No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Theology and law share much in common, including a long history of justifying violence against women. Critics of legal and religious institutions need not look far to find texts offering evidence that both kinds of institutions are hopelessly mired in a patriarchal history that renders them obsolete, and apparently unable to offer anything significant concerning justice for young women victims of abuse. These ancient texts unapologetically proclaim that young women were to be treated as property of their fathers or husbands:
Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, “I beg you my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.”—Genesis 19: 6-8.
[W]hether it [rape of a female virgin] was within the city or in the open country or at night in the (public) street or in a garner or at a festival of the city, the father of the virgin shall take the wife of the ravisher of the virgin (and) give her to be dishonored; he shall not give her (back) to her husband (but) shall take her. The father shall give his daughter who has been ravished as a spouse to her ravisher.—Codex Hammurabi.
1. Tracy, D., Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope 90 (1987)Google Scholar.
2. Abstract theories of justice that start with notions such as choice-making from behind a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls) or of “maximizing the greatest good” fail to take into account both the particularity of abused adolescents and that of the person(s) generating the ethical theory. Such attempts at objectivity do contain bias—nearly always a bias in favor of society's dominant group. As a corrective, I offer this look at justice for adolescent women, acknowledging from the outset the bias in favor of them.
3. Finkelhor, D., Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research 12, 25 (1984)Google Scholar.
4. Minnesota House of Representatives, Juvenile Court Cases in Minnesota: An Overview (04, 1985)Google Scholar.
5. Lerner, G., The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)Google Scholar.
6. Id. especially 8-11; and chs. 4 and 11.
7. Id. at 140. Lerner asserts that the state had an interest in maintaining such class divisions, “thus from its inception the state had an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family.” Id. at 9.
8. Boswell, J., The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance 58–60 (1990)Google Scholar.
9. See id. at 62. Boswell argues convincingly that the practice of abandoning children in a public place, in order that they might be found and raised by strangers, was widespread in antiquity, as well as in Judaism and Christianity. He notes here some correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, inquiring about what could be done about “free-born Roman citizens abandoned as children who were brought up as servants or slaves by those who found them, …’ a great problem affecting the whole province’” Id.
10. Gen. 22: 1-14.
11. Gen. 19: 1-8.
12. Judges 11: 30-40.
13. Judges 19:22-30.
14. Pleck, E., Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present 7–8 (1987)Google Scholar.
15. Spitz, L., The Protestant Reformation 1517-1559 at 354–55 (1985)Google Scholar.
16. Eph. 5: 22-23;6: 1.
17. Ruether, , The Western Tradition and Violence Against Women, in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique 33 (1989)Google Scholar.
18. Id. From Martin Luther's Lectures on Genesis, 2:23; 3:16.
19. Illick, , Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America, in The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse 328 (1988)Google Scholar.
20. E. Pleck, supra note 14, at 45.
21. Prov. 13:24, 23:13-14.
22. E. Pleck, supra note 14, at 25.
23. Id. at 34-44
24. Id. at 34-48.
25. Zelizer, V., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985)Google Scholar.
26. Id. at 209
27. Miller, A., For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1984)Google Scholar.
28. Id. at 17.
29. Id.
30. Id. at 240
31. Id. at 98-99.
32. Id. at 243.
33. Rush, F., The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children 14 (1980)Google Scholar.
34. Juvenile Court Cases supra note 4. This report gives data from juvenile court cases in Minnesota during the first six months of 1984, the most recent information available. During that time period, in the disposition of cases involving termination of parental rights, 93.7% of the young people were placed outside of the home. This number includes both termination of parental rights at the request of the parents for good cause (i.e., “incorrigibility”) as well as termination without parental consent due to abandonment, continuous neglect, or evidence of unfit parenting. Nonetheless, the 93.7% out of home disposition of these cases indicates a strong preference to remove the child from the home.
35. Minnesota House of Representatives, Youth and the Law: A Guide for Legislators (11, 1988)Google Scholar. Specific data on the number of parents ordered out of the home in cases of child abuse is not available. However, the infrequent use of this option can be inferred easily from the above information that 93.7% of juvenile cases involving termination of parental rights involve placement of the child outside the home. Of the 6.3% cases in which juveniles remain in the home, it is probable that parents are ordered out of the home infrequently for economic reasons. Among the types of dispositions available to the court is “ordering the abuser out of the home in cases of domestic child abuse.”
36. Gelles, R. & Cornell, C., Intimate Violence in Families 54 (1985)Google Scholar.
37. Id. at 54.
38. Id. at 91.
39. Id. at 93.
40. Id. at 94 (citing Gill, D., Violence Against Children: Physical Child Abuse in the United States (1970)Google Scholar). As reported in Gelles and Cornell (94) studies linking age, gender, and incidence of victimization show conflicting results. Gill samples cases of reported abuse resulting in physical injury that include a wide range of violent behaviors directed at adolescents, such as choking, drowning, and burning. Gelles and Cornell (94) hypothesize that Gill's results may reflect the higher reporting rate of abuse cases involving female victims, or may suggest that young women are more often the recipients of more violent forms of abuse that were not measured in other studies.
41. MacMurray, , Criminal Determination for Child Sexual Abuse: Prosecutor Case Screening Judgments, 4 J. of interpersonal Violence 238 (1989)Google Scholar.
42. See Bohn, , Dominion to Rule: The Roots and Consequences of a Theology of Ownership in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique 105–16 (1989)Google Scholar.
43. This is an important focus in various liberation theologies, which challenge traditional western theologians' perspectives that suffering serves a redemptive purpose. In contrast, liberation theologies take as their central affirmation the perspective that God stands with the oppressed and is at work in communities of struggle to liberate people from suffering and oppression. For a helpful sampling of these theologies, see Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside (1990). Feminist theologians in particular have devoted attention to the role of suffering in theology, as they address violence against women. See for example Sexual Assault and Abuse: A Handbook for Clergy and Religious Professionals (1987). Theologian Rita Nakashima Brock offers one of the most extensive and provocative treatments of this issue in Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (1988).
44. Mary Potter Engel, in an address at a conference on “Violence Against Women” in St. Paul, Minnesota on January 27, 1990. See also Dobash, E., Violence Against Wives (1979)Google Scholar.
45. League of Women Voters, Minneapolis, MN, Breaking the Cycle of Violence: A Focus on Primary Prevention Efforts 2.
46. Brock, R., Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power 56 (1989)Google Scholar.
47. Russell, L., Feminist Interpretation of the Bible 16 (1985)Google Scholar. Critics who contend that such an approach really develops a “canon within the canon” fail to appreciate that supporters of patriarchal interpretation already operate out of their own selective principle: note that few place as much significance on a text calling for men to become “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12) as they do on the normative status of texts that call for subordination of women.
48. for examples see McFague, S., Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age 1987Google Scholar; Russell, L., Growth in Partnership (1981)Google Scholar; and Meeks, M.D., God the Economist: the Doctrine of God and Political Economy (1989)Google Scholar. Specifically, abused women can find hope in theologies which articulate the Divine in images not associated with their abuse or oppression. Some of these images, such as McFague's God as lover, stand as an indictment against the unloving treatment a woman has received at the hands of an abusive man. One danger with religious metaphors, of course, is that they are easily co-opted by the dominant group to authorize their ideology of oppression. Imaging God as “the Master,” for example, supports an arrangement among humans in which some are masters of others. Certain images, such as God as friend, or God as liberator, resist being co-opted and are especially hopeful for abused women. Similarly, an understanding of God's nature as God in community with God's own self through the Trinity offers a resource for abused young women, by elevating community as an essential aspect of both divine and human nature. When faith is merely a private affair, the victim of abuse is isolated and must deal with the theological and ethical issues of her abuse alone. If instead it is an essential aspect of God's nature and ours to be and work in community, then the abused young woman has a community of others to share her outrage and call for justice on her behalf. Community suggests a state of interdependence—dependence between—the various members. In this light, common assumptions that dependence among persons is a negative quality must be overturned. The commonly negative aspect of dependence is the less powerful person's vulnerability to the one(s) upon whom she must rely. But in God's community, modeled in the Trinity, interdependence is an opportunity for mutually enhancing relationship, not for abuse of power. Finally, to perceive the Divine-human relationship as co-creators and partners suggests a higher level of human responsibility than if humans are mere objects of God's creative action and work. As partners, abused young women can view themselves as participants in God's activity in the world.
49. The woman's illness isolated her from her community and made her ritually impure before God, in the eyes of the patriarchal makers of religious law. In this story, through the healing of Jesus, she is able to return out of isolation into community; and she is declared so by Jesus, healed and also saved, re-united to God. Meanwhile, news comes that the young girl to whose house Jesus was going is already dead. What was to have been a “routine cure” from illness becomes the overturning of death itself, as Jesus raises her back to life.
50. Luke 10:38ff.
51. Mark 7:24ff.
52. The difficulty that I have with this idea is its relativizing of God's incarnation in Christ as embodiment: for young people whose experience of oppression is fundamentally related to their bodies in the form of physical or sexual abuse, a Christology that takes seriously God's partnership with humanity through the presence of God in human flesh, embodiment, holds a crucial place. Still, her critique of traditional doctrines of atonement as endorsing abuse are important correctives to past elevation of suffering. It may be that what is called for is a corrective in the tendency to focus on the humanity of Christ. Out of a Reformed perspective that asserts the full reality of God was present in Jesus, one could refocus the atonement from “cosmic child abuse” to God's own self suffering. This does not elevate suffering of humans, because it asserts God's radical otherness from us: God's suffering issues in resurrection, unlike human suffering.
53. Luke 7:36ff.