On horror's head horrors accumulate.
William Shakespeare
All is not quiet on the domestic front. Homes sometimes erupt in anger and abuse. And the weakest are victimized the most.
Domestic violence and abuse can be physical, as in wife or child beating. Even battered husbands and abused elderly parents aren't uncommon. Sometimes it's sexual. It may even be emotional; there the cruelty is verbal, and words can hurt. In whatever form, domestic violence and abuse plunge the entire household into crisis. How can a pastor respond to these seemingly more prevalent and intensely difficult situations?
Child Abuse: Physical
Charles Shepson tells this story from his days in parish ministry: "One day I received an anonymous phone call. The woman said, 'There's a child being abused in a house two doors from your church. You need to help that poor little girl.' I couldn't get any more information before she hung up."
Shepson wondered, How can I verify the information? What if the woman is mistaken or malicious? What if I blow the whistle on the wrong household? So he hit on a plan. That day he began a neighborhood visitation program.
He didn't go to the suspected home first — a house itself showing neglect — but rather visited another. Then, when he called on the home two doors from the church, he could say honestly, "I'm from the church, and I'm visiting homes on the block. May I come in?" They invited him in.
It didn't take long, once inside, to confirm his suspicions. "The couple's little girl came into the room while we were talking," Shepson remembers, "and I tried to observe her unobtrusively. She looked about 3 years old, but she had no hair. Her legs and arms were thin and bony, and bruises were on her body. She had a dull, emaciated look. I was surprised to see her still in diapers at her age.
"I went to a judge and explained what I had seen. He called in the couple to question them. As it turned out, one was too drunk to show up, and the other arrived inebriated. It didn't take that judge long to concur with my findings. The judge removed the girl from the family and placed her with a Christian couple from our church.
"When they took the little girl home the first evening, the foster mom prepared to give her a bath. As she helped the little girl remove her clothes, suddenly the girl threw her arms over her head, shrank into a defensive posture, and whimpered, 'Don't hit me!' The woman wrapped her in her arms and assured her they would take good care of her."
Once the girl was in a loving family, she quickly had no need for the diapers. With a good diet, her hair started growing, and her frame filled out. She finally basked in the love and care every child needs.
Shepson entered this abuse crisis as many pastors do: not at the call of the principal parties. Child abuse often lodges in a family as a kind of cancerous disease. Many times it is passed from generation to generation; the abused become abusers. As a dark family secret, it's not about to be divulged. Spouses may ignore or rationalize their partner's behavior, partly out of a need to maintain a charade of family decency and partly from fear of the drastic consequences when the behavior comes to light. And the children often collaborate unexpectedly; family ties bind them in powerful ways. That means it's often an outsider who sounds the alarm.
With nothing more than an anonymous tip, Shepson didn't feel confident enough to bring in the authorities. Even the suspicion of child abuse can cast a dark shadow across a family's reputation. Child-welfare investigators want to be fair and discreet, but they are compelled to make a thorough investigation. It's not the kind of thing Shepson would wish on an innocent party. That's why he sought a diplomatic way to confirm the information.
Randy Christian, pastor to children and families at Beaverton (Oregon) Christian Church, wouldn't try to investigate. He advises, "In this case the evidence was easily seen. It isn't usually so, and ministers can actually impede official investigations by attempting their own, more subtle, investigations. I realize this is a judgment call, but I'd caution against private investigations." Pastors sometimes have to make tough calls, and this looks like one of them.
Once Shepson understood the situation, he wisely went to the authorities. Most counties have child protective services, child welfare agencies, or family services that are prepared to investigate accusations. The police or sheriff's department also can be notified.
This step involves heavy consequences: possible arrest, and with that removal from the family, possible loss of income, and community scorn. Criminal charges may be filed. Persons may go to prison. Homes may be broken apart. The list goes on, yet reporting such a crime remains necessary, and usually legally mandatory, if not easy.
Randy Christian suggests, "Given our Lord's advocacy for the child, the widow, and the defenseless, our first concern should be for the safety of the one unable to protect himself or herself. If an error is to be made, it will be in favor of safety for the defenseless."
Pastors, with good intentions, often want to keep matters within a small circle and try to take care of things quietly. Concern for the economic future of the family, the reputation of the church, and the legal fallout from abuse charges may push a pastor to resist calling the legal authorities. But simply chiding an offender to "go and sin no more" fails to underscore the depth of the problem. The abuser usually returns to his family and resumes the abusive behavior, the only response he may know.
Further, in most states pastors would have to break the law to not report a suspected case of child abuse. Reporting laws require pastors to do what Shepson did and what most professionals strongly recommend — blow the whistle.
Shepson followed up on the little girl and her family. She was placed in a Christian home, and for the first time received what she needed physically and emotionally — even spiritually. The parents, however, lost their daughter, incurred the wrath of the law, and continued on a path of drink and ruin. Shepson could not help them.
In many cases the parents are themselves victims — of their upbringing, of mental problems, of a series of bad choices, of unresolved anger and self-hate. We find it hard to sympathize with anyone who would hurt a defenseless child, yet these parents more often are sick, pathetic people than cruel, despicable maniacs. The arms of the church need to wrap around these victimized victimizers. In such ways as prayer, financial assistance for counseling, and providing supervised alternatives to incarceration, churches demonstrate their concern.
Child Abuse: Sexual
According to Michael Phillips, pastor of Lake Windermere Alliance Church in Invermere, British Columbia, and director of the local Communities Against Sexual Abuse group, "It is estimated that one out of four girls will be abused in some way before the age of 18. The figure is exactly half with boys, and the statistics are almost identical for the U.S. and for Canada." In over 90 percent of the cases, it isn't some seedy-looking character dragging a child into the bushes; it's Uncle Bob or Dad or the baby sitter or Mom's new boyfriend — or even Mom.
This kind of abuse throws a child's life into crisis. Writes Norman Wright in Crisis Counseling, "Abused children feel anger and rage, but at home they cannot express those feelings. They learn both to deny and to repress fear, anger, bitterness, and hatred. Any expression of their feelings leads to further repercussions that they want at all costs to avoid." So they learn to cope in other ways.
It's not unusual for abused children to slip into a make-believe world in which the bad things are happening to a made-up character, not themselves. They dissociate their bodies from the things happening to them. Michael Phillips identifies this as the Snow White syndrome: "Just as Snow White was poisoned and slept until Prince Charming came along, so the victim of sexual abuse often 'sleeps' through the abuse, hoping it will go away. One young girl even convinced herself that it was a girl she disliked who was the victim. She would accompany her father on excursions where she knew abuse was likely, hoping it wouldn't happen. When it did, she would transfer the abuse to her enemy while exiting into her own private world. For years she maintained that her father was a good man."
A Baptist pastor tells of a 13-year-old girl from his church who was plagued with recurrent epileptic seizures. For a young teen, she hardly talked, and she walked around with head down, blocking out most of the world around her. Her seizures had the doctors stumped. Finally her pastor, on a hunch, asked her, "Is there anything your mom or dad are doing to you that they shouldn't be doing?" That brought life into her. She vehemently insisted nothing of that sort had ever happened.
Her pastor read the signs but felt handcuffed since she was unwilling or unable to say anything. He spent the next three days praying for her, and her seizures actually got worse.
Her father came home drunk late the next night. He went straight to his daughter's room, got her out of bed, and took her into his room, closing and locking the door behind him. His wife was afraid of him when he got drunk, so she sobbed quietly in another room. The next morning the mother asked her daughter what had gone on. The girl finally broke down and told her mother of the sexual abuse, which had occurred for some time.
Mother and daughter went straight to their pastor. As the story unfolded, he felt a mixture of disgust and relief: disgust over the sordid details, and relief that they could finally stop the abuse. After talking briefly with them about what they had to do next, he accompanied them to the police station. The police arrested the father at work that very day. He would never again molest his daughter.
It would be nice if the story ended there, but the girl continued to have such trouble with her trauma-induced seizures that she finally had to be institutionalized. Her seizures worsened until she died at 19.
The pastor in the story found himself in a difficult bind. He strongly suspected that the girl was being molested, but he had neither proof nor the cooperation of the girl. Norm Wright says, "If you have a greater investment in helping a child than the child has in being helped, the results will be negligible." The pastor could pray and look for a way to draw out the girl, but the crisis was theirs, not his, and with nothing more than a hunch, he sadly waited for an entrée.
When the crisis finally arrived at his doorstep, the pastor faced two immediate concerns: the welfare of the girl and the curtailment of the father. The girl and her mother needed to be heard, comforted, and stabilized emotionally.
They also needed to be coaxed gently to report the offending father — something they knew would be costly. The wife would likely lose her spouse, her financial support, her home. The daughter would part with her only security and her privacy about a matter that was severely embarrassing. And so the pastor helped them walk through the procedure, supporting them all the way.
In other cases, sexually abused children call out for help. Michael Phillips tells of a girl who had been abused for three years by her policeman father. The father had told the family repeatedly of misused children whose complaints hadn't been followed up on, so she knew quite well that most abuse victims aren't believed. But after three years of intimidation, she told a social worker, who believed her. When the next official to enter the room, however, was a uniformed police officer, she began to weep uncontrollably. The moment was nearly lost.
The girl was more fortunate than many. "I discovered that victims of sexual abuse will disclose their painful story to an average of nine people before anyone believes them," Phillips explains. Because of this shocking statistic, the first consideration for helping victims is to believe them.
Anybody who has seen The Crucible about the Salem witch trials will naturally worry about children making up stories. Might they want to spite a parent or lie to get out of some kind of trouble? Phillips replies: "In five years of helping abused children, I've never found one child who has lied about being sexually abused. More often than not, they would rather say nothing, because the pain of being so intimately used is like an open wound that will not heal. In fact, statistics tell us only one in a thousand disclosures will be false, and some of those come from frantic parents who misread a child's statement. Such false claims are easy to check; the story changes with every telling. And among preadolescent victims, false claims are virtually nonexistent."
Besides believing a victim, the helper needs to communicate that message to the child. "I tell the child I believe every word he or she has said," relates Phillips. "If for some reason I can't honestly say this, I state that I believe they have been terribly hurt and the hurt can be stopped. Then I take the responsibility for informing the nonoffending parent or parents about the details of the abuse."
A second idea is to refrain from negative comments about the offending person. It can turn the victim, surprisingly, against the helper. The child can be greatly attached to the offender if that person is a parent or close relative. Says Phillips, "Most often a love relationship still exists, and the hope is that the 'wicked witch' will turn out to be 'Prince Charming' after all."
Phillips suggests pastors emphasize the volitional character of forgiveness, rather than running down the offender. "Forgiveness can be (and often must be) a cold, calculated act of the will. I find even preschoolers can understand what it means to forgive. The advantage we Christian counselors have is being able to introduce Jesus Christ into the situation. Since victims desire a Prince Charming, a Savior appeals to them. They often are prepared to accept the salvation and help the heavenly Father offers."
A third phenomenon to consider is the pain-pleasure factor, especially with older victims. After working over two years with one young woman, Phillips found she kept mentioning how guilty she felt. "Her guilt lay in the feelings she'd experienced during sex," Phillips recalls. "Though her mind was completely repulsed, her body did experience a degree of pleasure. As she entered puberty, the pleasure level increased. Though she knew what her father was doing had to be despicably wrong, her body would occasionally respond. Long after her father went to jail, she felt latent feelings of remorse for the pleasure her body had felt."
Phillips carefully explained how our bodies are built to feel pleasure even when we don't want them to. He had to reinforce that concept many times, especially when she began to feel sexual urges toward classmates and realized those feelings were similar to what she had experienced with her father. Phillips outlined the biblical understanding of sex as more than self-gratification. He also stressed that no child should ever have to have sex with an adult, and that the adult bears full responsibility for the act. This eventually helped her quit blaming herself and begin to understand the proper expression of sexual love.
A fourth item to keep in mind is overdependency. The victim easily can become overly attached to the helper. Phillips suggests avoiding long-term promises and stressing the helping role without becoming a surrogate parent to compensate for the past: "Make sure the victim knows your role and that you cannot be expected to be on twenty-four-hour call. One young victim would phone me an average of three to four times a day. At least once a day she would ask me to come over and counsel her. She hinted at suicide, as if my refusal would set off a regrettable but inevitable chain of events. The best answer was to involve her in the lives of several women in the church and encourage her to join groups such as Bible studies and prayer circles."
Two cautions: First, the women he selected to help had to be advised of her situation. This necessitated getting the victim's permission to tell them. Second, Phillips finds it unwise to place older abuse victims in situations where they have direct responsibility for younger children. "Sexual abuse is a power trip," he warns, "and one way to regain lost control is to abuse someone else."
Finally, the family needs the care of the church. Especially when the abusing person was a family member — often the breadwinner — the family experiences deep crisis. Along with family therapy, in which the whole family can learn how interactions can be better handled, the care and support of a church is a lifesaver. Many in the community will consciously or unconsciously shun the victim's family. People don't like to talk about such things or may consider the family "soiled." The special understanding and outreach of the church evidences the love of God, which writes off no one.
Spouse Abuse
In one way, spouse abuse is like suicide: the offender can think of no other suitable act to adequately express the depth of anger and frustration. For most, it's a learned response: Dad did it to Mom. For most, it's not volitional; they wouldn't calmly choose it from a list of appropriate responses were they sober and in control. For all, it is an inadequate and damaging way to respond to a loved one.
A pastoral counselor in a southern town tells of a couple in their early forties. "I'd been helping them with their marital problems," he says. "They had told of previous arguments that had dissolved into name calling and even a little pushing and shoving, but nothing major.
"Then one appointment the wife walked in sporting a big black eye. She and her husband both looked rather sheepish. It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to the woman's shiner. Sure enough, in the midst of a heated argument, the man had hit her in the face."
Sometimes people come up with elaborate excuses for such injuries. One woman I know swore she had fallen onto a door-knob. A few months later it was a box that had tumbled onto her as she fell off a ladder while getting it down. Not long after that, I went with the police (as police chaplain) when they answered a domestic disturbance call at the same home. It was no accident.
This couple, however, didn't deny the cause of the black eye. The counselor continues: "The husband took responsibility for what he did. He was ashamed and couldn't begin to excuse it. It turned out he had a difficult time with anger. He didn't consider it a legitimate part of his emotional arsenal, and so he suppressed it most of the time. He had a negative self-image and felt tremendous guilt whenever that anger boiled to the surface, such as it did in the argument with his wife. With no legitimate way to recognize his anger and deal with it little by little, he was left with recurrent outbursts in which his anger exploded beyond control. I eventually referred him to a group of men who all were dealing with anger. The group therapy worked well.
"The wife, as with many victims of abuse, maintained some sense of deserving what she got. Without knowing it, she actually helped incite his outbursts and then gained a certain amount of satisfaction from being the wronged party. I helped her find a therapy group for women working on self-image.
"Of course, we talked about what the shiner meant to each person. We did a biopsy on the fight that led to the husband striking the wife. Before we were finished, they could see what caused the violence, and they had an idea of how to avoid it. I got them jointly to take responsibility for their parts in causing the problem. Then we dealt with the pain and shame both were feeling."
As both partners began to feel better about themselves, they were better able to avoid the name calling and shoving. Their pastor helped them learn how to be assertive rather than aggressive, to make pacts and keep them, and to fight fairly.
"Since violence is often picked up and acted out by children in a family where the parents fight," the counselor continued, "I included the kids in family counseling. They needed to see how families can resolve difficulties without abuse. Otherwise they'd become prime candidates for domestic troubles when they grow up."
In this instance, the husband appeared to be gaining control of his anger. Everyone agreed that it wouldn't be necessary for the wife to leave the home. "I told her," her counselor said, "that she has to make it clear to her husband that she will call the police if he ever strikes her again. And it can't be a bluff; she has to intend to follow through. Otherwise she becomes an enabler, co-dependent on violence to solve problems. Spouses who fail to report physical abuse simply reinforce bad behavior. And any first-year psychology student knows that reinforced behavior continues."
Long before counselors have the luxury of trying to bring harmony to a marriage, though, they have to concern themselves with basic safety: Will the spouse be in danger of further battering? If so, then immediate arrangements have to be made to separate the couple.
Many communities provide shelters for abused wives and children. Relatives will often take in a victim. Church members may be willing. I know our spare bedroom has provided shelter for a night or two. The important factor is that the threatened spouse find a place free from the possibility of bodily harm — and not feel sub-Christian for exercising that basic right.
Then the work of reconciliation and rebuilding is at hand. The pastor in our example handled this phase well. He had the advantage of knowing the couple, and he benefited from their candor. His first tactic was to get them to understand what went on prior to the violence that sparked it. This helped the couple see the several points in the argument where it probably could have taken a more productive turn. It also helped the couple discover their joint responsibility for both the mistake and its positive resolution.
He did more; he found ways to build up both the husband and the wife so they could approach their marriage from strength rather than dysfunction. Involving the rest of the family also helped and, we hope, prevented the continuation of abuse into another generation.
Sexual abuse of a spouse often has less to do with sex than with violence, power, rage, control. The rapist uses sex to act out violent and angry intentions against his victim. And to force one's spouse into any sexual act against his or her will is a form of rape.
Again, no man or woman, married or not, must give in to sexual demands contrary to conscience or will. Pastors can encourage the victim to seek safety first and then work toward resolution of the problem if the spouse is willing. The rest of the intervention needs to focus on the dynamics that make sexual aggression the chosen form of abuse, and those factors in the victim that have encouraged or allowed it.
Counselors need to be aware of their feelings in spousal abuse situations. The pastor who counseled the couple over the black-eye incident confessed, "When I first saw that blackened eye, I wanted to give the fellow a shiner, too! All my protective urges rush to the surface at a time like that, and I had to curb them to be able to deal effectively with the couple and not just get indignant for the woman."
Personal safety is not a foolish concern for interveners in abuse situations. According to a 1976 Psychology Today article, fully 25 percent of police fatalities and 40 percent of on-the-job injuries arise from intervening in domestic crises.
Fortunately physical violence isn't the rule, even among cases into which the police are called, but wise is the pastor who steps cautiously into potentially dangerous circumstances. Fear ought not preclude intervention, but neither should folly accompany it.
Quickscan DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ABUSE
Immediate concerns:
1.Be aware of the potential for continued or more severe violence and abuse. The victim's safety — and your own — are of primary concern
2.A victim should not stay in a situation where violence or abuse threatens. Pleas of "It won't happen again!" are suspect.
3.Call the police for any violence or abuse in progress, and follow their instructions.
4.Do not promise strict confidentiality. You may not be able to keep the promise, either legally or morally.
Keep in mind:
1.Abused children won't necessarily expect you to believe them. They may not divulge information harmful to the abusing parent.
2.Small children nearly never make up sexual abuse charges. They cannot make up something about which they know nothing.
3.Spouse abuse is rarely a chosen response. It is a response born in passion and frustration. Self-hatred and poor coping mechanisms often underlie the problem.
4.Spousal sexual abuse is not something an unconsenting spouse must bear. A spouse should not be violated sexually merely because he or she is married to the violator.
5.The presence of genuine guilt doesn't necessarily indicate the end of a battering problem. Most batterers express remorse when anger subsides; many repeat their behavior.
6.Reporting abuse, as difficult as it is, must be done. Families will need support as they go to the authorities.
Things to do or say:
1.Secure the bodily safety of the victim.
2.Show love, concern, warmth. Remain unshocked by what happened. The victim needs to be able to relate the story without inhibition.
3.Listen for cryptic comments from children. Role playing, using anatomically correct dolls, and having them make crayon drawings are other ways to obtain information.
4.Remove the notion that "Christians never do such things." All victims need to be believed, even when the accused is a Christian.
5.Help the victim and victimizer find specialized care.
6.Use a tape recorder with the permission of the victim. Tapes may well convince a skeptical parent or other authorities.
7.Report child neglect and abuse to the proper authorities. It's required by law in most states.
Things not to do or say:
1.Do not assume an innocent parent was unaware of child abuse. Denial is common.
2.Do not castigate the abuser. You may lose the cooperation of the victim, who often loves the abuser anyway.
3.Do not ask a child "Why?" questions. They are not sophisticated enough for analysis of the problem. Stick to finding the facts.
4.Do not underplay the potential for continued or increased violence in domestic fights.
5.Do not reject offhand any report of abuse. Tend toward believing it first, and then seek to validate it.
For further study:
Martin, Grant L. Counseling for Family Violence and Abuse. Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1987.
Olson, Esther L. and Kenneth Petersen. No Place to Hide. Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1982.
Strom, Kay Marshall. Helping Women in Crisis. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986.
Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today
