VIRGINIA
Augusta Free Press
Capping a month-long series of events around the topic of healthy sexuality and sexual violence, EMU welcomed Father Tom Doyle, a Roman Catholic sexual abuse victim advocate, to campus Monday, Nov. 7. Doyle, a priest who has worked with abuse victims for more than three decades, was the keynote speaker and panel presenter for a symposium for EMU faculty and staff on institutional harms and healing in response to sexual violence. He also gave an evening lecture, open to the public, on the spiritual impact of sexual abuse in religious contexts, and gave a sermon at an Eastern Mennonite Seminary worship service.
The symposium and public lecture were organized and facilitated by Professor Carolyn Stauffer as part of her multi-year “Silent Violence” project. Her research, which began in 2015 with a grant from The JustPax Fund, has focused on how abused individuals in marginalized communities employ resilient strategies to survive, endure and sometimes escape their situations.
While the first year of the project focused on surfacing individual stories and the second year on community services, the third year has emphasized the role of institutions. In March 2016, Stauffer organized a community education forum with both preventative goals and healing through arts-based approaches. One of Stauffer’s research questions, which widened the investigative scope to communities and institutions, was “How are our ideologies or institutions complicit?”
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