United Kingdom: elderly Jesus Army member jailed for sexually abusing two boys at sect communal houses
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Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
Jesus Army community member resident in communal houses shared with the child victims
Organization
Jesus Army / Jesus Fellowship Church
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
Both victims were small children placed by their families' membership into the Jesus Army's shared communal households, where the sect's doctrine of common life put them in the same house as an unrelated adult member with no independent supervision — the mechanism the Redress Scheme later found systemic across the community.
- Institutional obedience or isolation
Evidence structure
Proceedings
2016-11-01 · conviction and sentencing
Northampton Crown Court, England. Clifford Brett, 66, of Northampton, was jailed for five years total — four years for abusing one boy who was targeted as he slept at a Jesus Army house in Preston, and a further twelve months for luring a second boy, still of primary school age, to his bedroom. Both offences occurred at Jesus Army communal houses and were prosecuted as part of Operation Lifeboat.
Documented coercion mechanisms
- communal 'household' living arrangement placing an unrelated adult member in the same house as young children
- targeted one boy while he slept and lured a second to a bedroom under pretext
Cited record
Sources
- regional newspaper court reporting verdict and sentencing report Lancashire Post: 'OAP jailed for abusing young boys at Jesus Army homes'.
Court report naming Brett, describing both offences and the five-year total sentence.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.lep.co.uk/news/crime/oap-jailed-for-abusing-young-boys-at-jesus-army-homes-775725 Corpus classification: regional-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: verdict-and-sentencing-report. SHA-256 41db9b1bb266ecbd8215eeb0f1ad9051b5cb6a5a53a849a44cf0172c6d3fcc7c
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
Related cases · Christian institutions & contexts
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