Leaving Silence by Susannah Larry

Author:Susannah Larry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MennoMedia
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

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“If My Father and Mother Forsake Me”

Family Betrayal and Sexualized Violence

This chapter explores one of the most difficult aspects of sexualized violence to process: how families are sometimes responsible for or complicit in the abuse. Sometimes a family member commits the abuse, or sometimes families refuse to believe a survivor, or sometimes families actively participate in covering up the abuse together, or sometimes family negligence enables the abuser. Whatever the situation, this abuse represents a fundamental and traumatic betrayal that can represent as great a trauma as the abuse itself. The Bible offers us plenty of examples of family brokenness, where parents and siblings fall into patterns that perpetuate violence. While difficult to read, these examples of familial sin in Scripture remind us that when we face situations in which our families fail us, we are not alone. Claiming the parental love of God and a family of believers of our own, we can find new sources of support in our healing journey.

Family betrayal is so devastating precisely because families are so central to the ways many of us understand our Christian faith. The Bible lifts up the role of parents in particular as the nucleus of a family, respected and trusted. After all, parents appear in the Ten Commandments: “Honour thy father and thy mother,” as the time-honored King James Version puts it. Many passages of Scripture compare God to a father and to a mother (for example, Psalm 103:13; Proverbs 3:11-12; 2 Corinthians 6:18, in the case of God as a father; and Hosea 11:3-4; Isaiah 42:14; 49:15, in the case of God as a mother). In many churches, the emphasis is on the family as the first and most important sphere in which religious education should take place.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with these ideas about families. However, for survivors of sexualized violence whose families have actively harmed them or stood in the way of their journey toward healing and hope, we need some nuance in the way we speak about families. We need to name the harm that families can do and have done. We need to recover the image of the family of God as a sacred community in which sexualized violence can never be tolerated and survivors are believed and supported.

The Bible is there for us when we do the work of figuring out what “family” means in the wake of sexualized violence. The Bible includes cautionary examples of how poorly families can support survivors of sexualized violence (in fact, in probably every story in the Bible where a family is involved in sexualized violence, the family falls short in some way). There’s the recognition that, sometimes, the larger family of God needs to step in and love people in ways their biological family will not or cannot do. But most importantly, there’s the knowledge that God can and will be to us a parent greater than the one or ones we’ve had.

Family failures in the Old Testament (Genesis 22, Judges 11)

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