INTERCULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
A book by three researchers from the University of Bern illustrates that separate worlds within the church are enormously important within the context of enabling sexual violence.
Mathias Wirth, Isabelle Noth and Silvia Schroer from the Faculty of Theology have published an interdisciplinary and interdenominational work entitled “Sexual Violence in the Context of the Church” through the renowned De Gruyter publishing house. This publication marks the first time a scholarly approach is being taken to look at the fundamentals of the problem. The book arose through a collaborative effort by an international team of scientists from the fields of history, medicine, philosophy, psychology and theology.
It aims to use Christian churches as an example to shine some light on ambivalent structures and identify the conditions that enable sexual violence. Finally, this publication is intended as an effective preventive measure.
According to Mathias Wirth, first editor and head of the Ethics Department, not enough basic scientific work has been conducted to adequately address the interdisciplinary challenge posed by the problem and that have refused to be content with superficial answers and proposals on what to do about it. This book, on the other hand, discusses churches’ centralized ways of thinking and related structures as the context of sexual violence. It’s about church and theological structures that give rise to separate worlds. Separate worlds are characterized by the fact that they are natural to insiders yet foreign to people outside those worlds.
“There are basic theological assumptions and established habits in churches that manifest as structures that enable sexual violence.”
Prof. Dr. Mathias Wirth
Specifically, the book’s contributors ask how theological ways of thinking and church practices that have hardly been identified as being problematic in the past need to be discussed and criticized anew as structures that enable sexual violence," says co-editor Isabelle Noth, Professor of Pastoral Care, Psychology of Religion and Religious Education.
According to the three authors, the connection to sexual violence must always be considered and included on topics such as the ethos of unconditional forgiveness, masculine privilege, binarism and loyalty.
The book provides all stakeholders and those affected with arguments for being more considerate of those who have been exposed to sexual violence in churches: The book criticizes the fact that, to date, comments made by church leaders and their interventions have inadequately responded to the moral problems associated with sexual violence. Beyond that, it offers constructive suggestions on how to transform theological thinking and practices in the church.
With this approach, the editors aim to establish a perspective according to which sexual violence is an interdisciplinary and theological problem of the highest order. After all: “There is no end to the news about the extent of sexual violence in various churches and their affiliated institutions, nor to our fear of it,” says co-editor Silvia Schroer on the publication of their book.
Wirth, Mathias, Noth, Isabelle, Schroer, Silvia. Sexualisierte Gewalt in kirchlichen Kontexten | Sexual Violence in the Context of the Church: Neue interdisziplinäre Perspektiven | New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699203