Telling stories of sexual violence

In Canada 1,397 sexual assaults occur every day, according to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. In the United States nearly one in five women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape at some point in their lifetime says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Mennonite Church cannot assume its members are excluded from those statistics, said Rachel Halder, and she thinks it’s time we started talking about it.

In June, 24-year-old Halder launched Our Stories Untold, a website focused on sexual violence in the Mennonite Church. At present the blog features general articles about sexual violence, but Halder hopes it will become a space where women share their personal stories of abuse.

Because sex remains a taboo topic in many churches, victims of sexual assault, and the congregations that should support them, often keep quiet. A problem for a denomination focused on justice, said Halder. “I definitely think because of our Mennonite stance on peace and pacifism this should be a really important topic for them to start tackling,” Halder said by Skype from Parnell, Iowa.

On its first day the blog received 700 unique views, far more than Halder expected, and the overall response was positive. She did, however, get some comments pointing her to existing Mennonite Church USA guidelines and suggesting that their denomination doesn’t ignore the problem. But Halder wants a bigger, more open discussion.

“I’m not saying there aren’t like existing literature about it,” she said, “I’m saying it’s just not talked about and just because we have a statement about what would we do in this circumstance it doesn’t mean it actually happens.”

Yet convincing women to share personal stories online presents a major hurdle in using the website to promote important discussions. Though she has received a number of emails with personal stories she has just one willing to share online, and she wishes to remain anonymous.

While Halder understands the wishes of women who want to keep their stories private, she wishes more would share openly. “It’s also kind of frustrating because it’s like well you’re still buying into this concept that silence is better than speaking it out loud,” Halder said.

For Halder learning to speak about abuse is personal. She was assaulted around the age of three by someone staying at her aunt’s house. While she doesn’t remember all of the details, the process of working through it spurred her to start the blog. “Through the therapy to process I guess I realized, wow there’s probably a lot of people out there who have these stories,” she said, “and there’s not really anywhere for them to be.”

To help launch the website, Halder collaborated with Hannah Heinzekehr who runs The Femonite blog. Halder and Heinzekehr has been in conversation about an unrelated blog post when Halder mentioned her desire to start Our Stories Untold. They worked together to generate a week’s worth of posts on the topic to draw attention to Halder’s project and to raise awareness about sexual assault.

While Heinzekehr, who attends Peace Mennonite Fellowship in Claremont California, sees the wider Mennonite church opening up about sexual abuse and developing statements on the issue, she believes many communities lack resources to deal with the aftermath. “You know we do a lot of good reconciliation and justice work,” Heinzekehr said, “but I don’t think we’ve really thought through what that looks like in these specific kind of very contentious intimate settings.”

Both Heinzekehr and Halder suggest that spending more time discussing sex education and healthy sexuality could help the church get one step closer to open conversation on sexual violence.

“At least when I was growing up I sometimes got the vibe that sex is something dirty or it was something we should always feel guilty about,” said Heinzekehr, “so then when there are these breaks in trust of a very intimate nature like sexual violence I don’t think it feels appropriate to talk about them if you’re a victim.”

Halder also believes more training for church leaders would help bring the taboo subject into the open. “I think there should be like some kind of training for pastors or you know people in the church who are leaders,” she said, “to be able to kind of understand what this is and understand victim blaming and understand how it is a sensitive topic but it should be open and talked about.”