NEW leaflets have been created by the support group Survivors Voices, including several that concentrate on abuse in a church context. Topics covered within the leaflets, written with input from survivors, include recovery from trauma, looking for justice, coping with anger, and disclosing abuse.
An eight-page leaflet on “faith and the responses of the church to survivors of the abuse” says that “too often” the Church’s response to disclosures of abuse had been “unfair and hurt us further . . . In this leaflet we will not be trying to create sides. We are reaching out with a hand of peace.”
The leaflet quotes the experience of survivors who’ve interacted with the Church, lots of whom express anger and disappointment at their treatment. This includes damaging language about forgiveness, akin to the injunction that the perpetrator of abuse have to be forgiven “or God won’t forgive you”, and “you’ll experience healing only when you lay all of it down on the foot of the cross and forgive all of it.”
The writers contrast this with a survivor-centred approach that “God loves them, and at all times will, and God accepts them and values them just the way in which they’re. God understands their struggles and is with them, holding onto them.”
One survivor relays a positive experience. After they told their vicar in regards to the abuse that that they had suffered, and the way it continued to affect them, the priest had “listened and asked me if I would love to clarify it to other church leaders — the curate and the Lay Readers. I said I’d be up for that they usually got here to my home one evening and I explained to them things like why I don’t like people touching me within the Peace and the way I can’t deal with a crowd of individuals, or having someone behind me — and the difficulties I even have with among the words utilized in services and awful sermons on forgiving saying it’s easy and you only do it. They all listened and were very kind and I valued that. It made me feel safer.”
Another leaflet on “eager about disclosing abuse” sets out the steps that ought to follow from a disclosure to the police. One survivor writes of the method: “I even have never felt more scared; I even have never felt braver.” Another says that “disclosing lifted the blanket of shame my abuser suffocated me with for 23 years”.
Disclosure, the leaflet says, also can involve disappointment and further trauma, as an illustration, in a case wherein the police resolve to not prosecute.
Further leaflets explore the definitions and repercussions of types of abuse, including spiritual and sexual abuse.
All resources could be downloaded, freed from charge, at: survivorsvoices.org
