Faith Community Leaders

Ideas for faith community leadership

1. Commit to promote prevention and achieve the goal of becoming a sexually-violent-free community by creating recovery groups, counseling and triage resources.
2. Understand that most sexual violence comes from acquaintances and family members and make members aware of this.
3. Provide education to break ignorance barriers to understanding rape and to train men and women to come alongside survivors.
4. Start a Men Against Sexual Violence group, including teens.
5. Educate leadership to the attitudes impacting the prevalence of sexual violence and the distinction between sexual violence sex.  Only the perpetrator is guilty.
6. Address root causes: e.g. sexist attitudes, male aggression, female passivity, desensitization through TV, movies, internet.
7. Counter root causes with sexually-appropriate media and materials within the context of God’s plan for sex and develop classes for prevention of sexual violence.
8. Invite honesty, compassion, healing.
9. Initiate recovery groups, available (highly specialized) counseling, community resources.

1. Sexual Abuse: Pastoral Response by Len Hedges Goettl and Daniel G. Bagby
2. Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence by Monica A. Coleman.
3. Accounting For Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Vilence by I. Anderson
4. When Violence Is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Sruvivors of Acquaintance Rape by Kristen Leslie
5. Dinah’s Lament by Joy A. Schroeder
6. Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Cultue, 1790-1990 by Sabine Sielke
7. Helping Vctims of Sexual Abuse: A Sensitive Biblical Guide for Counselors, Victims, and Families by Lynn Heitritter and Jeaneet Vought
8. Sexual Violence: The Unmentionalbe Sin, An Ethical and Pastoral Perspective by Marie Marshall Fortune
9. Prevent Sexual Abuse in Congregations: A Resource for Leaders by Rev. Karen McClintock