Domestic Violence a Thorny Issue for Churches

For 12 years, Sharon Hill lived in an unimaginable world of terror. She was thrown out of windows and down stairs, beaten black and blue from head to toe, awakened at night and drenched with water--all at the hands of a husband who claimed to love her.

But when she turned to her church in New Zealand for help, they “didn’t know what to do about it,” said Hill, who returned to Newport Beach in 1993. “People don’t want to know it’s in their family. People don’t want to know it’s in their church.”

Many congregations are still befuddled over how to handle the staggering problem of domestic violence. But thanks to the passionate advocacy of Hill and others, two Southern California churches plan to take unusual steps this weekend to publicize abuse and the role that faith communities can play in supporting those struggling through the terror of violence.

Mariners South Coast Church in Irvine will sponsor a daylong conference on abuse today, and St. Mark Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach plans to devote its Sunday service to the issue--complete with an unprecedented pulpit presentation by noted religion and abuse specialist Nancy Nason-Clark of the University of New Brunswick.

“It is not that churches throughout this nation don’t care. They care, but they don’t know how to care,” said Mariners Pastor Jim Gaffney, who plans to open the conference with an apology for not adequately addressing the issue.

The events, part of the national Domestic Violence Awareness month, mark a growing recognition of the ways in which religion can complicate the handling of abuse.

Domestic violence occurs no more often in religious families, experts say. But religious families may be more vulnerable in confronting the problem because of biblical beliefs about the honor of suffering and sacrifice, the premium placed on family unity, the dominant role of men in many religious traditions and the creed of transformation and forgiveness that could let perpetrators off the hook too easily, said Nason-Clark.

Those ingrained spiritual beliefs help cause many women--95% of domestic abuse victims are women--to stay in relationships despite the danger, experts say. Many Catholic women in particular feel bound by the church’s teachings against divorce--a powerful dynamic Rosio Duriez sees daily in working with Latino women in the Pasadena area.

“Because of their beliefs, they feel mandated to stay until death do us part,” said Duriez, a domestic violence specialist at the Grace Center, a nonprofit agency serving families in the San Gabriel Valley. “I tell them: What is better for you and your child? To stay in a battering relationship so your child can get killed, hurt or sexually abused? Is that a life Jesus wants for you?”

Destructive Advice Cited

The advice women receive from their churches can vary widely.

“No good church will put its doctrine or dogma ahead of the safety of its family, especially women and children,” said the Rev. Timothy Safford of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. “A good priest will say: ‘Get out. Get help. Let’s see if he gets help. In four months, let’s see where you are.’ ”

In other cases, however, the advice can be destructive.

Laura, a Catholic homemaker still trying to extricate herself from a 20-year cycle of abuse, said she has stayed in her marriage because “I didn’t want to give up hope that if I love him enough and show him enough kindness and compassion, he would see in me a reflection of all that Jesus represents and come to admire my faith.”

Her church gave her conflicting advice about her husband, who she says constantly berates her and trashes the house and once threw her across the room in one of his unpredictable but frequent explosions of anger.

One priest told her to “love him in every way, cook for him . . . if he kills you, you’ll be a martyr.” Another priest told her to resume marital relations, get a job in a candy store and make new friends. A third priest bluntly told her to get a divorce: She was a child of God and should not tolerate such treatment.

“You get the gamut of opinions and that can be as paralyzing as anything else,” she said.

Too many women are still getting “appalling” advice from clergy and religious counselors, said Catherine Clark Kroeger, president emeritus of the Minneapolis-based Christians for Biblical Equality.

One woman who fled to a shelter was called there by her priest and told to return home immediately or face excommunication, Kroeger said. Another told her pastor that her husband woke her up at 2 a.m. and started beating her with a metal tricycle. She was advised to “go back, be a kinder wife; then you will win him to Christ because that’s what the Bible says,” Kroeger said.

“There are horrifying things being done. It’s a frightening world out there,” said Kroeger. Her organization, which claims 2,000 members, has published two books on religion and abuse, sponsors conferences and supplies resource material--including a three-page handout listing biblical citations that condemn perpetrators of violence. The group also plans to develop training materials on dealing with abuse.

Southern California religious organizations said they take pains to refer victims and perpetrators of domestic violence to specialists and do not hesitate to recommend separation or even divorce if necessary.

In her own research among Canadian Christians, Nason-Clark found no evidence that clergy were sending women back to unchanged abusive environments. But she said they were in general more optimistic than secular specialists that the perpetrators would change their ways, and slower to see the “slippery slope” of violence--the potential for verbal abuse, for instance, to spiral into physical battering.

Need for More Training, Services

Yet Christian women were far more likely to seek help from their spiritual communities than from secular shelters--underscoring a tremendous need to improve training and support services within congregations, Nason-Clark said. Her research also found an overwhelming need to improve cooperation between secular shelters and churches--a relationship riddled with mutual distrust over different perceptions of everything from the cause of abuse to the proper resolution.

Nason-Clark particularly advocates woman-to-woman ministries, where abuse victims can freely share their spiritual concerns along with their fears, pain and practical questions about safety and strategy. In the Newport Beach area, Hill and a small group of other women have established such a support network, “Love Without Honor,” and hope to expand it to other communities.

Other religious organizations have also stepped up activity to combat family violence.

In 1995, the Conservative Judaism movement adopted a rabbinical ruling that parent, spousal and child abuse were violations of Jewish law. Previously, spousal abuse was frowned on but not expressly prohibited among Jews of the Mediterranean basin known as Sephardim; hitting children was permitted for discipline and education, said University of Judaism rector and philosophy professor Elliot Dorff, who wrote the ruling.

Since the ruling’s publication, schools and community groups have increased programs about family violence, Dorff said.

The Grace Center, the Pasadena area service agency incorporated in 1995, was initially launched by the All Saints Women’s Council. “As I looked around at all the extraordinary women at All Saints, I felt we needed to be less self-absorbed and go into the community and see what needs we could alleviate,” said founder Katrina Carter.

After an intensive investigation, including meetings with law enforcement officials, social service agencies and hospitals, the group concluded that a center for sexually abused children was the most urgent need--a friendly, safe environment where victims could be cared for and interviewed in one place, instead of being retraumatized by several interviews in different places. But the group was soon besieged with requests to accept victims of domestic violence as well, since the two are almost always interrelated, Carter said.

The center, housed in a rented home filled with bright children’s toys and cheery art, offers a range of services: emergency food and clothing, crisis intervention and support groups. Advocates accompany victims to court, help them obtain temporary restraining orders, translate or interpret and make referrals for shelter, medical services and the like.

Grace Center’s advocates also help victims sort through their spiritual concerns, although the agency is nonsectarian and mainly funded by foundations rather than the church. Still, virtually everyone who comes for help wants to talk about God--even the children, staff members say.

‘God Is About Love and Order’

“We encourage them to keep their faith and [tell them] that whoever they see as God would not want this,” said Roxanne Mayo-Turner, a domestic violence specialist. “The bottom line is that God is about love and order.”

The center handled about 200 cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse last year and has taken on 500 new cases so far this year, Carter said. In addition, the center has handled 759 other requests for referrals. (The center, which welcomes donations and volunteers, can be contacted at [626] 355-4545.)

“The urgency there is absolutely staggering. We are desperately searching for more space,” Carter said. “It breaks your heart, but we know we are serving a need.”

At Mariners South Coast Church, the initiative to combat domestic violence is just one of more than 15 support programs in the “Recovery Ministry”--one of 35 ministries catering to Although many churches might balk at embracing such sensitive topics, Gaffney says his congregation aims to practice the biblical admonition to “comfort one another with the comfort you receive from God.”

“A church needs to be relevant to the people we’re ministering to,” Gaffney said. “We want this community to know we care about the things affecting them and hurting them.”