Scars Across Humanity: Understanding And Overcoming Violence Against Women

By ELAINE STORKEY

Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award - Politics and Public Life

'Scrupulously researched and documented, illustrated with both statistics and personal stories, this is a book that changes perceptions and could play a substantive role in achieving change.' -Margaret Hebblethwaite, author and missionary in Paraguay

Published to coincide with the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (25 November 2015), Scars Across Humanity is a thoroughly documented investigation into the causes of violence against women, past and present. Global in scope, and addressing the issues as they affect women at every stage of life, this powerful book also offers a probing critique of evolutionary and social-scientific accounts of gender-based violence, and of the role that religion can play, for good or ill, in the struggle against this worldwide problem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Nov 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780281075096

ELAINE STORKEY

Elaine Storkey is a philosopher, sociologist and theologian, having held posts at the Open University, King's College, London, and the University of Oxford. In 1997 she became President of Tearfund, and has since been involved in monitoring aid, relief and advocacy work in countries of the Global South. In 2010 she and her husband Alan became founder members of Restored, an organisation committed to advocating against violence to women. Her writings include The Search for Intimacy (Hodder/Eerdmans, 1994) and The Origins of Difference (Baker, 2002). Her last book, Scars Across Humanity: Understanding and overcoming violence against women (SPCK, 2015/IVP USA, 2018), won the Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Politics and Public Life.

Reviews for Scars Across Humanity

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An exploration into violence against women throughout the world and what Christians can do about it.The first few chapters are a murderer's row of terrible stories documenting what women experience around the world: murder, honor killings, rape, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, genital mutilation, child brides, and so on. A quite sobering look at the conditions of women worldwide.The author then explores the means by which these abuses are explained. She does well at exposing the limitations of the biological/evolutionary view of things, and concludes that the power dynamic/relations narrative proves more compelling. The book concludes with explorations of how feminism relates to Islam and Christianity.The author's likely liberal Protestantism, or at least highly feminist Christian views, comes out especially in the final chapters. It proves easy to dismiss certain interpretations of Christianity as enabling patriarchal abuse because of holding to a certain standard for said interpretation. Is the solution really to just make one's view of the New Testament culturally relative? Is there really refuge for abusers and those who perpetrate violence against women even in a "strict" interpretation, consistent with context, of New Testament Christianity?Nevertheless, worth exploring to be reminded of the plight of women worldwide. It's not pleasant out there.**--galley received as part of early review program