Fiji Bible studies help break silence over violence

Transcript

Interactive Bible studies in Fiji are helping to break the silence over gender-based violence.

The House of Sarah, part of the Anglican Diocese of Polynesia, is running workshops looking at how scripture can help end violence against women.  

Bridget Grace spoke with the House of Sarah's Gender Specialist, Tupou Vere, who says they've found the workshops a useful way to discuss difficult issues.  

Tupou Vere: We've found it's been extremely, extremely helpful in discussing violence against women because it involves everyone that comes to the Bible study.  And engaging youth, different age-groups, men and women, different ethic groups, and all have a say in how they engage and how they interact with the scriptures.  This one this year, the biblodrama approach enabled us to do that.

Bridget Grace: Could you just explain to me what is biblodrama?

TV: Biblodrama is a method where we engage in an interactive and creative way with the scriptures.  And in this case we use two bible texts in most of the workshops, and that's from second samuel, chapter 13, verses 1-22.  Which is a story of Amnon, the eldest son of King David in the Bible, how he raped his half-sister Tamar who's 15 years old.  So what the faciliator did was to take us through the different verses and ask us questions such as: what do we think about what has been described in the scriptures, so the participants shared their thoughts.  For example what do we think about what kind of experience Tamar had.  What sort of emotional changes or thinking or experience we think Tamar underwent following this assault on her.  So the participants identified various definitions of course, and in that process we also talked about the relevance of this story in the Bible, and the relevance to today's situation.  What's happening with rape in homes, who are the likely perpetrators.

BG: What role do you see scripture playing in helping end violence against women and girls?

TV: In this exercise, because we focused on a violent experience described in the Bible and a text that is hardly talked about in the old testament.  It gave us an opportunity to isolate or to define what is violence in a conversation, in a safe space, in a church, in a mixed audience, to actually talk about what is violence against women.  And even though it happened many years ago, the participants at the workshop talked about, this is still relevant today, we still see situations as such happening in homes,   and bystanders in the homes not doing anything about it.  What the Christian Network hoped to do, through these workshops, we call it, to break the silence about what is violence.  Fiji for example, our studies have shown released 2013 that only 24 percent of our victims and survivors report cases to the Police.

BG: What does the Bible say about violence against women?

TV: For us the Bible is quite clear that men and women are equal.  And it's quite clear as well that assault or violence towards women is not godly behaviour, is not godly teaching.