What the Watchtower Doesn’t Want You to Know with Australian whistleblower Lara Kaput: Child labor, financial fraud, and eight types of modern slavery inside the Jehovah’s Witnesses
About this episode
Lara Kaput discusses her experiences with child labor and modern slavery within the Jehovah's Witnesses organization.
When Lara Kaput was eight years old, she was required to clean bricks on Jehovah’s Witness building sites. She helped her father road-build on the church construction projects. She did cleaning, and gardening, and her childhood friends did this, and cleaning child-minding too. None of it paid, none very little of it optional. She did not recognize it as child labor at the time. Most children raised inside authoritarian groups do not. That is how it works. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lara on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and what she brought to this conversation is the kind of ground-level, decade-long investigative knowledge that is genuinely rare. Lara is a prominent Australian activist and whistleblower, a co-founder of the advocacy group Say Sorry (saysorry.org), and a former vice president of the Secular Association of New South Wales. For nine years she has provided testimony and submissions to governments, law enforcement, and royal commissions across approximately 10 countries, specifically concerning the Watchtower Society, theone of the legal names for the organization known publicly as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Lara has made approximately 30 or more…
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