Things I learned from feminism I wish I'd learned from Christianity

[DarkLight]

Who is telling you that abuse victims are to blame for their abuse?

It certainly is not official Church doctrine, certainly not with the Catholic Church, and Protestant denominations do not also teach that except for a few.

It would be a shame to separate oneself from the Body of Christ based on a lie.

I think what DL is talking about is the tendency of people to want to play armchair detective so they can figure out exactly how guilty you are of your own abuse. Because God forbid they just say, “I’m so sorry!” instead.

Right. What’s very common is to say “Of course abuse isn’t the victim’s fault. But you were alone with a guy, and you did wear a top where your shoulders were exposed. And you said no, but you didn’t scream it loud enough. You were sending so many mixed messages, you can’t really blame the guy for not understanding.” Or the whole “After all, you willingly were alone with a man. It doesn’t sound like you were assaulted - it sounds like you had sex and regretted it and don’t want to admit it.”

Or on a lesser scale - I’ve talked about street harassment, and sometimes about not feeling safe. Or simply feeling irritated that a woman’s body is seen as up for public commentary. But pretty inevitably, the first reaction is to start going over what I was wearing at the time and try to see if I was guilty of any immodesty that might have triggered inappropriate advances.

 

[Xantippe]

Victim-blaming is a surprisingly tempting habit.

As I recall, Rod Dreher, the guy who left the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy after the sex abuse scandals, later on once wrote a blog post where he was saying that a 15-year-old girl was to some extent responsible for her “relationship” with a teacher (or some other position of trust and authority). He said something like he didn’t know to what extent, but he was sure that there was some level of responsibility.

He would have lost his marbles if anybody had said that during the Catholic scandals about a teenage boy, even a 17-year-old boy.

 

[Xantippe]

Right. What’s very common is to say “Of course abuse isn’t the victim’s fault. But you were alone with a guy, and you did wear a top where your shoulders were exposed. And you said no, but you didn’t scream it loud enough. You were sending so many mixed messages, you can’t really blame the guy for not understanding.” Or the whole “After all, you willingly were alone with a man. It doesn’t sound like you were assaulted - it sounds like you had sex and regretted it and don’t want to admit it.”

Or on a lesser scale - I’ve talked about street harassment, and sometimes about not feeling safe. Or simply feeling irritated that a woman’s body is seen as up for public commentary. But pretty inevitably, the first reaction is to start going over what I was wearing at the time and try to see if I was guilty of any immodesty that might have triggered inappropriate advances.

Notice the word count devoted to sympathy and support (“Of course abuse isn’t the victim’s fault”) versus the word count devoted to investigation and blaming.

With all of the talk about fake rape accusations, maybe it’s time to dust off Professor Kirk’s advice from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lucy’s fantastical story of a trip through the wardrobe conflicts with Edmund’s more prosaic version, and Peter and Susan (their siblings) don’t know who to believe, so they go to Professor Kirk for advice.

Professor Kirk asks whether Edmund or Lucy is the more generally truthful and they say that Lucy is the more truthful.

““Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” "There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is
telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

I think that is a very reasonable approach. If we know that the accuser is truthful and of good character, I think it makes sense to believe her, even if what she says seems improbable or outside of our experience.

Whereas a more typical approach is (unfortunately) to assume that an accuser is a liar because she is an accuser, an approach which I think Professor Kirk would not approve of.

 

[ToeInTheWater]

The general problem with hypocrisy is that people come away with the impression that “Obviously, you don’t even believe what you’re saying yourself, because you’re not practicing what you’re preaching. If even you don’t believe your own words, then how can you expect me to do so?”

However, there is a difference between deliberate hypocrisy, and sincerely trying to live up to one’s ideals, but falling short from time to time due to human weakness. And even deliberate hypocrisy doesn’t always automatically disprove the principles the hypocrite is pretending to believe.

For example, a baseball player, Jeuris Familia, was recently suspended after a domestic violence incident. Ironically, he had actually participated in a PSA that was against domestic violence. I’ve also read that Gandhi admitted to striking his wife despite his overall pacifist philosophies.

But that certainly doesn’t mean “See, even men who claim to oppose DV engage in it themselves, so that means there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just part of human nature, some women are so disrespectful they deserve to be slapped around a little”.

All of this.
My favorite story in that timeframe was when I rang up some books for a woman in standard Church Lady gear–heels, tasteful pearls, nice church outfit, the works. I gave her the total, smiled, and wished her a pleasant day. Her response? “Tsk! Don’t you know you shouldn’t be working on Sundays?!”

Totally oblivious, of course, to the fact that she was shopping on a Sunday, and in doing so, was guaranteeing that I’d need to work…

That kinda thing just ain’t gonna win people to our side.

I think, though, that most people who act this way don’t even want to convert anyone. They just want to bask in their moral superiority over others.

I think that is a very reasonable approach. If we know that the accuser is truthful and of good character, I think it makes sense to believe her, even if what she says seems improbable or outside of our experience.

Whereas a more typical approach is (unfortunately) to assume that an accuser is a liar because she is an accuser, an approach which I think Professor Kirk would not approve of.

If you’re referring to Bill Cosby, I again think he’d have fewer right-wing apologists if he’d been a flaming liberal like Alec Baldwin.

I think that the issue was more that his defenders equate “sharing my own political ideas” with “being of good character”, because of the assumption that “Obviously They are worse human beings than We are”. If that’s true, then obviously, if One of Them accuses One of Us of some crime, it can’t possibly be true. They must be lying.

ETA: I mean, see how eager many right-wingers are to believe that illegal immigrants and Muslims are all ravenous rapists drooling over the chance to rape good WASP women?

Also, many people think that sexual assault of a partner or even an acquaintance, really isn’t that big of a deal. (Many such people also think it’s no big deal for a man to shove his wife against the wall or beat their kids behinds, either.) They think "If we believe the woman and she’s lying, then the man goes to prison, likely gets raped himself, and has his whole life ruined. That’s a horrible outcome, that we have to avoid if at all possible.

But if we believe the man and he’s lying…well, what’s the big deal? It’s not like the women died, was permanently disabled, or really had any lasting harm done to her. She can just go see a shrink and take Prozac. Or just pray every day, and ask God to help her get over it. If not she’s a bitter unforgiving *****."

ETA again: Oops, I got censored! Anyway I was thinking of a word that rhymes with “witch”.

 

[DarkLight]

What strikes me is that there’s often a lot of victim-blaming even when the accuser isn’t around to be hurt.

For example: The abuse, for me, occurred in college. I go to grad school afterwards. Grad school is halfway across the country. These people do not know the guy, and I take no special pains to identify him to them. I don’t even refer to him by his full name (and his first name would hardly be a unique identifier). So they’ve never met the guy, they’re probably not ever going to meet the guy. My purpose in talking is to explain the effect on my personal and spiritual life and perhaps gain advice, not to provide any repercussions to the man. In short, there’s really no way it’s going to affect him at all.

But you still get much of the same type of questioning and maybe you did something after all.

 

[DarkLight]

I think one of the problems about the Culture War mentality is that people start focusing on “defeating” only the kind of evil that is attacking a community from outside. We start to think, “If only we can defeat those evil post-modernists, radfems, secularists, in the field of Politics, then we won’t have to worry about evil and sin anymore. We can save ourselves.” (And on the more “progressive side, if only we can defeat those bigoted right wing haters, we can save ourselves”.)

At the end of the day, we have to remember that “culture” is only important insofar as it affects individuals. From our human perspective, culture is a giant monolith that far dwarfs any individual life. But from a spiritual perspective - from the Divine perspective - the human soul is the enduring thing, while cultures and parties and political movements and even nations themselves pass in the blink of an eye.

God’s not going to ask us whether we were on the right side of the culture wars. He’s going to ask us if we loved our neighbor as ourselves.

 

[Xantippe]

At the end of the day, we have to remember that “culture” is only important insofar as it affects individuals. From our human perspective, culture is a giant monolith that far dwarfs any individual life. But from a spiritual perspective - from the Divine perspective - the human soul is the enduring thing, while cultures and parties and political movements and even nations themselves pass in the blink of an eye.

God’s not going to ask us whether we were on the right side of the culture wars. He’s going to ask us if we loved our neighbor as ourselves.

Indeed.

I believe the core of your first paragraph is a paraphrase of something from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.

 

[DarkLight]

Indeed.

I believe the core of your first paragraph is a paraphrase of something from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.

Yup! There’s a lot of wisdom in that book, and I re-read it pretty recently.

I think the sci-fi series talks about that too - how from the divine perspective, so much of what we think of as enduring institutions are merely passing thoughts, and an individual human is of infinite more worth than the entire political institution of a nation.

 

[StudentMI]

Right. What’s very common is to say “Of course abuse isn’t the victim’s fault. But you were alone with a guy, and you did wear a top where your shoulders were exposed. And you said no, but you didn’t scream it loud enough. You were sending so many mixed messages, you can’t really blame the guy for not understanding.” Or the whole “After all, you willingly were alone with a man. It doesn’t sound like you were assaulted - it sounds like you had sex and regretted it and don’t want to admit it.”

Or on a lesser scale - I’ve talked about street harassment, and sometimes about not feeling safe. Or simply feeling irritated that a woman’s body is seen as up for public commentary. But pretty inevitably, the first reaction is to start going over what I was wearing at the time and try to see if I was guilty of any immodesty that might have triggered inappropriate advances.

I’m sorry you’ve gone through that.

 

[Xantippe]

I think, though, that most people who act this way don’t even want to convert anyone. They just want to bask in their moral superiority over others.

If you’re referring to Bill Cosby, I again think he’d have fewer right-wing apologists if he’d been a flaming liberal like Alec Baldwin.

I think that the issue was more that his defenders equate “sharing my own political ideas” with “being of good character”, because of the assumption that “Obviously They are worse human beings than We are”. If that’s true, then obviously, if One of Them accuses One of Us of some crime, it can’t possibly be true. They must be lying.

I suppose that makes the Sunday work thing “virtue signaling”? I feel like that can exist in both left and right (and mainstream) versions.

I wasn’t really thinking about Bill Cosby–I was thinking more of he says/she says college/young adult type stuff.

I followed both the Duke Lacrosse and UVA frat cases very closely, and while they get mentioned a lot with regard to fake rape accusations, I think there’s a lot to be learned from studying those cases. For example, I stopped skimming through the Wikipedia piece on Crystal Mangum (the Duke Lacrosse accuser) when I hit this sentence:

" Although Mangum claimed that she had only recently taken up stripping, she had actually worked at strip clubs as early as 2002: When she was arrested that year for stealing a taxi and trying to run over a police officer, the incident report stated that she had been lap dancing at a strip club that evening."

Oh man. That was 4 years before the Duke Lacrosse accusation.

Her later career was even more colorful. In 2010 police were called to her home: “She reportedly set fire to some of [her live-in boyfriend’s] clothing in a bathtub in their presence. The building suffered heavy smoke damage. They arrested Mangum on charges of attempted murder, first-degree arson, assault and battery, identity theft, communicating threats, damage to property, resisting an officer, and misdemeanor child abuse.”

Unfortunately, even that didn’t slow her down. A year later in 2011, Mangum fatally stabbed a different live-in boyfriend and is currently serving 14-18 years in prison for second degree murder.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum

While “Jackie” from the UVA case wasn’t violent like Crystal Mangum, the evidence suggests that her fraternity rape accusations were part of a bizarre (and extremely labor-intensive) scheme to get a male friend she was interested in to pay attention to her:

wtvr.com/2016/02/08/jackie-uva-gang-rape-story-twist/

Not that dishonest or delusional people can’t be raped, but I feel like the fact that a woman is not dishonest or delusional in her previous conduct ought to add some weight to what she says.

I was reading a young woman’s account of a Protestant college mishandling her rape accusation, and she had some very interesting things to say about how a) it turned out that the man she accused had some documented honesty and character issues that the college should have been aware of b) she was able to present dozens of character witnesses for herself (but the college discarded nearly all of them) and c) as she pointed out, documented false rape accusers tend to be either mentally disturbed and/or have clear personal motives. I don’t know if that holds for all false accusers, but it applies pretty well to UVA and Duke.

I know somebody is going to mention notoriety or attention as motives that would motivate a false accuser, but let’s think about that. For a sane, normal woman who wants to live a sane, normal life, what kind of genuine personal gain is there in being falsely identified as a rape victim? Oprah doesn’t give you a car.

I agree that there’s a tendency to believe too long in the impeccability of one’s political allies (and conversely, too much of a rush to believe evil of political enemies).

 

[DarkLight]

I think people also make the error that we have to apply the same standard in every single circumstance.

In the legal system, we have a standard for a criminal conviction. In the U.S., it is “guilty beyond reasonable doubt.” And that’s a good standard! We’d rather, overall, let guilty people go than lock up innocent people. But it’s not necessarily the standard we need to use in other cases.

At the opposite extreme, in the case I mentioned where the victim is speaking to people who don’t know and probably won’t know the accused, there’s no particular harm in accepting the victim’s word at face value unless you have a positive reason to think they’re lying. You don’t even know the accused and the victim isn’t looking to gain anything except support and comfort.

And of course there’s all sorts of cases in between. For example, one of the workplace blogs I follow had a woman write in talking about how she found out her creepy ex was applying to work at here company. She didn’t have absolute proof that it was because of her, but she had some evidence in that direction. He ended up being refused an interview when she mentioned that to HR. And that’s fine - losing out on a job opportunity isn’t a criminal conviction, so she doesn’t need enough evidence to prove he’s 100% definitely trying to stalk her in that case, just a reasonable reason to think so.

 

[Xantippe]

**I think people also make the error that we have to apply the same standard in every single circumstance.
**
In the legal system, we have a standard for a criminal conviction. In the U.S., it is “guilty beyond reasonable doubt.” And that’s a good standard! We’d rather, overall, let guilty people go than lock up innocent people. But it’s not necessarily the standard we need to use in other cases.

**At the opposite extreme, in the case I mentioned where the victim is speaking to people who don’t know and probably won’t know the accused, there’s no particular harm in accepting the victim’s word at face value unless you have a positive reason to think they’re lying. **You don’t even know the accused and the victim isn’t looking to gain anything except support and comfort.

Right.

 

[Xantippe]

I know somebody is going to mention notoriety or attention as motives that would motivate a false accuser, but let’s think about that. For a sane, normal woman who wants to live a sane, normal life, what kind of genuine personal gain is there in being falsely identified as a rape victim? Oprah doesn’t give you a car.

Following up on that–there are a lot more reliable ways for young women to get positive attention:

–buy a new purse or cute shoes!
–wear a dress!
–Instagram your lunch!
–put a bikini picture of yourself on Facebook!
–get a super cute puppy!
–wear a funny t-shirt!

A false rape accusation isn’t even in the top 50 ways to get positive attention.

 

[SuperLuigi]

Here’s something that is regarding as shocking to modern mores: acting as if children are the property of their parents and that parents can do more or less whatever they wish with their children and nobody better say boo about it.

That position came up over and over again in one of our recent spanking threads, and it looks really bad to a lot of mainstream middle class parents.

Ill-treatment of children is one of the issues that a lot of conservative religious people need to have sharper pains of conscience about, because it comes up over and over again as a problem.

I realize that secular people mistreat children too, blah blah blah–but is that really the standard we all want to live up (or down) to? Shouldn’t conservative religious people be trying to treat children better than their liberal and feminist counterparts?

We should be examining our consciences and not just spanking kids because it’s old fashioned and sounds like discipline. Rules and discipline are worthless as virtue signaling if they don’t work.

The other issue is people allowing the state to help them raise their kids. That is and would be a disaster.

 

[SuperLuigi]

I would agree that the wage gap is largely produced by motherhood.

But that’s another important fact that has to be recognized–that motherhood has severe impact on women’s earning ability.

That’s why the talk of how financially “unfair” divorce is to men is so one-sided–motherhood just by itself is “unfair” financially to women.

nytimes.com/2017/05/13/upshot/the-gender-pay-gap-is-largely-because-of-motherhood.html

It’s just not reasonable to ask that women give up prioritizing their careers for marriage and motherhood and then to be surprised when women wind up being the party that needs to be financially subsidized. If there’s not going to be a subsidy, then women need to stop hurting their education and careers for the sake of children and their husband’s career. They need to work as hard and as long as their husbands, not have any breaks in employment, and refuse moves that will hurt their earning potential (no matter how good all of those things might be for the family).

Now, as to rape culture, barely a week goes by on CAF without evidence. We had a very good one on this thread (I think), where somebody was making the argument that it was obviously more likely that 50 women were lying than that Bill Cosby had been drugging and raping women for decades.

I unfortunately don’t have my house mathematician available, but isn’t that kind of crazy, even just mathematically speaking? Let us say (being very generous) that there is a 90% chance that each and every one of those women is lying–the odds that all 50 women are lying is virtually nil.

We can also apply Occam’s Razor. Wikipedia says, “Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case, the simpler one is usually better. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

With regard to Bill Cosby, we have two alternate explanations. Either

a) he is lying

or

b) she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, she is lying, etc. (I typed out 22, so just imagine another 28)

The first explanation (only he is lying) is much more elegant than the second explanation, because it requires far fewer assumptions (49 fewer, in fact).

And that’s what rape culture means in that instance–totally disregarding the common sense probabilities of the situation in favor of the assumption that 50 different women (many of whom are now grandmas because the earliest accusations date from the 1960s) must be seeking fame and fortune through their accusations.

There’s also an interesting parallel to Islamic law. There are a lot of Islamic countries where a woman’s testimony is (quite officially) worth 1/2 of a man’s testimony.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_women%27s_testimony_in_Islam

With Bill Cosby, we get a situation where a woman’s testimony is worth less than 1/50th of a man’s testimony.

Wow!

The evidence against Mr. Cosby doesn’t look good on paper, that’s for sure. But the thing about some 2nd and 3rd world nations is that men and women are not equal and that’s deeply embedded in some cases in the government and culture. So that is institutional. We don’t have that issue in the US. There may be an issue with properly convicting powerful people, as some may argue with OJ or the average politician.

Rape culture as a phrase is something that has been tossed carefree around college campuses as a means for people to push mostly fake victimhood. I have previously noted (to quote Milo) that using the term carefree is unfair to those places like the former Yugoslavia, Nanking or “the Congo where rape has been used as weapon of war.” He also asks why so many American dads send their daughters to college if rape and sexual assault in general is so prevalent.

 

[SuperLuigi]

I think it’s specifically because of an unwillingness to call out and hold their leaders accountable that the right lost the very “culture war” they declared, and in such a short amount of time.

Who wants to be lectured about sexual morality by the likes of Ted Haggard, Josh Duggar, or churches rocked by scandal? Who is really going to believe that conservative Christians know anything about marriage when their rates of divorce, abortion, infidelity, and abuse are no better than the “liberals” they decry? Who really wants to hear about the “destruction of the family” from people who make their living off of shock statements about women and minorities, as some of the bloggers that have been referenced in this thread do?

No thanks. Liberals may be decedent, but they don’t build multi-million dollar empires on the notion of divine moral superiority and the hubris to talk down to those filthy “other sinners”.

You don’t want to call out one of your own for hiring a prostitute? That’s fine. But clearly, the rest of the world is happy to do so for you, and happy to note your silence on sin committed by pre-approved groups and people.

Either you stand by moral principles or you stand blindly by people who just happen to be mad at the same people you are. But you can’t do both.

In terms of politics, well, with the exception of some die-hard Trump supporters, conservatives are generally much better at calling out their own when it comes to politics. Liberals and their allies in the media frequently circle the wagons, I guess in no small part since 90%+ of said media agrees with them they can succeed to some extent at fooling people, namely their voting base, or get them to make just enough excuses to swallow a prozac and scribble the line in next to their name at the voting booth.

The operative word though you are looking for is scandal. It’s an important term that has all but vanished from Christian moral discourse—much to its detriment.

People LOVE to point out hypocrisy with those whom they disagree.

That’s been a massive problem, but as Xantippe noted, I think the excuse-making is even worse, because it gets people to violate their own conscience. I’ve argued that people in the homey heartland and fly-over country who do this are the difference in this dynamic, and in Catholic moral terms may be worse off than a bleeding heart hippie from Boston or Berkeley who genuinely believes in what they are doing.

The other biggie is just the blind appeal to authority and really those leaders (not so much the shock-preaching, I think) who perhaps thought they could just show up and win just because. It’s not Christian at all-----in fact, it’s the height of arrogance. I know enough about the atheist and skeptic community to know they don’t particularly care for that either.

 

[Xantippe]

The evidence against Mr. Cosby doesn’t look good on paper, that’s for sure. But the thing about some 2nd and 3rd world nations is that men and women are not equal and that’s deeply embedded in some cases in the government and culture. So that is institutional. We don’t have that issue in the US. There may be an issue with properly convicting powerful people, as some may argue with OJ or the average politician.

Rape culture as a phrase is something that has been tossed carefree around college campuses as a means for people to push mostly fake victimhood. I have previously noted (to quote Milo) that using the term carefree is unfair to those places like the former Yugoslavia, Nanking or “the Congo where rape has been used as weapon of war.”** He also asks why so many American dads send their daughters to college if rape and sexual assault in general is so prevalent.**

Some relevant stats on women 18-24:

bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rsavcaf9513pr.cfm

“Among college-age females (ages 18 to 24), the rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for nonstudents than students for the period 1995–2013, the Bureau of Justice Statistics announced today.”

“Among females living in rural areas, the rate of rape and sexual assault was almost 2 times higher for nonstudents (8.8 per 1,000) than students (4.6 per 1,000).”

So, go to college to avoid being raped?

I expect there’s a big socioeconomic factor here–young women whose demographics are good enough to go to college have other advantages that keep them safer.

Here are some stats on sexual assault victimization by age for 2005-2010:

Age 12-17 4.1 victims per 1,000
Age 18-34 3.7 victims per 1,000
Age 35-64 1.5 victims per 1,000
Age 65+ 0.2! (small sample size)

Note that (using that age breakdown), the highest risk group is girls 12-17–an age group young enough that almost none of them are in college yet.

 

[Sarcelle]

Right. What’s very common is to say “Of course abuse isn’t the victim’s fault. But you were alone with a guy, and you did wear a top where your shoulders were exposed. And you said no, but you didn’t scream it loud enough. You were sending so many mixed messages, you can’t really blame the guy for not understanding.” Or the whole “After all, you willingly were alone with a man. It doesn’t sound like you were assaulted - it sounds like you had sex and regretted it and don’t want to admit it.”

Or on a lesser scale - I’ve talked about street harassment, and sometimes about not feeling safe. Or simply feeling irritated that a woman’s body is seen as up for public commentary. But pretty inevitably, the first reaction is to start going over what I was wearing at the time and try to see if I was guilty of any immodesty that might have triggered inappropriate advances.

Rightly or wrongly, people will always have their opinions. You have the choice to care or not. The best way is to arm yourself with the truth. If their opinion is truth than you can learn from it, if it is not, ignore them. A lot easier said than done and a lot harder when one is young and cares too much about what other people think. One of the blessings of growing old is that it gets a lot easier to not care about other people’s opinions.

Can’t really stop it. It’s like trying to stop the wind.

 

[DarkLight]

Rightly or wrongly, people will always have their opinions. You have the choice to care or not. The best way is to arm yourself with the truth. If their opinion is truth than you can learn from it, if it is not, ignore them. A lot easier said than done and a lot harder when one is young and cares too much about what other people think. One of the blessings of growing old is that it gets a lot easier to not care about other people’s opinions.

Can’t really stop it. It’s like trying to stop the wind.

I never really held much with this sort of “it’s just a opinion” type of talk.

Like it or not, we are social creatures. That’s the way God made us. Most humans don’t do very well trying to go it alone, especially when we are hurting. Abuse leaves deep, deep wounds on its own. Having that then be turned around and have people question you and probe and try to find out what you might have done to deserve it hardly helps matters. This is the kind of thing that can cause a pretty serious disruption to someone’s well-being.

There’s some very real studies that the support a victim receives after a traumatic event has significant effects on the development of future mental health problems related to the event. Victims who receive immediate support and compassion have much better long-term outcomes. That’s going to be much more of an issue when certain viewpoints become pervasive.

And that’s leaving aside all the pragmatic effects. For example, there’s a lot of pragmatic considerations in leaving an abusive relationship, many of which the church is in a good position to assist. There’s also issues of safety in the church - a culture that disbelieves or blames victims is also one that’s going to be more likely to permit an abuser to remain in the church, especially in cases that may fall on the “technically legal” side.

 

[Xantippe]

I never really held much with this sort of “it’s just a opinion” type of talk.

Like it or not, we are social creatures. That’s the way God made us. Most humans don’t do very well trying to go it alone, especially when we are hurting. Abuse leaves deep, deep wounds on its own. Having that then be turned around and have people question you and probe and try to find out what you might have done to deserve it hardly helps matters. This is the kind of thing that can cause a pretty serious disruption to someone’s well-being.

There’s some very real studies that the support a victim receives after a traumatic event has significant effects on the development of future mental health problems related to the event. Victims who receive immediate support and compassion have much better long-term outcomes. That’s going to be much more of an issue when certain viewpoints become pervasive.

And that’s leaving aside all the pragmatic effects. For example, there’s a lot of pragmatic considerations in leaving an abusive relationship, many of which the church is in a good position to assist. There’s also issues of safety in the church - a culture that disbelieves or blames victims is also one that’s going to be more likely to permit an abuser to remain in the church, especially in cases that may fall on the “technically legal” side.

That said, there’s also something to be said for being selective about who one looks to for support.

goodreads.com/book/show/65325.Safe_People

(I haven’t actually read that book, but their book “Boundaries in Marriage” is very good, and I think the title of the book is superb–“Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren’t.” Even if the book itself is terrible, I really like their formulation of the problem.)

I know that being selective about confidants can be hard/impossible in the immediate aftermath of trauma (I have an auntie who was once spilling her guts to a hotel maid soon after auntie’s husband turned out to be cheating and moved two states away leaving auntie holding the bag and I once got a much-needed hug from a woman that was a total stranger at the hospital on a really bad day), but going forward after human-caused trauma, learning who to trust is probably the core survival skill.