United Methodists Join Response to National Domestic Violence Awareness Month

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A United Methodist Insight Special

Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month occurs every October. United Methodist churches around the nation are leading or involved in local awareness programs, including marches, prayer vigils and public forums with guest speakers from protective women’s shelters, advocacy groups, service agencies and law enforcement.

This year’s White House Proclamation affirms the nation’s continuing commitment to “extending support and resources to all survivors, continuing to hold perpetrators accountable, and ensuring that our society is truly safe for everyone.” It also celebrates last year’s 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which established a nationwide protection hotline and legal measures to prosecute and reduce gender-based violence.

Up to 40 percent of Americans are impacted by sexual abuse, physical violence, or stalking by intimate partners over their lifetimes, the White House reports. The National Network to End Domestic Violence’s 2024 theme, “Everyone Knows Someone,” reminds us that “we all know survivors of domestic violence in some way”—whether as friends or family members, coworkers or neighbors, or even fellow church members.

At the heart of this longtime national epidemic, many agree, is fear-based shame and secrecy among many survivors, both female and male. That secrecy also extends to many religious congregations, places where hurting people should be able to find hearts, minds and doors open to welcome them and help them find safety and support that starts with sharing the truth of their traumatic experiences.

“Domestic Violence Awareness Month represents a time to have hard conversations regarding abuse,” writes Christina Hays, a North Alabama victim services coordinator, in the Jackson County Sentinel. “This is no longer an issue to be hidden behind locked doors. We need to be able to encourage everyone to speak up when they discover someone is abused.”

Her agency placed displays of information about domestic violence and local services, poignantly decorated with wedding dresses, at a county courthouse and three local libraries. They also sponsored “Survivor Speaks,” a library gathering to hear a local survivor’s domestic violence story about the horror, healing and hope she has experienced.

Churches try to grow DV awareness, response

A brief survey found domestic violence awareness observances at United Methodist churches across the United States.

Community United Methodist Church in Pickaway County, Ohio, kicked off the county’s 26th annual Silent Victim's March to the local courthouse steps October 7, where they remembered victims and survivors of domestic violence amid purple ribbons and balloons, using the thematic color for DV Awareness Month.

First United Methodist Church in Richardson, Texas, offers an informative recorded video interview on its website with Jan Langbeim, CEO of the local Genesis Women's Shelter. “Domestic violence occurs when one person in an intimate relationship exercises power and control over the other through a pattern of intentional behaviors including emotional, physical, sexual, economic, and verbal abuse,” the website informs visitors. Domestic violence affects both men and women and is the leading cause of injury to women ages 15-44 in the United States.”

In fact, DV cuts across a wide cross-section of the population, affecting all races, genders, cultures and income levels. “Abuse victims are our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers and our children,” the website reports, “and domestic violence is happening right here in your neighborhood—maybe even in your own home. We have a congregational obligation to recognize the signs and symptoms of domestic violence, to be a beacon of hope and a resource for others to get help and to get out, and to be a living example of a different way of life—with hope and without fear.”

Many churches partner with and support local women’s shelters, like St. James UMC in Tucson, Arizona. “I consider women suffering from domestic abuse and violence to be some of the most vulnerable people in our society,” writes the Rev. Richard Jones, pastor, on the church’s website. “Many of these women have children, and that makes their situation exponentially more difficult.” His church held a drive to collect needed personal items for women at Emerge, which provides emergency shelter, safety planning and DV education, while also engaging its community in “addressing the underlying causes of abuse.”  

Sudbury (Massachusetts) United Methodist Church will partner with the Domestic Violence Roundtable in its area to host a prayer vigil October 29, with music and meditations to remember recent victims of DV fatalities. Attendees will hear survivors and advocates call for more preventive actions, as they help “shine a light on the issues related to domestic and break-up violence.”

The UMC’s General Board of Church and Society provides resources about how churches can learn about and address Domestic Violence/Intimate Partner Violence. That includes “Domestic abuse and gun violence: A fatal intersection,” which targets the often fatal role that guns play in domestic violence, where “the chances of homicide increase dramatically.”

“We recognize that family violence and abuse in all its forms—verbal, psychological, physical, sexual—is detrimental to individuals and to our communities,” says the agency. “As United Methodists we are working to eradicate such violence.” 

In Hidden in Plain Sight: A Call to End Domestic Violence, Church and Society has created a study to help congregations reflect on what the Bible and The United Methodist Church have to say about domestic violence.

Ending domestic abuse’s painful silence

Meanwhile some conferences, such as the Great Plains Conference in Kansas and Nebraska, and the Baltimore-Washington Conference also provide helpful information. The latter conference, in its Seeds of Security initiative, collaborates with local agencies and individuals as part of a Domestic Violence/Intimate Partner Violence (DV/IPV) Prevention Network “committed to educating, advocating, resourcing, and providing safe haven for survivors.”

Baltimore-Washington Area Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling mentioned her own past ordeal with domestic violence, as she encouraged women who have suffered abuse during the denomination’s recent 2020/2024 General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. “You are strong. You are brave. And you are beloved of God,” she asserted, preaching on Thursday, April 25. Attendees wore black that day to highlight “Thursdays in Black,” a World Council of Churches campaign that urges people to wear black clothing on Thursdays to call attention to rape and violence against women. 

“Too often,” she said, silence “has been the church’s response to domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, rape as a weapon of war, incest, violence against the transgender community, as well as the abduction and disappearance of Indigenous women.”

Easterling shared that when she entered the ministry, she was urged not to reveal that she had suffered domestic violence in a previous marriage. “I was told to be silent about that painful part of my past. They said it would make me look weak and women in ministry already have enough battles to overcome.

“Stop making us invisible!” she called out in her sermon. “Speak our names! Minister to us and speak words of hope and health and healing, and holistic sacredness into our lives.”

She also admonished the church to do more than “simply bandage the wounds of the abused,” but to also confront and help abusers face their own accountability and seek healing and repentance for their acts of violence. “We need to speak to the abuse itself.”

Indeed, every October, churches, communities and government leaders do speak to the unrelenting abuse of women and the national scourge of domestic and sexual violence. They do so through proclamations and prayer vigils, speeches and sermons, advocacy marches and meetings, and occasional efforts to directly support the work of women’s shelters.

But more frequent and continuous remedies are direly needed to help survivors wrestle with the residual, pernicious trauma they face from years of buried silence about their abuse. It is becoming widely known that such trauma can afflict one’s mind, body and spirit—as well as one’s social and intimate interactions—in lasting ways. Moreover, trauma can be roiled often inexplicably, by triggering incidents or latent feelings. Typically, the best remedy is to confront the hidden pain, shame and fear from remembered abuse in a safe environment, where survivors can seek healing from the trauma through honest, supportive engagement with others.

Triumph Over Trauma

The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference will promote such a remedy when it hosts a Domestic Violence Awareness Month webinar via Zoom on Saturday morning, October 26, from 9 a.m. to 12 noon. The Rev. Neelley Hicks, a United Methodist deacon in Nashville, Tennessee, offers churches and communities an opportunity to provide safe sharing spaces to survivors through her agency’s Triumph Over Trauma program, launched in 2022.  Online participants will learn about that group-support program and also hear domestic violence survivors share their stories of horrible abuse but also hope-filled recovery.

Hicks will share how pastors and church members can intentionally assist victims and survivors of domestic violence by providing non-judgmental compassion, a sense of safety, and helpful resources before referring or escorting them to helping agencies. But what churches can also do is sponsor Triumph Over Trauma ministries—small groups of supportive survivors who participate in the seven-session program led by trained facilitators.

Hicks’ nonprofit firm, Harper Hill Global (HHG), creates and provides trauma-informed resources and training to help people practice resiliency and care for one another in relationships. That care is helping women and men in numerous states and a dozen countries to forge supportive bonds to help them face and overcome trauma and stigma they have suffered from various forms of violence and abuse, and to learn coping mechanisms for physical and emotional healing. While it’s not a substitute for mental health therapy, she says, it is helping many people to find answers that may lead them to seek additional treatment as needed.

Hicks recently trained 17 new facilitators to lead the trauma-informed small groups. They will implement the work in the places where they live: South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, Nigeria and Haiti. She also led breakout sessions at this month’s Harvesting Hope in the Heartland Prevention Conference in Wichita, Kansas. Meanwhile, she is searching for more funds and more facilitators to train and coach, especially church leaders, to help lead groups.

"I had no idea the lasting effects trauma would have on my whole life,” said the Rev. Kim McLean, who attended a recent training. “The Triumph Over Trauma group deals with the whole picture and has given me the courage to trust myself and believe in the goodness of people and life again. The information equips me with tools for my journey, and the connection with other trauma survivors has given me perspective to heal the feeling of isolation."

Learn more about Triumph Over Trauma.

Longtime United Methodist communicator John W. Coleman serves as editor-at-large for United Methodist Insight.