Note: This story mentions domestic violence and sexual abuse.
In the film Spotlight, the character of Mitch Garabedian, as played by Stanley Tucci, takes the greater Boston community to task over its role in turning a blind eye to a longstanding child sexual abuse problem in the Boston Archdiocese.
“If it takes a village to raise a child,” Garabedian says, “it takes a village to abuse one.”
In Greenville, the Rev. Carrie Nettles, a Baptist minister and chaplain for the Julie Valentine Center – which serves child abuse and sexual assault survivors – says that when someone’s village, whether that someone is a child, a woman, or a man, is a community of faith, it matters that the community acknowledge, call out, and address instances of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
“ By not revealing [abuse],” the Rev. Nettles says, “we as a community continue to enable predators to do what they do.”
How often, she asks, do we know someone in our congregations who is suffering abuse at the hands of a spouse or a parent or a spiritual leader and say nothing?
Or, more likely, how often do we hear about abuse happening within the community and simply don’t believe that someone we know from our church or temple or synagogue or mosque or gurdwara would be capable of something so heinous?
“The vast majority of the time," the Rev. Nettles says, "what I see is ignorance around how prevalent this is. Who's capable of doing this and how to respond, both in moral, ethical ways, but also in really trauma informed ways?"
The Rev. Geneece Goertzen, an author and research fellow for the Center for Church and Community Impact at Baylor University, says that spiritual leaders are often naïve about what is happening within their congregations.
“ A Lifeway study several years ago showed that pastors weren't so much completely ignorant of domestic violence, but they didn't believe that it happened in their own congregations," she says.
Most studies into abuse within religious communities center on sexual crimes by clergy upon congregants, not on the prevalence of abusers within the congregation.
But there are statistics on the prevalence of sexual abuse and domestic violence in general, which the Rev. Jay Kieve, the abuse prevention and response advocate for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, says should tell faith communities something.
“It would be a statistical anomaly if when we gathered we were not in the presence of people who have experienced abuse of some kind,” the Rev. Kieve says. "We live in a culture where 80% of women report being sexually harassed. Half or so have experienced unwanted sexual touch. And so, because that's part of the experience of half the population and a good number of the people who come to houses of worship ... we need to be paying attention to that.”
The Rev. Goertzen calls on religious leaders to start identifying the probability that abuse victims are in their houses of worship.
“ If we look at the general stats that one in three women is going to experience domestic violence in her lifetime,” she says, “a pastor can look across the congregation and say, “Wow, a third of the women sitting here, and probably a up to a quarter of the men sitting here, are going to experience domestic violence. How can I leverage pastoral care in this community of faith to bring healing?’”
The Rev. Kieve says church leaders can start by calling out sexual violence and abuse when they see it – or read about it on Sundays.
“Name abuse when it happens in Scripture,” he says. “There are plenty of examples of people who experience interpersonal and even intimate partner violence in Scripture. Acknowledging it sends the message that I'm somebody who pays attention to this.”
Another thing religious leaders can do, the Rev Goertzen says, is to be aware of how messages in religious texts can become weaponized if they’re not given context.
“Wives need to obey their husbands, or the husband needs to call all the shots,” she says. “When that is weaponized through sacred texts, then we have an instance of spiritual abuse. And so we have spiritual abuse that can happen in the home where the perpetrator uses those kind of sacred texts against the spouse. And then we also have it in the church where you might hear it from the pulpit.”
Someone sitting in the pew and hearing that kind of messaging will glean that there’s no way out from under the abuse, the Rev. Goertzen says.
“When you are being harmed by the person who sits next to you in the pew and the pastor is preaching, wives be submissive to your husbands,” she says, “how do you go to that person in some sort of spiritual authority to say, ‘I'm being harmed by the person you're telling me to submit to?'"
Something else than can be weaponized – intentionally or not – is one of most religions’ most cherished tenets – forgiveness.
“Because we're so focused on those Matthew directives to clothe the naked and visit the imprisoned, church leadership can be focused on, ‘OK, we really need to minister to Jim,’” the Rev. Nettles says. “'We need to literally visit him in jail. We need to pray for him. We need to offer him resources for recovery and redemption.' Hyperfocusing on that can and often does fail to acknowledge the fact that Jim's child and his wife were part of this church too. And they're feeling abandoned by the fact that you didn't even call them or send them a postcard to say, ‘Hey, we're thinking about you.’”
With so much collateral damage at stake, the Rev. Goertzen says that spiritual leaders need to do what they can to prevent something called institutional betrayal – which is defined as “the wrongdoings that institutions perpetuate upon the individuals who depend on them, including the failure to prevent wrongdoings and the lack of a supportive environment concerning the doings” by Dr. Jennifer Fried of the University of Oregon.
In other words, just as there are collateral victims of abuse, there are collateral sins. And it behooves faith leaders, the reverends say, to set the tone that members of their religious communities should feel safe, seen, and listened to.
The Rev. Geneece Goertzen will present Resilience in Survivors: How Faith Communities Impact Healing on June 20, as part of a series hosted by the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. The webinar is free.
