A Common Testimony of Abuse: Laboring With the Violence in Our Lives

“Twelve years ago, when I first started engaging in a public ministry around abuse,” Windy Cooler recalls, “I thought that good policy was the answer.” She came to realize, however, that trying to get meetings to adopt policies to address domestic and sexual violence against children and adults led to power struggles that “were not the way that Quakers make decisions.”

“God is not a technocrat,” she reflects. “God is not a policy maker. God is a force in our relationships. God is love. God is not violent, and attempting to overpower other people the way I did in those early years was itself a form of violence.”

So she and her colleagues took a different approach—listening to the witness offered by survivors of abuse, and compiling their anonymous voices in a report released late last year.

“This is a tool that makes it safe for survivors to not just feel heard but be heard in their communities,” Windy says. Making the voices anonymous allows Friends to set aside their defensive reactions and focus on the testimony shared. “I imagine myself sitting in worship with these voices, and that each of these… are messages that are arising from the silence.”

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