Amen! What a beautiful reply.

I am so glad you found this post helpful. I agree that the suggestions listed here could apply to helping with any emotional issues, not just sexual abuse. Thank you for commenting!

Hi Jerry, I don’t know the answer to your final question, but I know it was rhetorical, so we’ll leave it at that. I have a question for you as well. When you say purity degrades women, do you mean the teaching of saving sex until marriage degrades women? Are you promoting “free love”? Or did you have something else in mind? This is not a rhetorical question, and if you care to answer it, I will better understand what you’re trying to say.

I agree that only picking up the pieces and doing nothing to aid in prevention of abuse is wrong. Thank you for that reminder. At this stage of my life, I am mostly at the picking-up-pieces stage. Prevention is a much larger subject, because there are so many factors in it I have no control over. I hope, as I learn more about abuse and how to get to the root of it, to contribute more to preventing it. One huge prevention of abuse is talking about it: making people aware that it happens and where it happens and what to do if it happens. Education is a powerful tool, and words are a powerful tool. Those who have been abused find it difficult to talk into silence, but if there is a conversation happening, telling their stories becomes easier. By writing this blog post, I hope to contribute to the growing conversation about sexual abuse.

I know people from a number of different backgrounds who have experienced abuse. The majority of those I know personally do not come from conservative Christian backgrounds and are not deeply involved in religious communities. From what I have seen, abuse happens in settings that teach submission and those that do not. It is definitely a form of mind control and dominance, but I think that drive for dominance comes from a different place than religious or Biblical teaching, since many of the men I know of who were/are abusers are not part of religious communities at all.

However, when an abuser is part of a Christian community, and especially if he poses as a godly and spiritual man, as the pastor who abused you did, the abuse survivor faces a double whammy. It is very difficult to sort through the confusion and hurt caused by that kind of hypocrisy. That man SAID he represented God, and if you–at least for a time–believed him, why should you want anything to do with that kind of a god? I would call that spiritual abuse as well as sexual. I think abuse that happens in what is supposed to be a godly setting is more damaging than any other.

Thanks again for your thoughts. I didn’t realize, when I started it, that my reply would be so lengthy! Abuse is a huge and complex subject, and there is a lot that I still need to learn.

Male authority is used to abuse young boys every day as well!

Too real for those who live this life and reap the whirlwind? Yes it is. Ignoring this fact means you are nothing If not COLLABORATORS.

Teach your girls they are not to be silent or submissive, then write a blog that celebrates PREVENTION. Teach your boys to respect women as equals.and fear no adult male.

You care for no one if all you choose time after time, is to clean up the aftermath. You are of equal BLAME.

Purity absolutely DEGRADES wimen, but you seem to have no idea. Deep introspection and change are the mark of true human advancement, not the usual biblical quotations which have destroyed all too many lives, especially women and young girls and boys.

As a man who was abused by a pastor, I have come to realize, your ‘godly’ perspective hurts all humanity.

Is there no hope for you and your kind?

Hi Rosina, thanks for commenting. Protecting their Purity wasn’t recommended to me by any of the counselors above, and I hadn’t read it myself, but knew it just came out and thought I would include it in the list. However, after looking it over, I find some helpful things but also some perspectives I disagree with and which I don’t think are helpful to sexual abuse survivors. I’ve taken this book off the list of recommendations.

I have questions about the book Protecting Your Purity by KAH. I’ve read some quotes from it that I felt were degrading women. But I haven’t read the whole book, so I’d like to read it and do a review on my blog.

Thanks again for engaging with this tough issue!