Thursday, May 12, 2011

Why Pastors Struggle with DV

It seems like all we have been doing lately is sharing other people's work, which is great, because that means all sorts of people in the media are paying attention to issues including and surrounding violence against women.

The article we want to share today looks at reasons why many pastors struggle when trying to address domestic violence among their congregants. The author comes up with six:
  1. Domestic violence is fundamentally unbelievable (that a person would be capable of hurting someone they love).
  2. Wife abusers are masterful manipulators.
  3. Pastors think spousal abuse only happens in certain kinds of families.
  4. Pastors haven't thought enough about the gray area between "submit" and abuse.
  5. Pastors believe what they preach.
  6. Pastors simply aren't trained about domestic violence.
The only fault in this article is that it, unless it is meant to be implicit within the last point, the author offers no solutions for pastors who want to become better at helping both abuser and survivors address the abuse going on in their relationship. That's where we come in. If you are reading this post and belong to a church, synagogue, or other faith-based institution and you would like to help your religious leader increase his or her skills in addressing domestic violence without causing more harm, please call us at (404) 370-7670. We would love to provide the training needed to make our community's faith leaders part of the solution.

1 comment:

Breakthru House said...

Thanks for posting this article - substance abuse is similar in that it is an issue that many people in our society don't want to look at, but the truth is that it does affect us all. Domestic Violence and substance abuse are often intertwined.