She Was My Angel

Shelly Braieoux grew up a Jehovah’s Witness, where elders were to be trusted, obeyed, even feared. Yet somehow she summoned the courage to call the police and report her father’s abuse. Genevieve Gannon meets Shelly and the now lifelong friend who returned that call.

It was an unremarkable afternoon in 1998 when Constable Natalie Bennett arrived for her shift at a Brisbane police station and made what she thought would be a routine phone call. The victim of a historical sex assault had contacted the station earlier, distressed and eager to talk to a female officer, but as none was available, the caller was told she would have to wait.

When Natalie rang her back, the woman sounded terrified. In a small voice, she explained that her father, a powerful ministerial servant within the Jehovah’s Witnesses, had brutalised and sexually assaulted her when she was younger. She described how she had reported him to the church elders, but her tiny community in tropical far north Queensland had closed ranks around him, shunned her, and made her feel responsible for the abuse.

Her name was Shelly Braieoux and she and Natalie were about to change each other’s lives.

“She was just seeking advice,” Natalie tells The Weekly, reflecting on the conversation 20 years later. “I explained that what had happened to her was a crime.” Shelly listened carefully, and then told Natalie that shewould have to think about what she wanted to do next. For years, she had been haunted by her father’s brutality and by the way her family and her church had dismissed it. She had yearned for someone or something to vindicate her pain, but she was petrified.”

“When Natalie told me it was a crime, I was shocked,” says Shelly, whose steady gaze and warm smile betray very little of the timid, traumatised young woman who needed to summon every ounce of courage within her to make that call all those years ago. Her cloistered upbringing in a strict household had filled her with fear of the wider world. She had been segregated from outsiders, or “worldly” people, and told that the police were servants of Satan. To report something to the police was to sin against God.