Deuteronomy 19:15
Deuteronomy 19:1515A lone witness is not sufficient to establish any wrongdoing or sin against a man, regardless of what offense he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
The Watchtower applies "one witness is not enough to convict a man" to accusations of child sexual abuse. If there is only one witness to the abuse — which there almost always is — elders cannot form a judicial committee or take congregational action unless the accused confesses. The Australian Royal Commission's Case Study 29 (2015-2016) found 1,006 alleged perpetrators across JW congregations in Australia over 65 years, with zero proactive reports to civil authorities by elders — the signature of a policy, not a statistical accident.
Read the verse in its own setting: a civil courtroom in ancient Israel, for adjudicating public disputes about property, theft, and covenant breaches. The two-witness rule protects the wrongly accused in a communal justice system where everyone could observe transactions. It was never intended to govern the investigation of hidden crimes against children — who cannot be expected to produce a second witness to an act committed behind a closed door. The application is also selective within the organisation: a single elder's testimony is enough to act on smoking, doctrinal dissent, or disassociation rumours. The selective application reveals the real function in abuse cases: reputation protection, not biblical fidelity. names civil authorities as "God's minister" to punish evildoers — a Christian who believes Romans 13 reports a crime to the magistrate God has appointed, because protecting a child is obedience to God (), not because the secular law happens to require it.