Can any of this be resolved?

I’m not sure if this is the place to voice my thoughts, but the title says ‘support’ and that’s what I’m here for.

I was as active and faithful as anyone you’d meet for about twelve years, in my mind and heart I was utterly spiritually converted to the church. There were many corrupt and sinful situations that occurred in the branch I lived in, which was, and although I no longer live in the area, continues to be highly dysfunctional and lacking in strong members/leadership. But my motto was always “the church is perfect, the people aren’t’ and ‘I the lord will forgive whom I forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all’.

I dated a man for a few months who was very interested in the church and he was baptised. Not long after he received the Aaronic priesthood he asked me to come to his house and when I got there he made sexual advances towards me. His reasoning was we were getting married anyway, so what did it matter? My reasoning was that I had made covenants in the temple I was not willing to violate. When I rejected him he became enraged, but in a very controlling, frightening manner and he wouldn’t let me out of his house, even trying to push me from his balcony window, a drop of about ten feet at least. I had to fight with every ounce of my strength not to get tipped over that balcony, it was terrifying. The assault was not sexual, but it was just so violent – he turned into someone I did not recognise, pushing, shoving, punching, dragging me around by my hair, and whipping me with a cord from an electric guitar. I will never forget the look in his eyes – I truly thought I saw evil in those eyes that day. When I finally got away and drove home, I called a friend (church member) who was horrified to find me covered in bruises, my clothes (including my temple garments) literally ripped in half, and with my hair coming out in huge clumps from where I’d been dragged around. While she was there, the police arrived at my house to say he’d reported me for coming into his house and breaking all his furniture. I burst into tears and showed them what happened to me – they advised me to go to the police station and make a statement. I’m sure he made the first call to the police to try and make out like he was a victim somehow. The fact he’d been so calculating was shocking to me, as this was not the person I thought I knew. I would later discover though other acquaintances that he had a history of becoming uncontrollably violent if provoked. I knew that he’d been a regular drug user before we met, and all I can put it down to is that he was on something that day.

After my friend came to get me from my house, I went into shock, shaking uncontrollably and freezing cold on a hot summer day. No amount of hot showering warmed me until I fell asleep hours later. We called the branch president to get support, leaving messages that he needed to call me urgently – but he wouldn’t return my calls. Next call was to the district president – who took my call and was sympathetic (I think he was, he didn’t say much really). I told him I was going to the police station and he asked me to wait for a while and think about that decision.

I went to the police to make a statement, and they told me that if I decided to press charges, he would be arrested, go through the courts and possibly only get a few months to a one year sentence, depending on which judge was on duty. The officer said that because I didn’t have any broken bones or stitches or ‘serious’ wounds, and because he’d left my face alone, it wouldn’t be considered a serious assault. He wasn’t weren’t totally dismissive, but made it clear to me that it was going to be a long and stressful process if I pressed charges. Then I called the district president back and told him what the police had said. His reply – and I am not exaggerating when I say this – was that if the man who assaulted me went to jail, we might lose him from the church forever and therefore my decision would have eternal consequences for him as a newly baptised member. He also told me that even though it was going to be a hard thing, that I should try and forgive what had been done to me. This was within hours of the assault. Because of my fragile state of mind at the time, I decided to take my good leader’s advice and wait before deciding what to do.

At the time I was YW Pres. and we were having the YW in Excellence event in two days followed by my usual teaching and presidency duties on Sunday. Because so many people were depending on me to take care of things, I went into automatic pilot until Sunday when I finally managed to find the branch president. His words to me were “so he gave you a bit of a beating did he?” and “you don’t look too bad, I don’t see any marks”. At that point I lifted my skirt and showed him modest parts of my legs and torso, and rolled up the sleeves of my arms and showed him exactly what had happened. My hair was still coming out where I’d been dragged around, so I showed him how it was all falling out in clumps. Some of those bruises were from being whipped with an electric cord when I tried to get away, so deep that they took months to go away fully. The BP looked shocked, and was nice enough, but didn’t really offer me any support or advice on what to do from a legal perspective. He also told me to try and forgive.

That incident and the treatment I received was the beginning of the end for me. I felt abandoned by my leaders whom I’d always supported in any way I could, I never said no to a calling, often holding three at a time – at one point I was YW Pres, Librarian, teaching Sunday School along with visiting teaching, attending university, working part-time and trying to survive as a single parent. I brought a few people into the church because I was so missionary minded at the time – one of them was this man who assaulted me. I felt like I couldn’t trust my leaders to look out for me, to care for and counsel me – the whole time the focus was on the perpetrator – poor him – what can we do to help him repent and come back to church. I suppose it didn’t help that the district president was his home teacher. Me, I had no home teachers – or none that ever bothered to visit anyway. By the time my leaders and the police were finished with me, I felt so unsupported, that no-one understood how vicious the assault had been, that I wasn’t believed…and so I decided not to press charges against my attacker. That was a massive mistake on my part and one I regret to this day – he should have gone to jail for what he did.

From that time, I lost a big part of my innocence in the church – I lost faith in leaders and no longer considered them to be inspired or called of god to their positions. I came to see leadership in the church as nothing more than convenience and/or politicking. When I lost that…I started to lose a lot of other spiritual aspects to my life as well. If the leaders were wrong and uninspired, then I believed that probably went all the way up the chain of command and then back through our history to Joseph Smith. I stopped tolerating the bigotry and hypocrisy that was so endemic among the members, and started loathing it. I began studying church history from an academic rather than spiritual perspective, and did not at all like what I discovered.

Eventually I stopped attending church. I’ve moved from that area but now when I go to church I can hardly stand to be in the building. I often leave feeling upset or angry – I don’t like being there and I don’t like the things I’m hearing when I’m there.