I had a new piece last week at the Christianity Today women’s blog on my own anxiety for my children’s safety and on the need for churches to join with other community members in protecting our most vulnerable: our children.
Though I was never the victim of abuse, even as a child, I had a hazy awareness that abuse happened. In the late 1980s, my father, a pastor then between churches, spent a year at the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare, investigating cases of alleged abuse and following up on children who had tested positive at birth for illegal substances. I have a foggy memory of overhearing my dad telling my mom that in a training session, they’d passed around a doll–an anatomically correct doll used to help children talk about what happened to them–and when it got to him, my usually stoic dad broke down crying. Who wants to hold such an object–such tangible evidence that child abuse is prevalent enough to warrant the existence of the doll–in their hands?
Read it all here: “Channeling the Mama Bear Effect to Fight Child Abuse.”
And pray for the wee voiceless ones.
*update*
Amazingly, I’m getting pushback in the comments for not advocating specific policies. My point was not necessarily to advocate for specific responses to child abuse, but only to do two specific things:
1. To point out that Jesus’ ethic of the family demands that we extend our deep concern for the safety of our own children to all the children in our sphere of influence
and
2. to highlight the very good work of Shepherding the Next Generation.
