For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.

It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.

Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.

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Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.

Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.

Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)

The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle.

“I can’t have my girls thinking that this kind of behavior is OK,” Lynn said.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members who said they were sexually abused, along with parents of........

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