Women blamed for abuse: No!

by Letters Editor · December 27, 2016

Sue Rakoczy IHM, Cedara – Colleen Constable’s article “Violence against women betrays Jesus” (November 16) refers. Thank you for your thoughtful response.

When I read Cardinal Wilfrid Napier’s article in the archdiocese of Durban’s newsletter I said to myself, “Not again!” Why are women blamed when they are abused?

The cardinal writes of “the ideology of exaggerated and enforced equality” that leads men to be violent against women. While women have made substantial gains in society (but very little in the Church), we are very far from real equality.

After centuries of teaching that women are not fully created in the image of God (St Augustine said a woman was fully the image of God only when joined to her husband), Pope John Paul II changed this teaching in Mulieres Dignitatem (1988) and described women as fully equal to men in human dignity (#16).

Blaming women for men’s violence against them because they are asserting their human dignity is exactly what happens when a woman is raped: it is supposedly her fault because of her clothing or she was “where she shouldn’t be”.

Men are violent for many, many reasons. The implementation of women’s equality as a human being in the structures of society and the Church is not one of them.