Can Faith Leaders Stop Violence Against Women? |
Violence against women and girls can escalate during wars because they may be viewed as soft targets.
Women may worry that speaking up about sexual violence could cause further harm and social exclusion.
When faith leaders in Congo taught male congregants to be allies, violence against women dropped dramatically.
Can pastors, imams, and rabbis be allies to women and children and help stop gender-based violence?
Many wars have been fought in the name of religion. Much pain and dehumanisation has been inflicted on women and girls in the name of religious culture. So, it wouldn’t be surprising for there to be cynicism about the question.
But, in fact, a growing body of research shows that faith leaders can be powerful allies against social ills like gender-based violence.
As a social-organisational psychologist, I research how people use their strengths and the strengths of their culture to assist those who are suffering in their society.
My colleagues, Karen Torjesen and Grace Ngare, and I set out to study the impacts of a year-long intervention by religious leaders in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The religious leaders had initiated a programme that they hoped would contribute to social change when it came to gender-based violence within marriage, gender roles in the family, and male allyship in the community.
Our study found that faith leaders could indeed be activated as champions of positive social change. They can activate entire communities—men and women—to come together to address gender-based violence. We found that the ripple effect can endure and extend well beyond initial efforts.
A History of Violence
The Second Congo War (1998–2003) was one of Africa’s deadliest civil wars, claiming as many as 3 million lives. Systematic rape was wielded as a weapon of war. The DRC earned the unfortunate label of “rape capital of the world.” Internally displaced women and girls were viewed by armed militia as soft targets.
From the 2000s, boys in the DRC who had been recruited as child soldiers were returning home as young adults. They had been taught that women were no more than “spoils of the war.”
Without the support of therapy, they had to reintegrate into their families and live among their mothers, aunts, and sisters, and start their own families. Predictably, gender-based violence was rampant.
Ending it was a clear goal for the health and stability of civil society.
At the same time, many women were reluctant to report the men who raped them. In addition to cultural norms of silence and shame around sexual violence, they did not want to have their brothers, sons, and husbands locked up in prison. The community had to find another means to restore women’s safety and well-being while also protecting the fabric of their society.
In a context of crumbling infrastructure, the people who truly understood the extent of the rape and violence against women were not the police or other authorities. Rather, it was the quiet presence of the church pastors and the wives of the imams that the women confided in.
The pastors and imams decided to use their influence to teach congregants about healthy interpersonal relationships—where respect, gender equity, nonviolence and empowerment were key.
In 2013, their three-year initiative, the Tamar Campaign, was delivered directly and through spin-off efforts to more than 30,000 people across multiple cities and villages in the DRC. Participants each attended the programme for about a year.
Created by the Fellowship of Christian Councils and Churches in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, this was an interfaith, inter-organisational effort to combat gender-based violence through the use of scriptures and the engagement of communities. It was named after the story of the rape of Tamar in the Old Testament—a common thread across Christianity, Islam and Judaism—in which a daughter of King David was raped by her brother.
Because of toxic gender norms around what it meant to be a man, the men returning from war had not learned how to identify their own emotions, how to speak about their emotions, or how to see the emotions of others and work with them.
The goal was to use stories from scripture as the entry point to teach men how to be better allies to women and girls. In the story of Tamar, for example, rape combines elements of incest, domestic violence, and the conspiracy of men. When Tamar sought help after being raped, she was told to be quiet. This displays the culture of silence around such acts.
In each monthly session run by the faith leaders, scriptural stories were introduced as an entry point to openly discuss gender-based violence within a mixed-gender setting. They lifted the shroud of silence in a sacred and safe space, often a house of worship. Next, participants discussed gender-based violence in their own families and the community. They talked about how they could become agents of change.
In the process, in monthly group sessions of 25 or so people, the programme sought to teach socio-emotional skills, detoxify notions of masculinity, deepen understanding between men and women, strengthen their relationships, and develop action plans for healing, repair, and allyship.
My research team evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention four years later. In a field study, a survey was given to Tamar participants, and matching control groups in North and South Kivu.
We found that those in the programme had a 50%-85% lower incidence of violence, with larger drops in violence in North Kivu compared to South Kivu. It was a dramatic success story.
This tremendous drop in violence happened after many earlier interventions to address the problem had failed. Typical advocacy-based interventions failed because women worried that even if they became better at advocating for themselves, the fabric of society would disintegrate—the women would be beaten, ousted from their community, and lose their children. Their only choice seemed to be silence—unless the intervention wasn’t about the women at all, but about turning the men into their allies.
My team studied the results, including the effects on the participants’ marital relationships. We found, amazingly, that their relationships were better than when women had remained silent. There were accounts of women and men communicating and dealing with emotional issues with respect, rather than derision.
Long after the funding had ended, other groups and communities who had heard about the programme borrowed the Tamar curriculum, with positive results. The allyship was still spreading and still having an impact. Community members were intervening when they saw violence occur among their neighbours or their extended family. They were being allies out in the world, not just for their own partner or immediate families.
This offers one example of how cultural phenomena like religion can be a resource to combat large, complex and entrenched societal problems. Congolese participants were drawing on their strength, building relationships, prioritising healing, and thinking in the long term to shift a toxic culture from the inside out.
A version of this post is also published in The Conversation.