This week I talked to Dr. Ponce-Rodas from the Andrews Psychology department about her career and work surrounding the topic of domestic violence in the church. She shares steps for learning more about this important issue and being better supporters for victims and survivors of abuse. Most important is the overlying message of hope that must be remembered in order to be advocates for those in our community.
Please introduce yourself to us and tell us what kind of work you do!
I’m Melissa Ponce-Rodas, I'm an Assistant Professor of Psychology. I've been here at Andrews for, I want to say, thirteen years now. And I'm actually trained as a community psychologist, so I work not with individual people, but with groups to help groups function better. And so the kind of research that I did for my dissertation is I looked at the way that religion, spirituality and beliefs about domestic violence intersect within Hispanic churches in the Lake Union Conference, to try and see if we could find some patterns to better understand what people think about this topic. I also look at where we might be able to intervene to lower rates of abuse and perpetration and increase overall wellness in the church.
What kind of work did you do in the community psychology field?
I got interested in this topic when I was at UIC University of Illinois at Chicago, which is where I did my graduate work. There were a lot of people who did violence against women work, so I worked with professors whose areas of expertise were domestic violence. And I ended up becoming a licensed domestic violence counselor in Illinois. That's when I first got into the sciency stuff, and the real life advocacy work, but I never did any of that full time. I've always been more on the research end of it. The way I got into this to begin with was when there was a person at one of my previous churches who apparently had gone to the pastor, and after more than 25 years of marriage, she realized that her situation wasn't safe and she needed to make changes. So the pastor said, you're a psychologist, you talk to people! I do, but not not really. He said he didn't know what to do with domestic violence. We started looking in the church to see if there were any resources and there were some, but the big problem was they were all in English so it wasn't really helping the Hispanic churches. In the process of looking for information for that pastor, I started to see the church has resources that most people don't know about, and it's not accessible to all. I started to wonder how I can bring that to Hispanic churches and that's where a lot of my research and work focused. I would volunteer to translate documents, and at this point there are translated materials in at least three or four languages each year for enditnow, and they're freely available on the website. And people always say, oh, that's a topic I may not know a lot about, but the great thing is that it comes with a sermon, a children's story, a Sabbath school activity, all of these resources and it’s easy for anybody to use.
What are some of the biggest takeaways that you've gotten from your work in this field?
I would say my biggest takeaways are from the survivors who I've had the privilege of working with. This is a topic that can get really depressing and really challenges your hope very quickly. But the stories of resilience from survivors are meaningful, the way they've survived in the face of extreme adversity and challenges. They found a way to keep their faith and many of them even talk about how their faith has helped them through it and then use that to share with others. In part what gives them the courage to tell their story is that it could potentially help other victims. When I talk to them, there’s this amazing desire to not stay in the place of hurt but to use it to propel them forward into sharing God's love and God's hope and God's vision for what healthy homes and healthy relationships should look like.
What are some ways that you think we can all be better advocates and be more aware of these issues?
So number one is acknowledging that it happens. Dr. Renee Drum is a researcher who has done the most work in the church, and between her research and mine and a few others that are out there. Unfortunately, what we know is that rates of abuse and perpetration are about the same in the church as they are outside of the church. But if more people were aware that it is happening, and it's happening in the church, that the statistic is still about one out of four women will at some point experience sexual assault, and one in six men. This is an issue we have to address in our churches, so first awareness, and then education. What do we really know about this? Because domestic violence is a pattern of abuse, it's not just a one time thing. It's not just one way, it can happen in so many different ways. There's financial abuse, spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, verbal abuse, immigration abuse, etc. and if we each got some education about the subject from good sources that’s a great start. The second step is to educate yourself, and then three is to share it with others. That'll put us in a good place to transform and look at our church policies and the way that we treat people with the resources we provide so that we can see changes in our own churches and congregations and communities. We can then use that to really be the light of the world which is what we're called to be, and take the way we've worked through this and share it with others to give them hope. We need to be able to show how things can be overcome with the love of Jesus. And again, I say that I've lost hope often and my survivors are usually the ones that bring it back. that's
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.