Excerpts

Excerpt I

"I feel guilty because I never noticed Dinah. Years of Sunday school, a couple reads through the Bible, a year in divinity school, and still, I never noticed Dinah. I had heard of Jacob and Esau. I knew something about Leah and Rebekah. I knew that Jacob wrestled at Penuel and became “Israel.” I knew that the twelve tribes of Israel were named after Jacob’s sons. But I completely missed Dinah. Dinah. Dee-nah. “Dee-nah,” say my friends who know Hebrew. In Hebrew, there is no “long I” sound in “Dinah,” like we want to say. Her friends and her siblings would have called her “Dee-nah.”

Dinah is Jacob’s baby girl. She’s Leah’s only daughter. She is almost an afterthought when mentioned in the 31st chapter of Genesis. But Genesis 34 tells part of her story. She was raped by Shechem and negotiated for a bride price. She was avenged by her brothers and later blamed for poor international relations. Her story is part and parcel of the family tales and soap opera-like dramas that make up the life of the patriarchs and matriarchs we read about and embrace as part of our Jewish and Christian heritages. But I missed her.

I missed her because I had never heard a sermon about Dinah. I missed her because there were no church school lessons about Dinah. I missed her because she never speaks for herself. And yet, here she is. In our tradition. In our holy book. In our spiritual heritage. She is the woman who makes up the first recorded incident of rape in the Bible. Dinah.

When we read Genesis 34, we hear about all the incidents that followed the rape of Dinah. We read about the response of her rapist, Shechem. We find out about the response of her father, Jacob. We learn about the reactions of her brothers, Simeon and Levi.

But we never hear Dinah’s voice.
We never find out about what really happens with Dinah. She disappears from our scriptural heritage just as silently as she entered it. I missed it completely, and it troubles me.

So it seems appropriate to name a church response after Dinah because she is so silent and so overlooked, and yet she is one of us. We are silent about the crisis of sexual violence. We overlook the pain of the victims and victimizers in our midst. We respond with silence, anger, violence and bargaining, but we don’t stop and notice our own Dinahs.

How might our spiritualities be different if we had noticed Dinah the way we notice Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Moses? What kind of questions might we ask? What did Dinah feel? What would Dinah have said? What would Dinah have liked for her community to do? Where was Dinah’s God in her pain? What might Dinah have asked for? What does the ancestral voice of Dinah say to me now? How, I ask myself in both shame and compassion, did I miss Dinah?

A church response to sexual violence owns the fact that sometimes we miss our Dinahs, but we don’t want to. It strives to give voice and response to the stories we don’t always hear about. A church response acknowledges the ugliness in our tradition, and looks within that same tradition for hope and healing.

A church response to sexual violence must also be careful not to do to our own Dinahs what was done to the biblical Dinah. It’s easy to be angry and want to seek revenge. It’s easy to get caught up in learning about and negotiating the legalities and technicalities that result from the experiences of sexual violence. When we learn more about sexual violence, it is easy for us to assume that we know what needs to be done and making sure it happens. When we do these things, we are no better than Dinah’s brothers, father and Shechem’s family. A church response is attentive to our Dinahs. We must see Dinah as the real live people in our midst. We have to talk with our Dinahs. We need to sit with our Dinahs through their pain. We need to ask our Dinahs what it is they have experienced, and with what they still struggle. We need to be for our Dinahs what the biblical Dinah did not have. We need to ask our Dinahs what they want and what they need."

Excerpt II

The first step is getting to know your community. The first step in addressing the crisis of sexual violence is finding out who else in your community is already working on these issues. You will probably be unwilling and/ or unable to provide comprehensive legal, psychological and medical care from your church’s ministry. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel if these services are already being provided in your community. If this is the only step you take in addressing sexual violence through your church, this is the most important one. Learning your community will allow you to develop three key aspects of your ministry:

1. A referral list 
2. Personal relationships with service providers
3. Knowledge of the impact of sexual violence in your local community

If someone comes to you with an issue of sexual violence, you don’t have to be an expert, but it will be helpful to have resources for that person to access. If you met with individuals in these agencies, you can always use your name as a contact and follow-up to make sure people have their needs met. An individual will often feel much better about calling an unknown person with the delicate issues that they are dealing with, if they feel that you already know the agency and trust it. If you refer people, it’s also nice to offer to accompany individuals on their first trip to the agency.

If you are interested in developing a larger ministry within your church, you will want to know where the gap in services exists and try to see how you can fill that gap. Perhaps there are few services that are free of charge. Or perhaps there are few services that are culturally-sensitive. Perhaps there are no services that currently address sexual violence from a faith perspective. The only way to know if there is even a need for different types of services is to know what your community is currently offering.

Step One: Find out if your community has any type of rape crisis center. Start with “R” in the phone book. Look for “rape.” Also try calling the RAINN hotline number. This national hotline will connect the caller with the closest rape crisis center based on the area code from which s/he is calling. Although you may not want to tie up a crisis line with administrative questions, learn the appropriate number to call, the best time to call, and the person to whom you should speak to find out about the services that are provided in your area. Ask about the demographics of the population that is being served. Many rape crisis centers also have a speakers’ bureau of people who are willing to give lectures on sexual violence, or share from their own experiences as survivors. When I served on the speakers’ bureau of my local crisis center, I was willing to talk to just about anybody and answer any questions. Be sure to ask if there might be a therapist or survivor willing to meet with you and answer any questions you might have.

Used by Permission -Pilgrim Press