I’m a pretty sexual person. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of my youth or whether it’s just how I am and I was made to feel ashamed of something that is just natural for me.
When I was 14 I ‘sinned’ with a boy in my stake. My mum found out because I skipped school to do it and school called her! So she made the first of many appointments with the bishop. I was asked whether he put his fingers inside me, how many fingers, whether we did oral sex, did he ejaculate in my mouth?
At the time I just answered the questions because you have to tell the bishop, my mum had made me go, they know best surely. As a 14 year old girl feeling ashamed I couldn’t stand up for myself and I didn’t even know that this kind of questioning was wrong. As I matured I realised it was totally wrong and disgusting for a 14 year old girl to be discussing these things with a much older man behind closed doors. It shouldn’t even be happening at all, but at the very least there should be an option of a parent or youth leader being present.
I experienced several abuses of power at the hands of bishops and stake presidents. My parents only later realised they made a mistake by making me speak to the bishop alone, but they are still active. I have children myself now and apart from other issues with church history and the fact that I simply don’t believe the church to be true, the main reason I can’t take my children to church is because I don’t want them to go through the things I went through, which have damaged me to this day. I am almost 30 and still have therapy for this.