Have you noticed the stress of living in close confinement during this time when we’re all well advised to stay at home? It’s not easy, I suspect, for any of us, but for some it will be a matter of life and death and injury and lasting scars. So I’m posting today a reflection I wrote for future posting in the blog of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women (COSROW) of the United Methodist Church. I hope we all might be praying for adults and children who are experiencing violence in their homes in this challenging and uncertain season. You can learn more about how to respond to and work to prevent this kind of violence through online training offered by the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault and the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, or their counterparts in your state.
When I went to prison and started hearing the stories the women told there, it struck me how un-emotional they were, as they mentioned the violence they had experienced. They would tell of the brother, or a family friend, who had raped them. Or the dad who struck them repeatedly with his fists, or worse. And the series of boyfriends that followed that pattern, each worse than the one before. These stories would unfold in a matter-of-fact way. As if to say this was the norm; it was to be expected.
They would tell of violence in the same tone of voice I might have used to describe the blue and purple ribbons I won at the county fair, or the expectation that I would go to college. No surprise here. Of course these things would happen.
But I didn’t grow up with violence in my home.
I should explain that I didn’t live there in prison. I became a pastor there in 2011, of a church inside the Iowa women’s prison, Women at the Well. For most of the past eight years, I would spend three or four afternoons on grounds each week, with hours devoted to pastoral care of women who bluntly share the hardest stories of their lives.
For roughly 90% of the women incarcerated in Iowa, those stories include violence, which ranges from rape and assault to domestic violence, both physical and emotional. It includes sex trafficking and the enacted and threatened violence that limits women’s choices to leave. It spans generations, and infects some women’s actions with their own children.
It’s no wonder the violence becomes matter-of-fact. It has been, in too many lives. It is, against women, in the crime dramas that air in every theater and during prime time every night. “Yep, I already had her pegged as a guest corpse.”
Violence against women begins to feel like just the way things are.
You know what doesn’t feel matter-of-fact, in the telling of the stories I’ve heard in prison? Her reaction to those who didn’t protect her.
- “I told my grandmother and she didn’t say anything!”
- “When I was raped, I told my mom, and she didn’t believe me.”
- “My brother raped me, and my mom didn’t do anything when I told her.”
- “They didn’t believe me when I said what that babysitter did to me.” (He was the son of the town cop.)
When you’ve found the courage to tell your truth out loud, and it doesn’t change anything? When the people who are supposed to be there for you aren’t? That will never feel matter-of-fact.
I do get it that the easiest thing in the world is to disbelieve her. In some cases, the mom or grandmother that doesn’t take action is herself a victim of abuse, and feels unable to act. Where a family member is the perpetrator, taking action to protect her could mean tearing apart the whole family. How much easier to act as if it didn’t happen, to simply let things go on as they were.
But there is a price to inaction. “I started drinking and using drugs after I was raped,” said Miranda. “I left home,” Valerie said, after the newly arrived stepfather started abusing her. “I ended up on the streets and started running with the wrong people.” When domestic violence and sexual assault are in the stories of 90% of the women in prison, that price is all too evident.
I’ve had the rare privilege of being entrusted with dozens—hundreds?—of these stories, in conversations that weren’t about me solving anything, or making it go away. Sometimes we’ve talked about whether her marriage vows required her to stay with this man who abused her so horribly. Occasionally she’s working through how to protect a sister, or a daughter, from further harm. Mostly, she has been glad I will listen, and believe her. We have often wept together. I am certain God has wept with us as we’ve prayed.
It worries me as a pastor, though, that the experience of this kind of conversation feels so rare. As a pastor. And in the context of church.
In eight years of pastoral ministry before I went to the prison, and forty years as an active lay member and leader of large and small churches before that, I don’t remember a single conversation that involved domestic violence, or sexual assault, with a person who had been victimized. Now, even given the possibility (unlikely, I hope) that I wasn’t perceived as a trustworthy person, or wasn’t listening very well, that feels surprising to me, in a world where statistics demonstrate that we are literally surrounded by women and men who have survived sexual violence. Have our churches not been safe places for our stories to be told?
In recent years, and especially after #MeToo, I hear stories from female pastor friends that more of these stories are coming to light. But we have more work to do.
My prison sisters’ stories reveal some theological dimensions of the problem:
- “My pastor and his wife came,” Lori told me, a few days after she told them her father had abused her sexually. “They said, ‘We prayed about it, and God told us it didn’t happen. And if you keep lying about it, you’re going to hell.”
- When Suzanne told her pastor about her husband’s abuse, “he told me to stop being so disagreeable.” And the pastor reminded her, “He’s in charge of the household.”
Outside the prison, it seems that when women have successfully left domestic violence, generally it wasn’t the church that helped them. The church disbelieves her for some of the same reasons family members do: “It will be disruptive.” “We like that man who she says is abusing her.” “We don’t want the whole church to end up taking sides.”
All of which creates a matter-of-fact-ness to violence against women even within the church.
We must do better. The church must be a place for healing and encouragement to women (and others) wounded by sexual and other violence. If the injury is inflicted by a pastor or leader in the church, the church’s response must be robust and decisive on her behalf, and for others who might be harmed in the future. Our clergy, lay, and conference leaders must be safe and brave hearers of stories, where we connect the power of the gospel with the shattering realities that leave people broken.
I long for the day when a woman (and others) can come wounded to us as followers of Jesus Christ and as the church, and we will truly see her, walk with her, bind up her hurts, and work toward justice for her and others connected to her circumstances. That care must include the perpetrator, who is also a child of God, surely also wounded in ways that are hard to see.
What if it were our care that began to become matter-of-fact? Never unfeeling or casual. But automatic. Expected. The way things are. We know what to do, and we do it. Of course.
It’s only a step. We won’t be done with this work until we reach what must come next, the kingdom that God is bringing, in which this scourge of sexual violence ends. I long for that day when we will no longer have these stories, hardly ever, nor these horrifying statistics. We all have a role to play in bringing that cultural shift
And, wow: We won’t need as many prisons, when we end that fundamental cause of human brokenness.
May it be so.
Lee Roorda Schott is the pastor of Women at the Well, a United Methodist Church started inside the Iowa women’s prison thirteen years ago. She is the author of Foolish Church: Messy, Raw, Real, and Making Room (where she tells some of the stories shared here), and its companion The Fools’ Manual, a study and practice guide for Foolish Church. Lee is a frequent speaker and blogs weekly at her web page, where she invites you to join the #FoolishChurch community. The names used in this piece are changed to protect individuals’ privacy.
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