Vulnerability And Violence

Following our arrest for a witness against nuclear weapons in September, several other women and I spent the night being shuttled by paddy wagon from police precinct to central cell block to the D.C. jail and finally, at 6:30 a.m., to court. Throughout the night we were joined by other women who had been picked up by the police.

In our conversations with these women, I was struck with the singular fact that each had been involved in a crime in which she herself had been the victim. Most were being held for prostitution or drug possession. A few had stories that went something like, "I was with my boyfriend, and he robbed a store." I felt pity for these women, but more intensely I felt anger--anger toward the customers and the pimps, the pushers, the boyfriends, all the men behind the victimization that had led these women to sexual abuse or addiction to heroin.

I would not try to argue that women are incapable of outwardly directed violence. But the facts show that our jails are overwhelmingly populated by men, and our mental institutions by women. A recent study reveals that boys who have been consistently abused often become abusers themselves, while girls become prostitutes. We women tend to turn our violence inward.

This phenomenon says a great deal about our socialization and the prevailing assumptions about male and female behavior. It also speaks of the limited options with which women still live. No relationship has touched me as deeply in the last few years as my friendship with a woman who for 13 years endured repeated beatings from her husband. When I asked her why she had stayed with him so long, she answered that she had no choice: "I had five children and no money." When he began abusing the children, she finally fled with them. He retaliated by gathering some of his friends and gang-raping his own 14-year-old daughter on a street corner early one Sunday morning as she was on her way to church.

The scars and pain of this one family's tragedy are repeated throughout our city and in many others. These are the extreme cases of a society that has at its root a system in which women are taught that obedience, submission, and pleasing men are their tickets to protection and survival.

This violence is subtle when it takes the form of lower wages for women and other kinds of discrimination based on sex. Its most personally terrifying manifestation, as Donna Schaper points out in her article "Imbalance of Power" beginning on page 26 of this issue, is rape. The same aggression that motivates military might around the globe finds personal expression in rape. Sabre-rattling and rape are both rooted in the need to dominate.

The evidence of exploitation and violence against women throughout history and among various cultures is appalling. To eliminate any temptation to womanly "impurity," widows in India were forced to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres. Chastity belts, instruments of discomfort and infection, served the same purpose in other cultures. For a thousand years, Chinese foot-binding kept women crippled, immobile, and dependent. Witch-hunting was prominent in Europe and our own country for several centuries; those persecuted were with few exceptions single women considered marginal, outside the realm of male control. These phenomena which have surfaced from time to time are blatant examples of a bedrock belief in male superiority that still provides the rationale for control over women and their sexuality.

The church has the potential to be a liberating and empowering force for women. But historically it has served more to reinforce and even initiate belief in female inferiority.

Traditional Christian theology does not serve women well. Augustine believed that women lacked the image of God, and Thomas Aquinas considered us "misbegotten males." Luther pointed out, with rare anatomical perceptiveness, that women ought to stay at home as we have "a wide fundament to sit upon, keep house, bear and raise children." Calvin argued that the order of creation, man before woman, should be reflected in the hierarchy of the Christian home, and Barth stated that men were created to lead and women to be led.

The Bible has often been used to argue for the inferiority of women, beginning with the view of Eve as the embodiment of carnal evil. Passages in the epistles about submission of women and men are often distorted and robbed of their context of mutuality. Statements used to disparage women's participation and leadership are divorced from their historical situation and set up as timeless truths, while Jesus' affirmation of the equality of women and women's roles in the early church are ignored.

The church has been one of the great perpetrators of a hierarchical family structure in which the husband holds all authority and the wife is subservient, needing protection. Traditional Christian marriage vows call on the husband to love and the wife to obey. Any such relationship of unbalanced power opens up the potential for violence, where dominance may become brutality.

Meanwhile, the blame for this violence is often placed on the less powerful, and, tragically, the church has in some instances played the accuser. The same faulty theology that views poverty as a sign of sin sees rape and other abuse as punishment for sin. Women beaten by their husbands have been asked what they did to provoke them. Victims of rape have suffered the double humiliation of blame for their own abuse.

Women I know who have experienced rape talk of their anger toward God and their feeling of abandonment, wondering why such a thing should happen to them. The worst that a woman in such a situation can feel is rejection from her church or community when she most needs understanding support and an unqualified indication of God's presence and love. We need more sensitive understanding of women's anger and fear at this point, and more dialogue around this growing problem, which often seems too sensitive to discuss.

The church's vocation is to stand with those who suffer, wherever there are victims. I recall vividly an Easter morning when a friend who had experienced a rape a year before shared with me a dream. In it, she was raped, then thrown across a room and raped again. This continued several times in different areas of the room. What finally emerged was a vision of the stations of the cross. This was her pain to bear, and in it she knew Christ and understood his suffering. Knowing that this pain too was within the realm of Christ's passion was the beginning of the healing of her anger.

To begin to heal the epidemic of sexual violence among us, we must eliminate its causes. We can start by refusing to accept the stereotypes that measure men in terms of machismo and women on a scale of passivity, and work to build something new out of the ruins of shattered stereotypes. Christ redefined power as servanthood rather than domination, giving us the freedom to build our families and communities on a foundation of mutuality and partnership.

This is no easy time for such awareness. The current administration and its allies have conjured up a new sort of witch-hunting mentality that considers women outside of the home or male control a threat to society's hierarchical and economic stability. But until we see a change to genuine equality and respect among women and men, we will all suffer from the violence among us.

Joyce Hollyday was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.