Violence Against Women

The Bible is not a book that hides violence against women. It tells the story of Hagar, mistreated by her mistress until she fled into the wilderness, who meets the angel of the LORD by a spring and names him: You are the God who sees me (Genesis 16:13). It tells the story of Dinah in Genesis 34, of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19, and of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13. It names what was done in each case as wrong, and it does not blame the woman. Tamar's words before the attack are recorded in full: Do not violate me, for such a thing should never be done in Israel (2 Samuel 13:12). The narrator gives her the clearest moral voice in the chapter.

These stories are not told for their own sake, and this lesson will not dwell on what was done. But it matters that scripture tells them, because they show that God sees what happens to women in hidden places. They also show what happens afterwards, and this is where they speak most sharply to churches. After Tamar was harmed, her brother Absalom told her, Be quiet for now, my sister. He is your brother. Do not take this thing to heart (13:20). Her father the king heard and was furious (13:21), and did nothing. So Tamar lived as a desolate woman in the house of her brother Absalom (13:20). The family's response was silence, protection of the man, and the woman's long isolation. Many women in churches today will recognise that pattern. Scripture records it so that we would see it as part of the wrong, not as wisdom.

The law of Moses, in a world very different from ours, still refused to blame a woman who was attacked. Deuteronomy 22:25-27 deals with a woman attacked in the open country. It says that only the man must be punished, that the young woman has committed no sin worthy of death, and that the case is just like one in which a man attacks his neighbor and murders him (22:26). It gives her the benefit of the doubt: the betrothed woman cried out, but there was no one to save her (22:27). The verses that follow, 22:28-29, are harder and interpreters differ on whether they describe force or seduction; in either case they protected a woman's future in a society where she would otherwise have been left destitute. They give no warrant for the practice, found in some places even now, of pressing a woman to marry the man who harmed her, and churches should oppose any such pressure or law.

Jesus treated women with a dignity that astonished his contemporaries. He called a woman bent over for eighteen years a daughter of Abraham (Luke 13:16), a title of honour. When men brought him a woman caught in adultery, they did not bring the man (John 8:3), and Jesus turned the accusation back on the accusers. Women travelled with him and supported his ministry out of their own means (Luke 8:1-3), and women were the first witnesses of the resurrection. In the ancient world, where unwanted baby girls were often left to die, the church's refusal to expose infants and its care for widows were among the things outsiders noticed. A letter on papyrus from Egypt, dated to 1 BC, has a man telling his wife that if the child she is expecting is a boy she should keep it, and if it is a girl she should cast it out. The church was born into that world and refused it.

On this subject the historic churches do not divide, and this course will not pretend they do. Rape is a grave evil. Beating, threatening or controlling a wife is a grave evil. Female genital cutting is a grave harm to girls with no basis in scripture. Marrying children is a wrong done to them. Buying, selling and trafficking human beings, for labour or for sex, is an evil scripture names as deserving death: Whoever kidnaps another man must be put to death, whether he sells him or the man is found in his possession (Exodus 21:16), and Paul lists slave traders among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10). Every one of these is a violation of a person made in the image of God, and the church's task is to oppose them, protect those at risk, care for those who have been harmed, and make sure those who do them are held to account.

The scale is great. The World Health Organization estimated in 2021 that about one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, most often from a husband or partner. UNICEF estimated in 2024 that more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital cutting, in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia and among migrant communities elsewhere. UNICEF estimated in 2023 that around 640 million girls and women alive today were married as children. And the International Labour Organization, with its partners, estimated that about 50 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, in forced labour or forced marriage. These are not distant problems. In every one of the regions where this course has students, they touch church families.

Female genital cutting needs particular attention, because it is practised in some places by Christian families as well as by others, and because it is sometimes defended as part of who a people are. It is not required by any church or by the Bible, and it has no health benefit; the World Health Organization documents its lasting harms, including dangers in childbirth. Church leaders in many affected countries, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, have spoken against it, and Coptic Orthodox leaders in Egypt have stated publicly that it has no basis in Christianity. Child marriage is likewise defended in some places as protection, a way to secure a girl's future or guard her from shame. But it ends girls' schooling, exposes them to dangers in pregnancy their bodies are not ready for, and hands them to the authority of adults before they can consent. Paul's instruction to treat younger women as sisters, with absolute purity (1 Timothy 5:2), describes the protection a girl is owed.

Honesty requires naming the arguments that some Christians still make, and answering them. Some have taught that a husband's headship gives him a right to discipline his wife physically. No major Christian tradition teaches this, and the texts on headship command husbands to love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25), and to love your wives and do not be harsh with them (Colossians 3:19). Whatever else Christians disagree about on the roles of men and women, they agree that a man who uses headship to justify violence has inverted the text. The Pastoral Care lesson Domestic Abuse answers the misuse of submission and divorce texts in detail. Others defend cutting or early marriage as culture, and say that outsiders have no right to judge. The answer is that culture is honoured in scripture, but every culture, including the cultures of the West, stands under the word of God, and no culture's customs give anyone the right to harm a child.

The church has not always done well here, and its failures are of two kinds. The first is silence: the Absalom response. Pastors who told a beaten wife to go home and pray harder; churches that moved an abusive leader to another congregation rather than report him; families who arranged a marriage to cover a crime. The Pastoral Care track's lesson Protecting the Vulnerable faces this record honestly and explains why harm to a child or a vulnerable adult must go to the authorities and not be handled quietly inside the church. Every student of this lesson should read it.

The second failure is subtler. In Kenya in 1929 and the years following, the Church of Scotland Mission and some other missions required their members to renounce female circumcision, and expelled those who would not. They were right that the practice harmed girls. But they acted with the authority of a colonial power, and many Kikuyu people heard the demand as an attack on their identity and their land. The result was a deep split: independent churches and schools were founded in protest, and the practice became for a time a symbol of resistance to colonial rule. Jomo Kenyatta, later Kenya's first president, defended it in his book Facing Mount Kenya (1938) as central to his people's life. The lesson for the church is not that the wrong is less wrong. It is that a settled wrong is best overcome when it is opposed from within a people, by its own believers, women and elders, rather than imposed from outside by those who do not share the cost.

There are better stories. Pandita Ramabai, an Indian scholar and convert to Christianity, founded the Mukti Mission near Pune in the 1890s, which sheltered thousands of child widows, abandoned girls and famine victims, and educated them. Amy Carmichael, an Irish missionary, founded the Dohnavur Fellowship in South India in the early twentieth century to protect children who were at risk of being dedicated to temple service. Josephine Butler, an English Anglican, campaigned for decades in the nineteenth century against laws that punished women while protecting the men who exploited them, and against the trafficking of girls. In many African countries today, churches have led programmes of alternative rites of passage, in which girls receive the teaching, celebration and community recognition of coming of age without being cut, so that families can keep what is good in a tradition while refusing what harms. Churches through the World Council of Churches have kept the Thursdays in Black campaign, in which people wear black on Thursdays as a sign that they stand against rape and violence.

Christians who agree on everything above still differ on some questions of strategy, and those differences deserve respect. Some churches work closely with government agencies and secular organisations against violence, believing that common cause is right where the goal is just. Others are cautious, fearing that some international campaigns carry agendas on sexuality or family that the church cannot accept, and prefer to work through their own structures. Some favour public campaigns and strong laws; others believe change comes faster through quiet work with elders and families. And in places where the police are corrupt or abusive themselves, Christians differ on how to make reporting safe. These are real questions. None of them is a reason to do nothing.

Psalm 72 prays for the king: May he vindicate the afflicted among the people; may he save the children of the needy and crush the oppressor (72:4). Every pastor holds some of that authority in his own congregation, and with it the duty. The first duty is to believe and protect. When a woman or girl tells someone in the church that she has been harmed, the response must be to listen, to believe her enough to act, to make sure she is safe, and never to suggest she caused it. The Pastoral Care lessons Protecting the Vulnerable and Domestic Abuse set out what to say, what not to say, and why safety must come first, including why bringing a couple together for counselling when one of them is violent is dangerous. Follow them.

The second duty is to report and to hold to account. Violence against women and children is a crime as well as a sin, and the church is not a substitute for the courts. Romans 13 calls the governing authority God's servant to punish wrongdoing; the church that hides a crime from that servant is obstructing God's own provision for justice. Where the authorities are genuinely unsafe or corrupt, the church should seek out the safest legitimate route it can: a trusted officer, a hospital, a legal aid organisation, a women's shelter, a child protection service. It must never use the difficulty of reporting as a reason for silence. And within the church, a man who has harmed his wife or a child must not hold office, teach, or be left alone with those at risk, whatever repentance he professes.

The third duty is to teach and to change the culture of the congregation. Preach the texts that the church has often skipped. Tamar's story, taught with care and without graphic detail, teaches a congregation to recognise the Absalom response in itself. Teach what headship means and what it does not. Teach families that girls are to be schooled and protected, not married early. Where cutting is practised, work with mothers, grandmothers and elders, and with women in the church who have themselves been cut, to find ways of marking a girl's coming of age that keep what is good and refuse what harms. Bring the subject into men's fellowships, because men are the ones with the most power to stop it.

The fourth duty is to care, for the long term. Women who have been harmed often carry shame that does not belong to them. The church should be the place where that shame is lifted, where a woman hears again and again that what was done to her was not her sin, and where the God who sees (Genesis 16:13) is made known through people who see her. The LORD is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18). That nearness should take human form in her church.

The fifth duty is to warn, because trafficking usually begins with a lie that sounds like hope. In many countries young women and men are recruited by offers of work abroad or in the city, as housemaids, waitresses, factory workers or students, and only discover on arrival that the job does not exist, that they owe a debt they can never repay, and that their passports have been taken. Recruiters are sometimes relatives, neighbours or church members. Paul's world knew the same evil: in Philippi he met a slave girl who earned a large income for her masters (Acts 16:16), a person whose life was someone else's profit. A church can protect its young people by teaching them the warning signs: a job offer that is too good, a recruiter who will not put terms in writing, travel arranged by someone else, a request to hand over documents, and a debt for the journey. It can encourage families to check any offer with a trusted source before a child leaves, to keep copies of documents, and to agree on a way of staying in contact. And it can make sure that a person who returns from such a situation is welcomed, not shamed, because she was the one wronged.

Open your casebook to a fresh page and head it Violence Against Women. This page must contain no names of any person and no description of any incident. It is a map of protection, not a record of harm. If you yourself are affected by violence, or are in danger now, please put this page aside and speak to someone you trust and who can help, and read the Pastoral Care lesson Domestic Abuse; your safety matters more than any assignment.

Step one. List the forms of violence or harm to women and girls that are known to occur in your community: for example abuse in marriage, early marriage, cutting, trafficking for work or sex, or harm to widows. List only the kinds, not the cases. Step two. Find out and write down where help can be found near you: a police unit that handles family or gender cases, a hospital or clinic, a legal aid office, a shelter or a women's organisation, a child protection service, a telephone helpline. Use your phone to search, and ask other leaders. If you cannot find any, write that down, because it is itself important. Step three. Write what your church currently does when such harm becomes known, honestly, and compare it with section 4 of this lesson and with the Pastoral Care lessons.

Step four. Write one concrete change your church could make in the next three months, such as appointing two trusted people, a man and a woman, to whom harm can be reported; displaying the helpline numbers you found; preaching on Psalm 72 or on Tamar; or raising the question of a written safeguarding policy with your leaders. Step five. Pray Psalm 72:1-4 for those in authority in your church and nation, and for the women and girls in your community who have no helper. Keep the page in your casebook. It may become the most useful one you write.