Spiritual or Religious Abuse

Spiritual and religious abuse is using scriptures, traditions, and cultural norms to assert power and control.

Examples of spiritual/religious abuse:

Asserting Authority

Using scriptures to impose gender roles that are abusive or coercive, to assert authority, to reinforce male privilege, to force you to submit, to give commands and punish you if those commands are not obeyed.

Prolonging Abusive Relationships

Using scripture, traditions or cultural norms to force you to forgive anything and everything, to keep the relationship together, to require you to sacrifice yourself for the relationship, to excuse or minimize the blame, to remain silent or to accept the suffering for the sake of the relationship.

Isolation

Isolating you from your faith community by not allowing you to participate in services or events, by silencing you when you are there, by moving the family from congregation to congregation, or by forcing you and the children to attend services in a different faith community that is not your preference.

Using Community Coercion

Working through clergy or lay leaders, or friends or family from your faith community, puts pressure on you to stay in the relationship or put up with the abuse even though you are in danger. Coercion can take the form of letters or phone calls on the abuser’s behalf, comments in social settings, etc.

Blaming the Victim

Using scripture to blame you and justify abuse because you are female, sinful, and the weaker vessel, estranged from God, not created in God’s image, created to be man’s servant, unclean, polluted and defiled.

Restricting Access to or Use of Health Care

Using scripture to force you to forego regular checkups, family planning, medications, emergency medical care, or neglect medical care for your children.

Using Children

Using scripture, traditions or cultural norms to arrange and force marriage for teens, to value male over female children, to use girls as commodities, to force you to raise the children in another faith or no faith.

Controlling Sexuality and Reproduction

Using scripture, traditions or cultural norms to force you to have sex or unprotected sex, to deny or force family planning, to participate in polygamous marriage or genital mutilation, to have sex or be married at a young age, to be in an arranged or forced marriage.