UNITED STATES
Our Stories Untold
By CAMERON ALTARAS on Aug 13, 2015
Representing the Anabaptist Mennonite Chapter of SNAP, Dr. Cameron Altaras delivered the following speech at the Annual SNAP conference in Alexandria, Virginia on August 2, 2015. More than 300 survivors of sexual abuse in faith communities and their loved ones gathered to hear speakers from around the world who educated and inspired us to “protect the vulnerable and expose the truth” about sexual abuses of power in our own denominations. BG
(Note: Although a male pronoun for the pastor and female pronoun for the victim is used here, victims and perpetrators can be any gender.)
A woman went to her pastor for advice.
Not for sex.
She never imagined her pastor would do something so egregious as to manipulate her into having sex with him.
The worst part was that because they were both adults, the woman blamed herself for having an “affair” with her pastor and then hid silently in her shame.
But it was not an affair.
It was an abuse of power.
Sex between two parties where there is a power differential is not and can never be labeled “an affair.”
Sex between persons with unequal power is not even about sex. It’s about power and control over someone with less power.
If approached by a stranger at a party, the sexual advances would have been obvious to the woman. But when her pastor became amorous, the woman was caught completely off guard. She thought she was making more out of the situation than her pastor intended. She ignored her screaming intuition, warning her that something was terribly wrong. It was not easy to rebuff her pastor, whom she held in the high esteem afforded by his position. She didn’t want to offend her pastor by refusing his pastoral hug the first time and it became increasingly awkward to refuse to hug him each time after that.
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