“Violence against women, and violence against children for that matter, is violence against the defenseless. With women, it goes hand-in-hand with misogyny,” Roskam said.
Perhaps wrapped in softer language, Bishop Cate Waynick finds the same lack of respect for women at the heart of why violence is frequently meted out against them.
Waynick has made two trips to Sudan with her Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis’s ongoing relationship with the Diocese of Bor. She has learned what a visitor can about gender violence as a cruel companion to warfare and genocide.
But even more sinister than violence against women as one of the wages of war, often the terror is more placidly fueled by lack of both education and access to power as well as the weight of what male-dominated cultures will tolerate.
In many parts of the world, Waynick said, “there is a sense that beating children and perhaps women is necessary in order to provide correction for someone.” It is part of social ordering that keeps people—and specifically women—in line, with deadly consequences.
“What I observed in going into villages was that women had babies in their arms with syphilis sores. And they don’t know what is causing that. The women are kept in ignorance. They are told that this is something caused by insect bites or by something in the water. They are not given the truth: that this is a sexually transmitted disease, that it can be fatal for them and their children, and that there are ways to protect themselves,” Waynick said.
Both in the Diocese of Bor and in the Diocese of Brasília—the third diocese in the tri-provincial relationship—Waynick has witnessed the link between domestic violence and the economic vulnerability of women that is no less endemic in Indiana.
“In Sudan, the women do not have access to the kind of training that will help them become economically stable,” Waynick said. “In Brazil, it is the generalized poverty and economic [challenge] that always falls harder on women. In the cities, there is prostitution and the violence that goes with it.”
“Economic downturn increases violence toward women,” Roskam added, “but you also find violence against women in the richest of households. You can’t say it’s only the poor who do it.”
Bishop Gayle Harris of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts calls violence against women “the silent disease.”
“Violence is done in many ways,” she said. “Emotional scars can come from physical abuse but the scars that are emotional are always worse than any scars on the body.” Harris explained that in every church that she has served, when conversations turned to violence, women approach her and acknowledge that they have been abused.
The three bishops agree that raising the issue as partners in the Anglican Communion is essential—and perhaps the concern would not have surfaced but for the growing witness of women among the male bishops of the Anglican Communion.
“The conversation at this Lambeth Conference is a real first for the communion to address the issue of gender violence,” Roskam noted.
“I am not hesitant to talk about it,” Roskam declared. “We have 700 men here. Do you think any of them beat their wives? Chances are they do. The most devout Christians beat their wives. Culturally, many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife. In that regard, it makes the conversation quite difficult.
“It exists and it goes largely unreported and invisible. One of the things that has to happen is that bishops have to give this issue some heat and light, not only the violence that happens in the home against women, but violence that happens as a weapon of war which is particularly egregious. While domestic violence is often hidden in the home, violence against women as an act of war is not hidden and we become complicit when we do not do something about that as a world community and as Christians and as an Anglican Communion,” Roskam said.
Waynick finds hope in the Lambeth Conference focus on the Millennium Development Goals.
“It’s a way for everyone to say where are we on the issue of poverty? What are the economic issues for women and what would it take to have education for everyone?” she said. “When we are talking about working for equality for women, it automatically raises the questions about mistreatment and violence.”
Waynick also believes that the voices of male bishops must find a new volume on the issue of violence against women.
“There is a sense that when women talk about violence against other women,” she said, “it can be heard that there is an aspect of self-serving in it. Even when it is women outside the situation who are raising their voices, it can become that monotonous, repetitive raising of an issue of justice or mercy that we can tune out because we have heard it.
“It is when someone who isn’t caught up in it or doesn’t perceive himself to be caught up in it starts raising a voice. In this case, it probably will be when the men begin to say ‘the women around us are being mistreated,’” Waynick concluded.
Harris also believes it is the voices of the men that will impact the lives of the women, but she wants men to first talk among themselves.
“If we could get the men to sit together and talk about how they understand violence, not only to themselves but how it affects their family—their mothers, their grandmothers—they might begin to understand,” she said. “They have to enter the story.”
For Roskam, just as the conversation on violence toward women has surfaced as more women have taken their seats among the bishops of the Anglican Communion, she believes the redress of the issue will come as more women move through seminaries.
“We really don’t expect men to tell women’s stories,” she said. “We have to be included in the counsels of the church so that we can tell women’s stories—our own and those of our suffering sisters.”
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