NEW leaflets have been created by the support group Survivors Voices, including several that focus on abuse in a church context. Topics covered in the leaflets, written with input from survivors, include recovery from trauma, searching for justice, dealing 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 are not looking to create sides. We are reaching out with a hand of peace.”
The leaflet quotes the experience of survivors who have interacted with the Church, many of whom express anger and disappointment at their treatment. This includes damaging language about forgiveness, such as the injunction that the perpetrator of abuse must be forgiven “or God won’t forgive you”, and “you will experience healing only if you lay it all down at the foot of the cross and forgive it all.”
The writers contrast this with a survivor-centred approach that “God loves them, and always will, and God accepts them and values them just the way they are. God understands their struggles and is with them, holding onto them.”
One survivor relays a positive experience. After they told their vicar about the abuse that they had suffered, and how it continued to affect them, the priest had “listened and asked me if I would like to explain it to other church leaders — the curate and the Lay Readers. I said I’d be up for that and they came to my home one evening and I explained to them things like why I don’t like people touching me in the Peace and how I can’t cope with a crowd of people, or having someone behind me — and the difficulties I have with some of the words used in services and awful sermons on forgiving saying it’s easy and you just do it. They all listened and were very kind and I valued that. It made me feel safer.”
Another leaflet on “thinking about disclosing abuse” sets out the steps that should follow from a disclosure to the police. One survivor writes of the process: “I have never felt more scared; I 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, can also involve disappointment and further trauma, for instance, in a case in which the police decide not to prosecute.
Further leaflets explore the definitions and repercussions of forms of abuse, including spiritual and sexual abuse.
All resources can be downloaded, free of charge, at: survivorsvoices.org