“I feel like a lure,” she said to me. “Like I’m putting myself out there giving survivors false hope that churches are willing to learn and change.” Then she, a devout Christian, said, “I have literally no hope left that churches are going to change.”
Last week I had a long conversation with a fellow advocate from a partner organization that, like Into Account, specializes in strategic support for survivors who have been abused in Christian environments. We’re almost exactly the same age, and our advocacy careers have had somewhat similar trajectories, but what matters the most to me about our collaboration is how deeply aligned our priorities are.
We’re not in the business of working with survivors of church-based abuse because we want to “restore the church” or “save the church from itself,” despite the frequency with which those intentions are projected onto us. We both got into the work out of a desire to build up survivors’ agency and autonomy in the face of bad institutional responses and bad theology that routinely strip them away.
For the past few years, my advocacy nonprofit Into Account has been a partner organization with the Religion and Sexual Abuse Project, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project based at the University of California-Riverside. On May 30-31, they’re hosting a hybrid conference called Surviving the Law: Legal Advocacy for Survivors and Scholars.
If you’re reading this newsletter because you’re a survivor and/or a fellow advocate, I hope you can join me in Riverside, or attend online. The registration is sliding scale. I’m excited to be part of the lineup of speakers, which includes a number of my friends and advocacy colleagues, and some of my advocacy role models (including Terry McKiernan, the founder and president of the massive online archive Bishop Accountability).
Some of the panel titles include: “Survivor Experiences in Litigation: First-Person Accounts,” “Barriers to Justice: Agency, Education, Disability, Isolation, and Trauma,” “Post-Publishing Hazards for Scholars and Survivors: Libel, Subpoenas, Publishers’ Liability, and Personal Risks in Writing about Abuse,” and “Reform v. Abolition: Confronting Mixed Feelings.”
I’ll be speaking on a panel entitled “Institutional Firewalls: Bankruptcy, Insurance, Legal Teams, Enablers, and NDAs.” The title of my talk is “In the Shadow of ‘Zero Tolerance’: When Liability Avoidance Leaves Survivors Behind.”
Welcome to So Sue Me! I’m Stephanie Krehbiel. I’m a writer, a former academic, a nonprofit co-founder and executive director, and a survivor advocate. I work primarily with sexual abuse survivors who have experienced betrayal from churches and other faith-based institutions.
You can read examples of my previous writings here, here, here, and, if you have a stomach for dissertations, here.
