystal started to make excuses as to why she couldn’t attend these sessions  but her father insisted on driving her there and waiting outside .

During a reading on Genesis about procreation and filling the earth, he suggested to Crystal that as she was a virgin and had not experienced sex with a man, that engaging in a sexual act with him (not penetration, as he explained that this would be adultery against his marriage vows) might cure her from believing she was gay and he said to her that he, as a virulent man, could teach her and turn her away from having a desire for women, because she would experience a form of sex with a real man. He asked her if she would be willing to try this with him and she declined. He became very agitated and as she made to leave the room and he assaulted her sexually.

When he had finished he told her that she had led him on, and that she was an adulteress, and that if she told anyone he would denounce and ruin her and her family before the whole congregation and he quoted at her:

"From the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and smoother than oil is her speech;

but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold of Sheol."

These were the final words of spiritual abuse he spoke over her as she lay on the ground following his sexual assault upon her.

She was left traumatised by the experience of the sexual assault, the grooming, the prayers said over her to expel from her what he had called ‘the demons of homosexuality’.

The minister passed away some time after and her father was insistent she attend his funeral to pay respect to him. Only now, aged 35, on hearing about him dying, has she been able to disclose what actually happened to her in that room that day, following years of her enduring this secret, silent trauma. Shockingly for Crystal, her younger sister told her upon her disclosure that her parents had thought the minister had sexually harmed her following her leaving that room that day, because of the state she was in, but they didn’t say anything in case it would cause upset to the pastor.