by Anonymous

A service like the one you had at AMBS is an amazing undertaking. I’m sure it was difficult to plan, and as I’ve seen in your responses on social media, you knew from the start there was no trauma-and-harm-undoing magic answer. What you may already know is that a service like this also reverberates and has impact through time and space, far beyond the reaches of the room in which it happened and those participating in and experiencing it.

So you planned, and worked, and consulted, and prayed, and finally, you held a service of lament. And people who attended and participated, including survivors, report they found the experience transformative, felt honored and valued. That is wonderful. In the service and in published documents, you apologized. You made commitments. But now there have been calls for people who did not attend to stop being critical and cynical and have faith in you to do the right thing.

Do you have any idea how many more of us are out here watching closely, hungry for information? We are also deeply affected because of our shared history of sexualized violence. Were we mentioned?  Were the words “We know John Howard Yoder is not the only one among us” ever spoken?  Were the words “We know there are many victims of current church leaders and members beyond John Howard Yoder with whom we also grieve” ever heard?  Perhaps they were, but we are left to wonder.

You stated in the goals for your event that you wanted to be in solidarity with all survivors. So I ask of you as an act of solidarity, my intended ally, to read this with an open heart and mind, and a pen in hand to take notes. Some of what you read may make you feel defensive. I ask that you read it anyway. Some of what you read may make you toss your hands up and say “We know! We did that! We’re doing that!” I ask that you take a breath, sit in your truth, and read my truth too.

The apology is great, the commitments good and well-intentioned (although I think more are essential), and the fact that those who attended, including survivors, found the experience transformative is nothing less than a true blessing. But asking people to not be critical or cynical, and to have faith and trust, as some AMBS faculty have asked, is loaded and misguided. “Critical” and “cynical” are often used as Mennonite code words for “not feminine or nice enough” and “not Christian enough.” I critique not out of cynicism, but out of an earnest desire for transformation. Trust is something earned, not asked for. Mennonite institutions have a long history of cover-up and silence when it comes to sexualized violence. We cannot be asked to wipe the slate clean with one act of lament.

Here is my experience and also my opinion.  You are free to find it critical, cynical, or faithless, although I believe it is nearly the polar opposite.

In 2003, a male member of my church raped me. I went through a process with a group of women from my church that was extended with grace, support, and nothing but good intentions. I find it comparable to the service and current process of AMBS. It felt, at the time, transformative. However, despite promises and good intentions, nothing was done to change the culture of the church; actions were not taken to prevent future violence; a survivor in the church continued to experience shaming and isolation. And when that was the case, the memory of my process turned sour and felt hollow and poisoned.

I asked myself questions. Was the process only to pacify me? Afterword, I wanted to speak with the youth group to help prevent similar experiences. I was accused of self-aggrandizement and told it was inappropriate. The pastor told me others had experienced violence too, and they didn’t feel the need to spread that around everywhere. One woman in particular, whose husband beat her, came in to church week after week with nary a peep. The pastor held her up to me as an example of how to properly embody Christian grace when experiencing violence.

Was the process meant to make me realize the violence was my responsibility?   I was asked by the women’s group to name the events leading up to the rape and any actions I was ashamed of.  I trusted those women and assumed they knew what I was learning in therapy: nothing I did or did not do made the rape my fault; yet their questions implied they thought it did. No one should ever force sex on anyone, no matter what. As time passed and the congregation refused to take any action to change the culture of silencing, isolating, and shaming, I began to question the intention of that exercise. Maybe they weren’t trying to help me let go of the ways I blamed myself, but to try to get me to accept responsibility.

At one point, my rapist’s mother called my dad, furious because I was pressing criminal charges against her son. She yelled at him for a long time, then crescendoed to her conclusion: “She was a feminist cunt in high school, and she’s a feminist cunt now,” she shouted. She wanted me silent, and I wouldn’t be silent.

Was the church process meant to silence me too?  The process began when I received a phone call from my pastor. The church member who raped me was in a bad way, she told me. He was so ashamed that I had named him at a Healing from Violence event. He was into drugs, in despair, unshowered and unshaved, and nearly face-down in a gutter. Would I be willing to do a joint healing/accountability process?  Naively, I agreed.  I even said I would love to participate in something like that.  And so I went through this process, the whole of it, meeting after meeting with this group of women, only to find after we had completed the whole thing that the man who raped me never participated at all.

**************************************************************************************************************************

Thank you for including in your Board Statement of Commitment a pledge “to listen carefully to those who speak up about things that are wrong or incomplete in AMBS’s polices or their implementation” and for doing all that is within your power “to ensure that policies are in place and adhered to in order to assure that AMBS is a safe place for everyone.”

I am speaking up, because these policies are directly relevant to my story.

A service like this can easily become meaningless or even harmful if it is not followed through with deep and meaningful action. There are important actions that AMBS could take that I don’t see published in your statements of commitment. They may already be in process, but if they are not, I strongly recommend them. If they are, I’d love to see that publicized. The suggestions below come from a variety of survivors and survivors’ advocates:

1)  Hire an independent panel of experts in survivors’ advocacy, such as Security on Campus, to audit the campus’s vulnerability to sexual violence including judicial process, related class curricula requirements, survivors’ advocacy, health insurance coverage, policies regarding queer and gender nonconforming welcome, and all other aspects of campus structure and culture. The objectivity and expertise necessary for this audit is not possible from within this or any other Mennonite institution.

2)  Create a scholarship fund for survivors of violence that helps bring to the church a variety of voices. A devastating swath was lost because of the abuse of Yoder and the subsequent cover-up.

3)  Hire scholars who specialize in sexualized violence, as well as in sexualized violence in the context of Christian ethics, requiring a set of courses in this field for all seminarians.

Although it was painful to revisit these memories, I took the time and energy to write this because AMBS is the place where so many Mennonite pastors are trained. Perhaps it was the place where a pastor mentioned in this experience was trained. In fact, perhaps that pastor participated in the service of lament. With one in three women and one in five men experiencing sexualized violence at some point in their lifetime, the pastors you train at AMBS will encounter it at some point in theirs.

 Predation like Yoder’s, and the church’s enabling of it, is still happening in the Mennonite church right now, today. It is your responsibility to create a better future. That too is part of the reparations for your institution’s past. It’s time that pastors understood deeply how to address and engage with violence occurring in their own congregations, as well as the violence happening in the nation and world. I am asking you to please, help make it so that somewhere, another woman raped by a man in her congregation has a far different experience than mine.

Another post by AnonymousMennoBitch can be found in our Stories section here.