Domestic Violence
Awareness Sunday

The Revd Gemma Baseley, Member, Family and Domestic Violence Working Group and Rector, Parish of Beaconsfield

It was in the back room of a cathedral - on another continent - that I attended a session titled Domestic Abuse and How the Church Should Respond. Ten years had passed since my first marriage ended, but I still felt ashamed, disgraced, and discouraged by the church handled it.

I stayed away for many years but when I first returned to church - wounded and searching - it was the church of my youth, where I’d met and married my first husband.

I hoped for welcome. Instead, I was labelled a scarlet woman. The minister demanded public repentance. His wife refused to hand me a notice sheet. No one asked about my marriage, or why it ended. I was shamed, while he was shielded.

Still, God whispered love into the wreckage. I heard, ‘I’m pleased to hear from you. I love you.’ And so, I dared to believe the church should have something to say about the things that break people - and offer a way back.

That training session opened my eyes. I had gone in wanting to help ‘those women.’ But a simple handout listing types of abuse - emotional, financial, sexual - made me catch my breath. Dot points blurred into my own painful memories:

• ‘You’ve eaten enough. You’ll get fat.’
• ‘I’m the spiritual head; we’ll go where I say.’
• ‘Close your mouth; you look retarded.’

He never hit me. So I’d believed it wasn’t abuse. I locked myself in the bathroom and wept. Ten years on, I was realising: it was abuse. And it wasn’t all my fault, even though my church had told me it was.

The world told me abuse is only physical. The church told me divorce is always the woman’s fault.
God told me the truth: I was loved, beautiful, and never abandoned.

I returned to the training red-eyed but resolute. I would use my experience - and my anger - to help the church respond to domestic abuse: tenderly, courageously, without misogyny, full of grace.

In Australia, one in four women experience domestic abuse. The numbers are even higher for Indigenous women. And abuse is as likely, if not more so, to happen within our churches. You may have heard abuse doesn’t happen here. That tackling it is not your job.

Now hear us say: yes, it is.

This year FDV Sunday is held on 4 May. Worship materials are available to view and download here:
www.tencommitments.org.au/dvsunday

Published in Messenger May 2025