March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Pastoral care means response to batterers > Ministers learn their choices go beyond a prayer and a hug

The pastor was frantic.

A week after helping find a shelter for a woman whose husband was beating her, the pastor answered the phone and encountered an agitated husband. Wife and husband were members of the pastor’s church, and the husband wanted to know where his wife was.

The pastor told the husband. His wife was at a shelter. That admission, however, prompted the minister to call domestic abuse consultant Carol J. Adams and confess fear that the battered woman was in yet more jeopardy — because of something her minister did.

A pastor frantic? Confused? Uncertain of right or wrong?

For Adams, perplexed clergy and congregations are no surprise. Since the early 1970s, when she began working with abused women after graduating from Yale Divinity School, Adams has been at the forefront of efforts to alert — and convince — pastors and churches of the need to respond to domestic abuse with more than a prayer and a hug.

Now she teaches as an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and often serves as a consultant to churches trying to figure out how to deal with battering and other problems of violence. Earlier this week, she spent an evening with about 20 female and male students and other people at Bangor Theological Seminary, talking about pastoral care and battering.

“Why should we expect the church to be any further along than the society at large, which has the same problems, in terms of holding abusers accountable?” Adams said, during an interview.

Compounding the difficulty can be the heavy yoke of spiritual attitudes that can cause a battered person to fear that ending the violence would result in severing church ties or breaking a covenant, particularly a marriage covenant. And churches are often viewed as part of a battered person’s family.

“The society and the church look at these issues and they see `relationship’ issues rather than seeing a choice to be abusive,” Adams said.

That’s Lesson No. 1 on battering: Batterers assault by choice. It’s not about “losing my head,” Adams said. They batter or threaten force as a way to control.

Lesson No. 2: The response to battering needs to be clear-cut. Identify it, get the recipient to safety, and hold the batterer accountable, she said.

The frantic pastor who phoned Adams understood the need to get the wife to safety. But the pastor goofed by telling the husband that his wife was in a shelter, betraying her security. And at some point, the husband must be confronted.

Adams can cite lengthy evidence that suggests the abuser — even if he is the chairman of the church’s board of deacons — must first be held accountable.

“We want the response or the understanding that excuses the other person, because it’s kind of frightening to believe the person knew what he was doing,” she said.

Adams has spent considerable time developing a profile of batterers and who they are. She defines battering as the use or threat of violence as a means to control another person.

Women and men can be batterers, although Adams cites U.S. Justice Department statistics that report women are six times more likely than men to be the victims of a violent crime committed by someone close to them.

Other researchers, quoted by Adams in her book, “Woman-Battering,” conclude that one-third to one-half of battered women are victims of marital sexual assault.

“The behavior of men who hurt women includes threats, reckless driving, throwing and damaging possessions, the injuring or killing of pets, burning, punching, kicking, barring her exit, keeping a woman awake against her will, throwing a woman down the stairs, sexual humiliations, rape,” reports Adams in her book.

Some of the recent research on batterers suggests that abuse of alcohol and other drugs is not necessarily connected with battering. The majority of known alcoholics don’t beat their wives, and the majority of wife abusers have not been diagnosed as alcoholics, Adams’ book reports. But wife abusers have been known to become intoxicated to carry out violence.

Adams also says, as do many authorities these days, the most recent evidence suggests that being a child victim of or witness to child abuse doesn’t necessarily translate into becoming a batterer as an adult.

The professor said she was drawn to the issue of battered women 20 years ago when she got a job with a social service agency in upstate New York. She helped families fill out the paperwork to obtain federally backed loans or grants for housing repairs.

“One of the women was in her 70s, and she had been divorced from her husband for 20 years,” recalled Adams, “but he continued to break into her house. And I still remember sitting down on her kitchen chair, and I needed a variety of information to help with that grant application.

“To get her Social Security number, it turned out it was hidden in the cushion I was sitting on,” Adams said. “She kept some of her other papers in the freezer. All this — to keep her abusive ex-husband from finding them.”

In her session Monday in Bangor, Adams stood behind a lectern and beside a sketchpad on which she scribbled various key problems that her seminary audience has encountered:

“Pastor as conduit for batterer.”

“Who has broken the covenant?”

“What is forgiveness?”

Adams said the Christian trauma-sufferer often must wrestle with troubling questions about ethical and theological issues.

“It can be overwhelming,” Adams told the group. “Jesus suffered on the cross. Everybody has a cross to bear.”

Yet, Adams added, why can’t clergy respond by pointing to the number of times Jesus witnessed wrongs and took steps to make them right?

Prayer can be an appropriate response to violence, but it is not the only response, she said.

Adams has compiled a lengthy list of options for a congregation. Among them:

Start a study group on religious issues and woman-battering.

With the church’s council or session, develop a church policy about battering, child sexual abuse and marital rape.

Include hot lines and battered women’s shelter phone numbers in church bulletins and newsletters, and on church bulletin boards.

Conduct a Bible study that includes 2 Samuel 13, Judges 19 and other passages that feature violence against a woman.

Provide healing services for victims and survivors.

Adams, however, cautioned her seminary audience Monday night: “One thing we know. Batterers know how to manipulate, including the power to forgive.

“And my bottom line is: As long as she is not safe, there’s no business discussing forgiveness.”


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like