UNITED STATES
Morung Express
Catherine Woodiwiss Sojourners
The Silence and the Shame of Sexual Violence in Church
Several years ago, Amee Paparella was an eager student at a state university in Ohio. A conservative Christian, she quickly signed up to join the campus ministry. What she found in the group surprised her.
“It was so misogynistic,” Paparella recalled. “My leaders perpetuated this hyper-masculinized idea of God as physically a man.”
Over the years, Paparella wrestled to reconcile this image of God with her own faith, often to the discomfort of her peers. But an incident of sexual abuse within the ministry proved the breaking point. When it was discovered that a young man had been abusing his female partner, also in the group, the campus minister and student leaders responded by encouraging the young woman to stand by her man and to pray with the other students for his healing.
Paparella was horrified. “I realized, they don’t want me to think. After that, I just didn’t see how faith and women’s empowerment could be reconciled.” From that point on, she said, “the women’s movement really became my new church.”
Several months ago, a young woman in Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a series of horrific, and horrifically public, violations. After being raped by two classmates, her abuse continued as photos of the incident were spread throughout social networks and ultimately to the national media. Not only did she suffer violations of her body, of her dignity, and of her privacy, she later suffered skepticism and blame from victim-shamers both online and in her community, and had her identity broadcast on cable news.
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