163 – #SilenceisNotSpiritual: Breaking the Silence on Violence Against Women and Girls

Dr. Sandra Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the power of the #SilenceisNotSpiritual movement and the best ways to implement changes in our own communities. Key Points #SilenceisNotSpiritual is different than most movement hashtags because it requires people to sign a commitment that they will stand with women and for women. 75% of harassment victims experience retaliation. If you are going to help a women escape a violent situation or file a sexual harassment lawsuit then you also need to be willing to stand by them during the fallout. If community and political leadership are heavily populated by men, does that affect its response to harassment of women? Many churches that have policies that allow women in leadership don’t actually have any women in those positions. Resources http://www.silenceisnotspiritual.org/ The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey https://www.211oc.org/ Gerda Lerner Center for Biblical Equality Are you enjoying the show? If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to subscribe or rate the podcast on iTunes by clicking here. Click here for FAQs about podcasts and how to subscribe. Haven’t been receiving our newsletter? Visit our homepage to join today. Contact us with questions, comments, or suggestions at [email protected]. Transcript Dave: [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 163, #SilenceIsNotSpiritual: Breaking the Silence on Violence Against Women and Girls. Production Credits: [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Dave: [00:00:32] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak. Sandie: [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan. Dave: [00:00:40] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we certainly couldn’t not say something about this topic, with everything that’s been going on in the media and in the news over the last five or six months. There’s so much happening, there’s so much conversation going on. We’re at the very beginning of a revolution which has needed to happen. And yet there is so much complexity here. And yet today we’re going to try and tackle one piece of this. And one way that one organization is responding. And I think that there will be some takeaways for all of us on how we can think about this differently, especially here in the New Year. Sandie: [00:01:25] I’ve heard someone say this is a defining moment in history. Here in the news, we see it felt like for a few weeks like there was a sexual harassment revelation every single week and someone lost their jobs. And how do we respond to that? And one of the things that a group of my close friends began to look at is how do we as women respond in a context that we’re part of our churches. And so, it isn’t about alienating ourselves from media, or even pointing fingers at men who are bad, and things like that, but really taking the opportunity with this attention to look at issues that surround violence against women and girls. And this is really important from the Ending Human Trafficking perspective because we know that when we look at prevention models, many of the girls who end up in being trafficked had an experience either with sexual abuse as a child with sexual assault that left them in a vulnerable position, and may have run away or found themselves in a place where they were much more recruitable or even abducted. Manage all of those things, you can you can go back and listen to some of those podcasts. Sandie: [00:02:52] But how do we be proactive now? And so, this group has launched #SilenceIsNotSpiritual. And the first time I heard the hashtag idea, I thought oh that sounds like Sin by Silence. And Sin by Silence is the name of a documentary that Vanguard alum, Olivia Klaus Morrogh, created based on our beloved founder’s research, Dr. Elizabeth Leonard’s, on convicted survivors women who had been battered and ended up in prison because their husbands died in an altercation at their hand. And so, the idea that breaking that silence is part of the key to ending violence, this was an echo of that. And I wanted to pursue that, so I said yes, I’ll sign and I’m like the fourth signature or so on this. Now it has almost 5000 signatures when I looked yesterday. And the idea is that this has gone beyond awareness. We push things out, you’ve got Twitter stuff, you retweet the things you like, I push things out on Facebook. But this means that you actually have to go to the site and sign it. So, it’s real engagement. We’re not measuring how many hits; how many people saw it. I mean the first day I posted it, it had 470 views. That doesn’t matter. That does not matter. We watch things happen, we’re bystanders. This is about getting involved during a defining moment in history. And we want people to go to the website and sign that they’re standing with women and standing up for women. Those are the two actions statements. Dave: [00:04:54] As people are listening to this episode, I know one of the calls to action we’ll have is to go visit the website, Sandie. When you do sign what is it you’re committing to, what is the organization really trying to do in order to effect change? Sandie: [00:05:06] Well want to go beyond the #MeToo or even the #ChurchToo. And we don’t want to be out there saying oh who’s doing this wrong. We want to look in our own community and Vanguard is a private Christian university. The leaders that launched this are women who are in leadership and in the Evangelical church world. And so, we want to take responsibility in our own context. We want to look at what’s happening in our churches. One of the things that they were very intentional about was doing their research through research communities that are part of the churches like they use LifeWay Research. They did a poll a survey, LifeWay Research did, of a thousand pastors. And discovered that 74 percent knew about violence against women but they had very unrealistic expectations about if it was present in their own churches. Dave: [00:06:12] Interesting. Sandie: [00:06:13] And so how do you move forward and create space to stand up for women, if you think it doesn’t exist in your church. And so, we have to break that silence. That’s why its silence is not spiritual, being a voice, and how many times have you heard me say Proverbs 31:8 says, “Be a voice for those who have no voice, ensure justice for those being crushed.” And that’s really the premise for me signing this. It isn’t an option for me. I want to sign this. I want to support a movement that calls us to reflect in our own community, in our own backyard. Dave: [00:06:55] Well and you think one of the challenges with the current defining moment revolution whatever term we want to use that’s ...