Domestic violence

Thanks to Jason Goroncy for letting us know about the following:

The heads of churches in South Australia have produced a guide – a ‘field manual’ of basic information – to assist clergy and pastoral workers to respond to domestic violence.

The guide's title is Domestic Violence Handbook for clergy and pastoral workers. It's published by the Joint Churches Domestic Violence Prevention Programme.

The introduction begins: One of the most difficult things for a survivor of violence to do is to find the courage to tell someone they are being abused. If you have been chosen as the one to disclose to, there is a reason that this trust has been placed in you, so trust yourself that you are the most appropriate person for the survivor at this time!

And goes on: We encourage you to seek further training to enhance the skills you already have to deal with pastoral situations where violence is an issue. There are suggestions for further reading listed in the booklet. While domestic violence occurs across all types of relationships, the majority is male to female violence, so for simplicity of wording this booklet uses “she”/ “the women” to refer to the survivor of violence, and “he”/ “the man” to refer to the perpetrator. However, the principles apply regardless of gender, so are relevant to intimate relationships where violence is female to male, male to male, or female to female.

It's available as a download.

Keeping stats safe

I've mentioned Bradley Wright on this blog before. He's an American sociologist who has done some writing on making sure stats are interpreted more accurately - he writes about this in his book, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites … and Other Lies You've Been Told.

He's recently been interviewed by Ted Olsen in Christianity Today. A couple of quotes from the article:

...we have to make sense of statistics for ourselves, applying our own experience. If I went to a group of Christians and made some sort of outlandish theological or political statement, they would question it. But if I put it in numbers, people would tend to accept it without discernment.

and....

Rather than picking which statistics we agree with, we should be a little more agnostic about all of them. You don't have to believe them. Christians are called to accept and love people unconditionally. That doesn't apply to statistics. We should be cranky and judgmental.

There's another article on the subject on the CT site, by Ed Setzer. This one comes from earlier this year, and is entitled Curing Christians' Stats Abuse. He deals nicely with some typical 'myths':

"Christianity will die out in this generation unless we do something now."

"Only 4 percent of this generation is Christian."

"Ninety-four percent of teenagers drop out of church, never to return again."

Bullying, Abusive Congregations

I was alerted to this blog post on abusive congregations yesterday by a tweet from a friend on Twitter. So I'm passing it along. The post itself is fairly moderate, but the several comments that follow show an appalling problem within the church - an appalling lack of Christian behaviour from people in some congregations towards their ministers. You have to wonder if they ever pray, read their Bibles, think about Christian discipleship.

I've heard of such things with other colleagues, and experienced it myself in a somewhat less severe way when I was filling in as pastor at a former church, so it's by no means an American problem.

The post itself refers to research on the topic from the Clergy Health Initiative, and one of the people commenting adds several useful links which anyone suffering this kind of abuse should follow up.

One of the other awful things from the comments is how many of them talk about the way in which the ministers' spouses were also abused. As Paul says, if I remember rightly, Brothers (Sisters), these things should not be!

Ethnic Identity And Exposure To Maltreatment In Childhood

Evidence From A New Zealand Birth Cohort - Marie, Ferguson and Boden.

From the abstract:

Exposure to maltreatment in childhood, including sexual abuse, severe physical punishment and inter-parental violence, is an issue of growing concern in New Zealand. The present study examined the associations between ethnic identity and exposure to childhood maltreatment among a longitudinal birth cohort of individuals born in Christchurch in 1977.

Participants of Maori ethnicity reported higher rates of exposure to physical punishment and inter-parental violence, but did not report higher rates of exposure to sexual abuse. Control for a range of socio-economic and family functioning factors reduced the magnitude of the associations between ethnicity and both physical punishment and inter-parental violence, but did not fully account for the associations between ethnicity and maltreatment exposure.

Furthermore, adjustment for variations in Maori cultural identity indicated that cohort members of sole Maori identity were at significantly increased risk of exposure to both physical punishment and inter-parental violence.

It was concluded that Maori, and in particular those of sole Maori cultural identity, were at higher risk of exposure to physical punishment and inter-parental violence, and that the associations could not be fully explained by either socio-economic deprivation or exposure to family dysfunction in childhood.
This report is a valuable overview of research done as to why Maori children in particular are suffering greater abuse than their non-Maori counterparts.

Photo by Clayton Scott

The "anti-smacking" law

Family First reports: Almost two years after the passing of the controversial anti-smacking law, more than 80% of NZ’ers still want the law changed and 77% say that the law won’t have any effect on our unacceptable child abuse rate.

These are the key finding of research commissioned by Family First NZ, following on from similar research in 2007 and 2008. The Curia Market Research poll surveyed 1,000 people, and also found huge confusion over the legal effect of the law.

The key findings are:

83% say the law should be changed – only 13% say to keep it as is
77% says the law won’t help reduce the rate of child abuse in NZ
Less than one third of respondents actually understand the law

Here are some graphs provided by Family First to show these results:

The abuse has to stop

Muriel Newman writes in her weekly NZ Centre for Political Research newsletter:
For years, governments have shied away from getting to the heart of the child abuse crisis because that means tackling the incentives in legislation that is leading to increasingly higher rates of family breakdown - especially amongst Maori families which feature disproportionately in the child abuse statistics. If marriage leads to a safer family environment for children, then the census data on the rates of marriage amongst Maori and non-Maori shows a very worrying trend: in 2001, while 79.5 percent of partnered non-Maori couples were married only 58.8 percent of Maori couples were married. And by 2006 the rates of marriage had fallen to 78.6 percent for non-Maori and 54 percent for Maori.

Unless the incentives in the domestic purposes benefit are changed to stop encouraging single parenting, all the good intentions in the world will not halt the rise in child abuse. And with the problem being an intergenerational one, whereby children raised in fragmented families and abusive homes will tend to repeat that behaviour on their own children, addressing this problem must surely rank at the highest end of the new government’s priority list.

And John Sax adds, in an article called, Redefining Compassion:

Drugs, alcohol and poverty are generally purported to be the breeding ground for child abuse but the statistics also hold another common element. Global social scientists tell us that on average there is a 1400 percent increase in child abuse and a 1600 percent increase in child murder when children are brought up in a relationship other than marriage – live-in boyfriends, stepdads, de facto relationships and so on.
Unfortunately we find ourselves now in a society where social policy - as compassionate and heartfelt as it is - not only discourages the very unions that could provide the safest environment for children, but, by its very nature, encourages a cycle of generational poverty, and drug and alcohol abuse.