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vii preface to the First Edition (1995) A t the wedding of a friend last summer, the priest performing the ceremony addressed all the guests, exhorting us to take seriously our role as witnesses to the new marriage. It was hot. The glass-walled chapel at Pacific School of Religion was like a greenhouse. People smiled, fanned themselves with programs. Didn’t the bride look lovely? Wasn’t it an unusually summery day for the Bay Area? The priest’s words rang out, suddenly calling us to attention, reminding us of our commitment— beyond the surface pleasantries and the etiquette of the wedding as a social occasion. He told us the biblical Greek word for witness is martys. He called us to pour out our lives, our selves, as witnesses, as martyrs, to this union now being created before God and before us. I hope and believe that my friend’s marriage, and her life, will be blessed with harmony and peace. But for so many women, that is far from the reality of their lives. All too often hope dies, crushed by the fist of a battering partner, overwhelmed by the violation of a rapist’s attack, smothered even in earliest childhood by the devastation of sexual abuse. This book—amazingly for the first time—gathers together by one author under a nontechnical framework the seemingly disparate strands of the violence-against-women movements. I say “amazingly” because with the research and advocacy advancing apace in the various strands, no introductory book from a unified perspective yet exists.1 One reason for this lacuna, no doubt, is that each strand has often pressed ahead independently toward political initiatives for change, so vital for improving women’s treatment within the North American context. A second reason is that many people have become engaged where they first encountered violence against women. A third is that the theoretical perspectives often shift as one moves from one area to another. The envisioned readers of this book, then, are those who want to know more about the various forms of violence against women and some of what can be done to counter such violence. By the term church’s response in the book’s subtitle is meant the basic witness for what is healthy and against what is destructive. I am taking the hopeful stance that the church’s response to violence against women can be increasingly helpful, even proactive. This book is an effort to support that response by suggesting starting points viii preface for advocacy (both pastoral and institutional) and by undergirding those suggestions with both theological and theoretical foundations. I felt drawn, even compelled, to write this book for many reasons. In my first parish ministry setting in 1979, I opened a program for homeless people and had my eyes opened to the realities of battered women. The very first family to come to supper in our simple parish hall was a battered woman who had fled with her two children from her violent husband, preferring the streets to the terror of their apartment. Deeply convicted by that encounter, I went on to become involved in the battered women’s movement, a commitment that I have carried throughout my ministry in secular agency, church, and seminary settings. Later, while teaching at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, I discovered the lack of a book addressing the multiple forms of violence against women from one author’s unifying perspective and analysis. I found myself assigning dozens of books and articles and wishing for one source that could serve as a primary text for the class. As an Episcopal priest, I write with a Christian and, at times, distinctively Episcopal/ Anglican voice. The book carries the assumption of a certain shared world with the reader, that of the Christian church in the United States. I hope it may also be of some transferable value to readers of different religions, although I do not pretend to represent in a universal way all the complexities of their traditions. Beyond these reasons for writing the book, there is another: I am a woman. As I have shared in various places throughout, I have personal experiences with some of the specific forms of violence I am describing. Additional stories in this book have been gathered from others. The stories of my friends and colleagues, if compiled, easily fill in any gaps in experience in my own life. The stories if laid end to end could be...

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