Can we save our children from our violent texts?

A seminar in Sydney in March examined how religions could be at the forefront of protecting children against violence, rather than encouraging theology that either directly or inadvertently promotes it.

God’s own son was crucified.

So it’s tough to deny that there are some curly questions about children and violence that arise out of Christian scripture.

The Rev. Dr William Emilsen, Lecturer in Church History at the United Theological College (UTC), believes that tackling the tough passages is important if we are to avoid some of the disastrous clashes between children and theology that have occurred in the past.

With the Rev. Dr John Squires he coordinated the recent Religion, Children and Violence seminar at UTC on March 15. It was the second in a series on religion and violence run by the Public and Contextual Theology Strategic Research Centre (PaCT), an organisation connected to Charles Sturt University.

“We thought it was important for people to understand that our own scriptures have violent texts within them and we needed to help people find a way of understanding how do deal with them,” said Dr Emilsen.

The seminar connected theologians with practitioners (including doctors, lawyers, psychologists and social workers) who deal with the implications of theology’s dealings with children, to start a conversation and compare experiences.

The seminar included papers that examined ways that religion, children and violence intersect.

The papers covered religion and the resettlement of young Sudanese refugees, violence and Aboriginal youth, historic child abuse of children under denominational care, the role of religion in the recruitment of young suicide bombers, a personal account of abuse within a dysfunctional religious family, and a call for churches to play an active role in the total banning of corporal punishment in Australia.

Abuse needn’t go with the territory

As a medical doctor in charge of sexual assault medical services for child and adult victims, Dr Patricia Brennan is frequently witness to the after effects.

“I recently had to examine and take the history of sexual abuse from a seven-year-old girl,” she said.

“When asked how she felt about the abuse by her 13-year-old brother, she said she was sorry for him.

“Why? Because when he was doing whatever he did to her, he said, ‘Please hit me and punch me to stop me from doing this because I don’t want to, but I have to.’

“I asked her what she thought about that and she answered simply, ‘He needs help.’”

Since reading The Ugly Duckling as a child and then Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative during her final medical exams, Dr Brennan has spent a lot of time contemplating the violence that is innate in animals and homo sapiens, the evolutionary purpose it serves and the strategies at our disposal to manage it.

The first book taught her that nurture and brutality are inseparable in the animal kingdom.

The second influenced her belief that the uncivilised urges that result in sexual abuse should not simply be written-off as hard-wired animal instincts.

The difference, as argued by Ardrey, is not simply human capacity for moral thought.

When it comes to sex there is another major variation, she said.

“Whereas homo sapiens may have managed to ‘pull himself up by his evolutionary bootstraps’ in respect to territory, Ardrey asserts that, unlike animals, ‘we lack the innate command which shapes our individual sexual impulses to our whole selective good.’”

Dr Brennan is currently a staff specialist in forensic clinical medicine. In the early eighties, she was the founding president of the Movement for the Ordination of Women.

She used her keynote address at the Religion, Children and Violence seminar on March 15 to explore these issues in relation to child sexual abuse and clergy, saying that, while the Judeo- Christian tradition is noted for its stance on sexual morality and its call to holiness of living, revelations of child sexual abuse have drawn attention to its tendency to fail.

She asked, is a child more vulnerable to sexual violation in a religious institution than it would be in a secular setting and, if so, why?

One hefty hurdle in the way of answering this question is the difficulty in determining how many victims are out there.

The secretive nature of the crime, combined with the fact that many children do not have the language to report sexual crimes, or cannot comprehend them until they are older, makes victims reluctant to come forward and guilt difficult to prove.

Dr Brennan said that only around ten per cent of sexual assault cases that are reported to police proceed to court and even less achieve a conviction.

“Public expectation that the sexual abuse of children will be proved by the presence of injury is quite unrealistic,” she said.

“The majority of cases that attract investigation involve male offenders who have intimate access to the child. As such, they are in a position to cultivate compliance and silence, and thus maintain their access.

“Serious injury to a child in the pursuit of sexual arousal is a risk to be avoided, since it alerts other carers.”

Our traditions let us down

In a religious context, there are further complications.

“Certain violations of the social contract are all the more terrible to utter when the culture is one that publicly speaks of love, care and goodness while it engages in open abuses of power and secret abuses of the body,” she said.

“A heartbreaking aspect is that the abuser is usually someone the child depends on for their sense of safety, wellbeing and their very survival. The adaptations the child has to make to this fact, both physically and mentally, results in shame and long-term trauma.”

Dr Brennan said that reducing the risk of child abuse in churches will require fundamental changes to the religious culture itself — and its teaching on sexuality.

She recommended a greater and equal integration of females into all sections of church life, a stronger recognition that children should be fully informed of their rights (especially in regards to their body) and a move to disabuse clergy of any notion of their immunity from sexual impulses (including regular counselling and debriefing sessions).

“Sexual desire, the least controllable of impulses, has haunted sanctuaries as frequently as football clubs. Casualties have been manifold because of a refusal to tackle desire head-on.”

Though national church registers on child abusers and sex offenders may be helpful, she said the real change will come about by altering the fundamental elements of sexual abuse, which she lists as:

• That notwithstanding the ordination of women, women and children continue to be subjugated together in the religious hierarchy of “God over male, male over women and children”, thus ensuring their shared vulnerability to abuse.
• That children, conceived as sinners and the property of adults, are more susceptible to abuse in a religious setting because of the elision between parent, carer, priest and God.
• That the combined role of priest, confessor and pastor is a dangerous mix, providing a secret domain where sexual problems and abuse can flourish undetected.
• That the distinction between spiritual knowledge and “worldly” knowledge has set up an opposition between religion and science to the detriment of understanding the evolutionary determinants of human sexual behaviour.

While some may not immediately see the connection with female rights, Dr Brennan said the disempowerment of women has strong links with the disempowerment of children.

“As current discussions about child sexual abuse are taken up by church councils and synods as well as by the media and the politicians, there has been a tendency to ignore where the awareness of the child as a victim of adult abuse came from in the first place. Certainly not from the church!

“The fact is, it was closely associated with the rise of the women’s movement, which in the 1960s and ’70s was the prime mover against child abuse.”

She said that the simultaneous “outing” of clergy as abusers and the start of serious ordination debates surrounding women was no coincidence.

“The fact that males have been ministers, priests, bishops and Popes in the religious world has allowed them to be relatively unaccountable, until in very recent years when an increasing number of adults disclosed the unthinkable; that while they were children, and in the care of religious institutions and congregations, they had been subjected to long-term sexual abuse by priests.

“The church in the western world not only housed the sexual abuse of children, but also protected the perpetrators rather than the victims.”

Historically, while women and children have been viewed as the dependant property of men, under certain circumstances, reporting an abuse can be at odds with ultimate survival goals.

Returning to evolution, Dr Brennan said among the most pertinent factors in the child sexual abuse were fundamentalist Christianity’s rejection of Darwin’s evolution theories and its ignorance of the origins of violent tendencies and drives.

She said child sexual abuse will be at its most threatening as long as religions fail to understand it.

Lyndal Irons