Victims usually stay with abusers because they face entrapment barriers that prevent them from leaving. “Churches must evaluate the entrapment barriers they create and perpetuate that keep victims entrapped in abuse,” says Andrea Aleksandrova in her superb article Becoming A Safe Church: How churches can become safe spaces for victims of domestic abuse.
I am giving some excerpts from Andrea’s article here and I urge all my readers to click through and read the whole article. I also urge my readers to subscribe to Andrea’s Substack.
Andrea writes:
If churches want to actually become safe spaces for victims, then they need to ask the question: What entrapment barriers am I creating or perpetuating that prevent women from being able to escape from their abusers? This is a much harder question and one I am convinced most churches will not ask because it shifts the focus of blame from victims to themselves. It asks, “What role do I play in this?” This is a courageous question, and it is one that churches must ask in order to become safe spaces for victims. Churches must evaluate the entrapment barriers they create and perpetuate that keep victims entrapped in abuse.
Most Christian churches today want to be known as safe spaces for victims of domestic abuse. Ask almost any pastor if they think abuse is horrific and whether or not they want to care well for victims of domestic abuse and you’ll get a resounding, “Of course we do!” almost every single time. And yet, time and time again, churches are failing to actually be safe spaces for survivors and are instead known for traumatizing victims further. So, what exactly do churches need to do in order to actually become safe spaces for survivors?
Current Approaches
Many churches are currently seeking training and creating programs for victims of domestic abuse. These programs often become group studies for female victims or betrayed partners of sex addicts. However, there is a very unfortunate trend right now inside Christian advocacy circles for advocates, trainers, therapists, and coaches to embrace models that are considered outdated in the broader domestic violence field. These outdated models include codependency theory, learned helplessness theory, the cycle of violence theory, and family systems theory (1). When churches want to get educated, they typically reach out to Christian trainers who are talking about domestic abuse. Since many of these trainers are currently teaching outdated models, this means that these outdated models trickle down to churches who embrace them wholeheartedly. I believe churches often find these materials attractive because churches love to blame victims. Blaming victims and focusing on fixing victims absolves churches of the need to take any responsibility whatsoever for the domestic abuse problem themselves. It allows churches to feel like they are “doing something” while simultaneously doing absolutely nothing. It also allows churches to continue scapegoating victims.
We now know in the broader domestic violence field that women are not victimized by their intimate partners because of any psychological reasons but rather because they are facing social entrapment barriers. (I use “she” in this post to refer to victims and “he” to refer to abusers because this is the most common scenario.) To quote Jess Hill, author of See What You Made Me Do, “The obstacles . . . women had to overcome in order to leave weren’t psychological: they were social” (2). Unfortunately, almost every single Christian program for Christian victims of domestic abuse currently focuses on fixing a woman’s psychological state, thereby implying that if she were more psychologically healthy she wouldn’t have been abused.
Read Andrea’s article here.
I agree with every word Andrea wrote in this article. I’ve said before but I’ll say it again — I am grateful that a survivor-cum-advocate has taken up the torch which I have been carrying for so long. I am impressed by how Andrea has grown and learned how better to assist victims of betrayal and abuse.
Andrea is courageously standing outside the mutually-back-slapping club of “Christian advocates” who are teaching false and outdated ideas that perpetuate victim-blaming. She is mostly doing that on Facebook, which in my view is the most dangerous social media platform on which to call people out for their bad conduct.
I couldn’t do what Andrea does on Facebook. I know that many survivors pay more attention to Facebook than to long-form articles written at blogs. I understand why that is so, but I just can’t attend to Facebook readers much because doing that exhausts and often triggers me.
Please pray for Andrea. Like many of my readers, she is a divorced mum raising kids and working to pay the bills.
Jess Hill’s book The Dangers of Domestic Abuse That We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See [Affiliate link]
A Cry For Justice 
Exactly right! So tired of FB posts where they talk about how beat down the person is. I wasn’t beat down, I just didn’t have any advocates who would actually help me stay safe away from him! Still going on today.
Sarah wrote (4th January 2024):
What Sarah wrote — and not to diminish you or your experience, Sarah — is still so common in today’s “church” (and sometimes church).
In Barb’s post, she wrote:
That.
And in Barb’s post, if you click on the link in her sentence “Andrea has grown and learned how better to assist victims of betrayal and abuse”, you can read Andrea Aleksandrova’s Facebook post about how she (Andrea Aleksandrova) has changed….her Facebook post is well worth reading. 😊
While I was reading through Andrea Aleksandrova’s post Becoming A Safe Church: How churches can become safe spaces for victims of domestic abuse., I was making some VERY snarky comments to my computer screen — NOT at Andrea Aleksandrova, but comments about the truths she’s talking about. From the little that I’ve read (including her prior stuff Barb’s included in comments, posts, and links on the A Cry For Justice blog), I was thinking that in one post Andrea Aleksandrova has summarized much of what’s been written about on the A Cry For Justice blog (in posts, pages, and comments) since it started.
One of the first things I was reminded of after reading the beginning of Barb’s post, including some parts of Andrea Aleksandrova’s post that were quoted, was Barb’s series on the SBC’s (Southern Baptist Convention) Church Cares Program: Becoming a Church that Cares Well for Abuse.
When the Church Cares Program: Becoming a Church that Cares Well for Abuse first came out, I was VERY sceptical about the program, and called it (paraphrasing) the “Not Caring Well” program. And, over time (and much as I hate to say this, 😢), I’ve been — as have been many other people, including Barb — proven right. Very big sigh.
And what’s become VERY evident, is that the SBC cares very well for abuse — continuing the same old playbook, exactly what Andrea Aleksandrova writes about in her post.
From Barb’s post:
That.
From Barb’s post:
That. (I’d insert an emoji of praying hands 😊, but the one that I found doesn’t “look” right….and — no offence or insult to anyone intended — I’m guessing there are more ways to pray. 😊)