This study, led by Linda Woodhead and Jo Kind, involved individual interviews with thirty participants and explored people’s experiences of what had helped them to survive the experience of abuse in a religious context. Twenty-eight of these participants were victim-survivors, and two were therapists with substantial experience of working with people who had experienced abuse in religious contexts. The participants came from a range of faith community backgrounds in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Judaism.
One key finding was that participants generally found that metaphors and narratives of progress from abuse to recovery and healing were not true to their experience. The ways that people dealt with the emotional, religious and social dimensions of experiencing their abuse were highly individual. Whilst participants were able to identify times and ways in which they had become more able to live with the effects of the abuse, this was not a linear process, nor one in which the effects of the abuse were no longer felt anymore. The experience could be more like a game of snakes and ladders in which experiences of progress, challenges and set-backs continued. The concept of ‘recovery’ did not therefore best fit the complexities of people’s individual experiences of survival.
Another key finding was that, although appropriate forms of social support could be important, participants generally reflected that the process of survival was one that they had to work out for themselves. An important part of this was coming to learn what, for each person, was more helpful. Most of the participants had some experience of therapy. Many had found therapy to be valuable at some points in their life, but had often had to try out different therapists to find which person or approach would be most helpful to them at a particular time. The idea that there was one kind of therapy that would be useful – or that a single kind of therapeutic intervention would be enough – was not confirmed.
Participants also identified a number of specific things that they themselves had found helpful in coping. The majority of these were things that participants would do by themselves, including activities that helped people to feel grounded, to improve their physical health, to reflect or to be creative. Relationships with other people – whether a small group of trusted friends, a partner or a therapist – were important to some, and a number spoke about the importance of workplace relationships and of institutions, including educational ones. Support offered by non-human others, whether pets, trees, objects or places could be equally important.
The process of survival also tended to be associated with different types of response to the faith community in which the person’s abuse had taken place. Some people remained part of that faith tradition – but many of them moved to another group or community within it. Others moved decisively away from it (including those who were excluded from it by shunning and ostracism), or ‘sifted’ it to find what remained valuable for them but discarded the community belonging. Another group of participants – who found this experience particularly difficult – felt that they could no longer be part of their wider faith community, yet still felt a strong attachment or desire to return to it. This state of ‘limbo’ was one that those participants found it particularly difficult to move on from. There was no indication from participants that experiencing abuse in a tightly-knit or more socially isolated religious group necessarily had more difficult experiences in surviving this than those abuse in more ‘mainstream’ groups such as traditional churches.
With the research demonstrating the importance of victim-survivors finding their own way to surviving abuse – and coming to trust their own authority and experience in doing so – further questions were raised by this study about whether faith groups can act in ways that enable people to develop a sense of self that helps them to survive.
