Ideas for faith community leadership
- Commit to promote prevention and achieve the goal of becoming a sexually-violent-free community by creating recovery groups, counseling and triage resources.
- Understand that most sexual violence comes from acquaintances and family members and make members aware of this.
- Provide education to break ignorance barriers to understanding rape and to train men and women to come alongside survivors.
- Start a Men Against Sexual Violence group, including teens.
- Educate leadership to the attitudes impacting the prevalence of sexual violence and the distinction between sexual violence sex. Only the perpetrator is guilty.
- Address root causes: e.g. sexist attitudes, male aggression, female passivity, desensitization through TV, movies, internet.
- 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.
- Invite honesty, compassion, healing.
- Initiate recovery groups, available (highly specialized) counseling, community resources.
- Sexual Abuse: Pastoral Response by Len Hedges Goettl and Daniel G. Bagby
- Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence by Monica A. Coleman.
- Accounting For Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Vilence by I. Anderson
- When Violence Is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Sruvivors of Acquaintance Rape by Kristen Leslie
- Dinah’s Lament by Joy A. Schroeder
- Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Cultue, 1790-1990 by Sabine Sielke
- Helping Vctims of Sexual Abuse: A Sensitive Biblical Guide for Counselors, Victims, and Families by Lynn Heitritter and Jeaneet Vought
- Sexual Violence: The Unmentionalbe Sin, An Ethical and Pastoral Perspective by Marie Marshall Fortune
- Prevent Sexual Abuse in Congregations: A Resource for Leaders by Rev. Karen McClintock
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