Dr. Sandra Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the power of the #SilenceisNotSpiritual movement and the best ways to implement changes in our own communities.
Key Points

#SilenceisNotSpiritual is different than most movement hashtags because it requires people to sign a commitment that they will stand with women and for women.
75% of harassment victims experience retaliation.
If you are going to help a women escape a violent situation or file a sexual harassment lawsuit then you also need to be willing to stand by them during the fallout.
If community and political leadership are heavily populated by men, does that affect its response to harassment of women?
Many churches that have policies that allow women in leadership don’t actually have any women in those positions.

Resources

http://www.silenceisnotspiritual.org/
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
https://www.211oc.org/
Gerda Lerner
Center for Biblical Equality

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Transcript



Dave: [00:00:00] You're listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 163, #SilenceIsNotSpiritual: Breaking the Silence on Violence Against Women and Girls.

Production Credits: [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave: [00:00:32] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: [00:00:37] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: [00:00:40] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we certainly couldn't not say something about this topic, with everything that's been going on in the media and in the news over the last five or six months. There's so much happening, there's so much conversation going on. We're at the very beginning of a revolution which has needed to happen. And yet there is so much complexity here. And yet today we're going to try and tackle one piece of this. And one way that one organization is responding. And I think that there will be some takeaways for all of us on how we can think about this differently, especially here in the New Year.

Sandie: [00:01:25] I've heard someone say this is a defining moment in history. Here in the news, we see it felt like for a few weeks like there was a sexual harassment revelation every single week and someone lost their jobs. And how do we respond to that? And one of the things that a group of my close friends began to look at is how do we as women respond in a context that we're part of our churches. And so, it isn't about alienating ourselves from media, or even pointing fingers at men who are bad, and things like that, but really taking the opportunity with this attention to look at issues that surround violence against women and girls. And this is really important from the Ending Human Trafficking perspective because we know that when we look at prevention models, many of the girls who end up in being trafficked had an experience either with sexual abuse as a child with sexual assault that left them in a vulnerable position, and may have run away or found themselves in a place where they were much more recruitable or even abducted. Manage all of those things, you can you can go back and listen to some of those podcasts.

Sandie: [00:02:52] But how do we be proactive now? And so, this group has launched #SilenceIsNotSpiritual. And the first time I heard the hashtag idea, I thought oh that sounds like Sin by Silence. And Sin by Silence is the name of a documentary that Vanguard alum, Olivia Klaus Morrogh,