LONDON (ENGLAND)
Church Times
February 9, 2018
By Hattie Williams
The term “spiritual abuse” should not be written into safeguarding policies or law because it is “unworkable” and “potentially discriminatory” towards religious communities, the Evangelical Alliance (EA) has said.
In a report, Reviewing the Discourse of “Spiritual Abuse”: logical problems and unintended consequences, published on Monday, the theology advisory group of the EA said that recent attempts to categorise “emotional and psychological abuse in religious contexts” as “spiritual” were also damaging to interfaith relations.
In the foreword, the chairman of the group, the Revd Dr David Hilborn, and the general director of Evangelical Alliance UK, Steve Clifford, wrote: “[Spiritual abuse] is a seriously problematic term partly because of its own inherent ambiguity, and also because attempts by some to embed it within statutory safeguarding discourse and secular law would be unworkable in practice, potentially discriminatory towards religious communities, and damaging to interfaith relations.”
While the report “in no way downplays” the harm that spiritual abuse caused, they said, more “precise, well-founded, workable definitions of abuse” were needed to help survivors.
The report comes after the Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service (CCPAS) conducted a survey last month of more than 1500 Christians, two-thirds of whom said that they had been victims of spiritual abuse (News, 12 January). The study acknowledges that definitions of spiritual abuse are not clear cut, and suggests that this lack of clarity may be a significant barrier to responding appropriately to its victims within the Church.
The EA report states that its members had met the CCPAS to discuss spiritual abuse, but concluded that the term was “not a legally recognised category of abuse”, and that they had become “increasingly uneasy” about its application.
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