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Complaints of sexual abuse against children in the Jehovah’s Witness church are dealt with “in house”, a court heard.

An alleged victim told how she waited 40 years for church elder Thomas Brian Jenkins to be charged over the campaign of abuse she claims she suffered as a young girl.

The woman, now in her late 50s, told a jury: “I’m angry at Jehovah’s Witness elders and the governing body for the lack of protection they provide to children.

“There is no safeguarding. They do not report it to the authorities because they want to deal with it in house.

“Then it doesn’t get dealt with.”

The woman claims she was repeatedly touched and groped by Jenkins in his car, during bible studies, and in a swimming pool in the 1970s.

The alleged sex attacks happened while the girl and her family were members of the Brecon congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses where Jenkins was an elder.

She told the jury: “I was terrified. I tried everything I could, as a 12 or 13-year-old girl, to get out of being round that person.”

But she added: “I didn’t have the power or the words to avoid it.”

Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard many of the alleged assaults happened when Jenkins took the schoolgirl and her brother on “door-to-door” missions to rural properties in the Powys countryside.

Jenkins, 74, is accused of sending her brother to “preach the faith” so he could force his hands up the schoolgirl’s skirt as she sat in the back of his Rover car.

The court heard Jenkins tried to get his fingers inside the girl’s costume under the waterline at Brecon swimming pool during Jehovah’s Witness outings.

She told the court: “I was made to do bible studies with Brian Jenkins and the same thing would happen – he would be groping me.

“There were so many incidents I have tried to block them out over four-and-a-half decades.

“I tried to tell the elders that he wouldn’t leave me alone. I was a young girl, I felt ashamed and embarrassed.”

The woman told the jury that two elders, a doctor and ex-police officer, “grinned” when she told them what was going on.

She said she was “scared” of the elders and described one as a “physical and mental bully”.

The woman, who can’t be named for legal reasons, said she stopped going to church to avoid Jenkins.

She said: “They would take me to a little room in a meeting hall where I would be reprimanded by all these men.

“They would come to my home. I was reprimanded for not going to meetings, not knocking on doors, not doing bible studies.”

Hilary Roberts, defending, said: “This is a campaign of complaints against Jehovah’s Witness and this (the sex assaults) didn’t happen.”

She replied: “It happened.”

The woman told her husband about the alleged abuse 10 years ago and finally went to the police after seeing abused women getting justice in high-profile cases on television, the court heard.

The jury was told Jenkins was convicted of a series of sex offences at Worcester Crown Court in 1990.

Jenkins, of Landor Road, Redditch, Worcester, denies 20 charges of indecent assault in the 1970s.

The trial continues.