‘Violence against women is violence against God’

Matelita Ragogo
Tongan Pelenaise Luana was beaten for many years by her husband who also held a position in the church they attended before she had the courage to ask the church to speak to her husband.

“But it (the church) let me down, not God, it was the way things were,” she told ISLANDS BUSINESS. Pelenaise and her children continued to suffer until she felt the only option left was to leave; she fled with her children and now runs the only safe home in Tonga through her National Centre for Women and Children.

“I opted to help those who go through what I did because I know my sisters in the church suffer badly from domestic violence and feel more comfortable coming to a neutral ground when they need to just talk or shelter. Children suffer the worst in this situation.”

This is why she celebrates the decision to amend the curriculum at theological colleges to include gender studies, particularly violence against women.

The week-long consultation on the curriculum heard that cultural practices and patriarchal systems that perpetuate violence against women and children, that continue to consider women as second-class citizens must be stopped to realise women’s full potential.

The meeting included training for lecturers who are going to implement the new curriculum change in theological schools.

The meeting concedes that a radical transformation is needed in our societies which must rid itself of violence.

Acknowledging the church is one of the most influential institutions in Pacific islands communities, it cannot afford to continue to tolerate violence against women (VAW).

Speakers and participants at the Pacific Theological College meeting in Suva agreed it was time to stop  citing “culture” to justify violence against women.

While the Old Testament of the Christian bible articulates the roles for women that are now entrenched, discussions were initiated on whether a culture that did not acknowledge nor recognise women’s contribution to family life, their roles in the very survival of society and to a certain extent, the church, continue to be ignored rather than changed now to ensure God’s justice was a reality for all regardless of gender.

Academic Suliana Siwatibau proposed that with a recent research establishing humanity’s and nature’s interconnectedness, violence in whatever form and whoever it was destined for, was in effect, against all of us.

“To recognise our interconnectedness is to realise that what one does to others, one does to God and hence to oneself as connected to God. Any action directed at other humans or other creations in any form is violence against God,” Siwatibau said.

“The very existence of discrimination against women that prevents them from expressing themselves to their full potential is an act of violence. It is violence not only against women concerned but also violence against society that is thereby robbed of the talents and services those women could have provided.”

As the oppressed, women are challenged with being initiators of their own liberation, the meeting heard. Women need to accept that they are equals; that to be equal does not necessarily mean to replace men’s positions in power but rather to be equal as a human being, to be treated like one. This means that women are responsible for the church’s response to the violence they are experiencing.

For this transformation to be effective, only the most radical forms of change are essential, Maori academic Dr Jenny Plane Te Pa’a said.

She said this process of developing a response of the church to violence against women would require the “highest level of moral and intellectual courage”.

She proposed a new institutional framework to allow processes that will eventually rid Pacific islands communities of abusive, restrictive and biased norms that masquerade as ‘culture’. And this critical re-examination of what our societies have lived by all these years would have to be a collective, immediate act.

“To those who argue that traditions are sacrosanct or sacred and therefore not to be disrupted or adjusted in any way, I would say we either want to live God’s justice or we don’t,” Dr Te Pa’a said.

“We owe it to the generations yet to come that we would commit now to confronting our old culturally-based hypocrisies.

“As long as we have the levels of violence among ourselves that we currently do, we will continue to suffer a very serious credibility problem. It is to our collective shame that we are rapidly and sadly, with every justification, becoming globally and regionally characterised as peoples with an unconstrained propensity for violenceŃwhether militarised, culturally sanctioned, institutionally embedded and domestically-tolerated.”

This attempt to address violence against women from within the church is a ground-breaking initiative developed and coordinated by the South Pacific Association of Theological Schools (SPATS)’s Women Doing Theology programme (WEAVERS).

The curriculum which covers facts about violence, human rights and violence against women and the bible, and the church and its role in overcoming violence could be translated in eight languages if funding is secured. It is hoped this new addition to the curriculum could begin next year.

Frank and sometimes emotional discussions brought to the fore the fact that church leaders were perpetrators themselves, an unfortunate part of the Pacific community entrenched by the culture of silence.

Honiara-based Bishop Patteson Theological College principal Reverend Ben Seka felt it wasn’t so much the church hierarchy that would pose a problem for him but rather the men’s attitude.

“The women themselves will have to accept this liberation before they can convince the men that they are not second class citizens who exist to serve,’’ he said.

Seka said women basically stopped the civil war in his country when they would stand between the two groups of men.

This, he said, showed how much of an impact the women could make when acting collectively.

He added both men and women however were responsible if there were to be meaningful changes.

“I am looking for a world view in which men and women see themselves as equal. This curriculum will meet a need but it will take a while to see its effectiveness,” Reverend Seka said.

American Samoa’s Reverend Fa’atauva’a Alaelua said Pacific people needed to look at the different faces of violence and that we need to stop “joking about it. Culture has defined gender roles, yes but they are supposed to compliment each other”.

Of the 26 theological schools represented, only 10 offered courses related to gender and/or violence against women.

“We all know the story: it’s now time to put things into practice.”