Women Talking About Women Talking

On Saturday, April 15th 2023, Life and Power’s convener, Windy Cooler, joined Stephanie Krehbiel, the executive director of the survivor’s advocacy organization Into Account With Our Stories Untold,, and Friends General Conference (FGC) in a public discussion of the Academy Award winning film about discernment in response to abuse, Women Talking. The film, taken from the book of the same name, is a fictional account of a plain community of Mennonite women and children who, in response to sexual assault, spiritually discern to leave their homes together. Below is the transcript of the discussion which ranges from the question “is this movie really about Mennonites?” to “how is power relevant to discernment processes?” The transcript begins abruptly while Stephanie answers Windy asking about whether one can say that this film is about Mennonites. The answer, you will see, is complicated.

Lori Sinitzky is the moderator. Katherine Tate served as chaplin. The transcript and also an audio recording (available here), is thanks to the labor of our Friends at FGC, most especially the staff of Spiritual Deepening at FGC: nova george and Rachel Ernst Stahlhut.

Before reading the transcript you might ask yourself the following discussion questions from FGC:

• Does pacifism require removing yourself from potential violence?

• “I was struck by the acknowledgement that "forgiveness" became understood by the hierarchy as permission.... The classic abuse of power over, then, is allowed to persist. The women in the room finally came to terms with the harm that does to everyone. “ What does forgiveness look like in a Quaker/spiritual context?

• How does this movie support us in noticing systems of oppression and the internalization of oppression within our meetings?

• How might we navigate the transmitted trauma and strive to heal? What does it look like to name traumatic experiences in religious and faith based spaces?

• These patterns seem to be very prevalent in Quaker organizations as well as the faith community, a demand for the excusing of abuse. How do we hold our communities accountable in these situations?

• Does being a peacemaker require us to address violence and work to create space to support healing?

  Transcript

Zoom:

This meeting is being recorded.

Stephanie Krehbiel: Got it. You know. 10 to 15 years ago. It isn't, it isn't a. A factual depiction of what happened there, and it doesn't aspire to be.

So that's the short answer. I I think I look on this movie as a sort of somewhat out of time fable about women trying to discern who they are and authoritarian fundamentalist patriarchy. And I think it, the book to some extent, and even more the movie, aspires to be as universal as possible, and that that has its own moral and ethical implications, which I don't want to gloss over.

So OK, so the short answer, I'm not good at short answers, I don't know if you can tell. The short answer is you know, I don't. I don't think that this movie is about Mennonites. The longer answer is, as somebody who grew up as a very, very different kind of Mennonite than the women in this, you know, the women from the Manitoba colony in Bolivia. It feels very Mennonite to me. I grew up. There's no good word for it. I know that my, my friends who come from playing and conservative Anabaptist communities call us Liberal Mennonites, I the most efficient way of describing it is that I grew up in a tradition. That is now part of Mennonite Church USA, which is certainly the most assimilated institutional Mennonite denomination in North America. I come from the I guess the kind of Mennonites that sort of see themselves as the interpreters of conservative plain Anabaptist cultures to everyone else. And that is a hugely problematic thing that I think is worth talking about.

I've been processing a lot of Mennonite responses to this film. I feel really differently about the responses from Old Colony survivors than I do about the responses from more liberal, educated men and nights. I do think there's a tendency to project our fantasies onto plain communities, which we don't actually understand very well. Liberal Mennonites, we have a very different culture, so I am not speaking from any level of authority on what old colony Mennonite life is like it is utterly foreign. It's as foreign to me as it is to anybody else here.

I do want to read a little bit from a blog post that is written by. A man who is an old colony survivor. Who is not a fan of the movie. I don't know if he's, I don't know if he's watched it, but he's not a fan of the existence of the movie and I'm not going to say I I don't feel like it's necessarily my place to agree or disagree with his perspective, but I think it would. It would be remiss to ignore, to ignore it, or dismiss it or downplay it. He comes from communities like this so I can share the link with everybody, but I'm just going to read part of it:

“ So just in case someone questions what gives me the right to express this. I grew up in one of these communities. I know the culture. I speak, the language. I experienced the colony life also am an abuse survivor.”

I've seen the same survivor say in different contexts that you know, almost all of the men and boys. That sexual victimization of by children of other children, including men and boys, is incredibly common in these communities, which, Yeah, we can talk more about that.

“ In the Mennonite circles, especially the low German ones all over America, he's I think he's speaking broadly about North America and South America. This particular story was discussed at length when it first caught world headline attention. Whatever version we have read or been told is probably not. There are various different versions of it by now. What is true? This is what I think is the most important part. What is true is that extreme forms of abuse happen in pretty much every one of those communities. Many people managed to escape, fortunately. Also, whenever any type of journalistic inquiry happens, the community people never tell the honest version of anything. They do not trust outsiders. Even if an outsider speaks their language, so whatever book you read about this is not factual information. They are coerced by whatever means to get them to talk. Often the leaders have already told the community members exactly what they want them to tell any outsider. They are operating from a self-preservation perspective, so no matter what you say to them, they are not concerned about what anyone else thinks. They are only focusing on their preservation.”

And I want I want to make sure that it's clear that like when he says preservation. My understanding of it is that he means preservation of the Community and the communities. Basically their ability to self-govern and particularly in in the colonies in South America they have a great deal of leeway to self-govern. That is very much the case also in conservative Anabaptist communities in North America. In the United States, we have really extreme religious liberty. That makes room for a lot of hidden abuse of women and children in fundamentalist sort of sectarian communities. And I guess one truth that I want to always bring people back to, particularly Mennonites from my background who idealize these communities and view themselves as interpreters of these communities, we don't know. We don't know if you didn't grow up in fundamentalism and separatism. You don't know what it's like. You don't know how hard it is to escape. And I have a lot of trepidation about being perceived as an expert on these communities because I'm not what I what I do experience is helping people. Who need help when they get out and seeing all of the obstacles that they face and escape usually is, you know. It's it's a a woman, frequently a woman, trying to make a decision about how to maybe save her children, how to maybe save herself. How to get out without incurring more harm on the people that she loves and cares about and herself. I've never heard of a mass exodus like this, that's sort of. That's where that's where this is in the realm of fable. Women and communities like this wouldn't have these kinds of opportunities for conversation because, like patriarchy does not give you that kind of time. But are there things about it that feel really Mennonite to me? Sure.

Windy Cooler: Yeah, I'm really wondering about, you know, we so Quakers and Anabaptists have in common the Peace testimony that we are the historic Peace churches and in the film they identify themselves as pacifist, which I realized might mean something different in this context, but you know, taking it as a as a fable that might be meaningful to, you know, a fellow peace church. I am really thinking about, you know what it means to take the peace testimony seriously, as Quakers in interpersonal violence, sexual violence, domestic violence is so prevalent in the United States, I think it's something like one in four women have been assaulted by the time they're 18 and one in five men have have been assaulted and something like 25% of all American households experience domestic violence of some kind at some point. And you know, in my experience working on the issue of specifically domestic and sexual violence, there is a real resistance amongst Quakers to really acknowledge that we're, like anyone else in the United States, and we experienced these things and make plans for it. And the story I tell a lot as a very public survivor is how when I found myself experiencing domestic violence, my meeting was really unable to help me. And instead I really relied on state violence, that I went to the court system. And the police. And that I feel that I violated the peace testimony when I did that and I I live with a with a moral injury and I don't call myself a pacifist anymore. And you know, often I say this to people. And they're like, oh, no, no. You were just doing what you needed to do. But I really wonder about our commitment to prison and police abolition and the pacifism, and you know, and how that intersects with community responses to very real interpersonal violence amongst us. And I'm wondering from you, Stephanie. If well, you know, so we don't, we don't have that long. So I I'm not going to ask you about the peace testimony, but I will ask you about the other thing that I wonder if we have in common. I'm not really sure. And that is the discernment process that we saw in this film. This is really a meeting for worship with attention to business in the Quaker context. They are really engaged in some heavy discernment that is very much in our tradition, and I wonder. You know what your feelings are about the tradition of discernment in Mennonite communities.

SK: Hmm. MMM.

That's a tough that's a tough one. Mennonites also deeply value discernment I, you know, and I again, there are so many. I'm extremely conscious as I'm talking of how many different kinds of Mennonite traditions there are, which is, you know, the same thing with Quakers and. I can really only speak with authority about the one that I grew up in. Discernment is, it's very, I don't want to sound like I'm like I'm trashing it. I wrote a dissertation on institutional violence in Mennonite Church USA, specifically as it pertains to LGBT people and survivors, and so I have a big load of trauma about discernment, and I'm so like I want everyone to be conscious that I'm speaking through trauma as I talk about it. Discernment is a… I have never seen Mennonites very skillfully navigate. The existing power hierarchies that they bring into discernment processes.

For instance, you know there were years and years of discernment processes around whether the church would become LGBTQ plus affirming. And because, at this point, I had already left the church. But because I did dissertation research on it, I went to lots and lots and lots of discernment processes. And what I saw repeatedly was that there was a presumption by many of the many of the straight people. In the room there was the presumption that when we all walked in, we left all of our baggage at the door and we left everything that that made us, you know, distinctive at the door. It was like the… The idea of the discernment process is an opportunity for leveling of power. But in reality, power was not leveled at all. And the invisibility of the power of one person's social location over another haunted every one of those discussions, and I would, you know, I talk about this. I've talked about this in multiple settings, but I would often walk out of the room. Seeing some people who just looked utterly emotionally destroyed, I saw people, I saw people dissociate. I saw people burst into loud sobs. I saw people experiencing active trauma. And then I saw people who were like,” that was a wonderful discussion. And then what's going on over there. That was a wonderful discussion!” And I realized that there are a lot of Mennonites for whom having a conversation that's labeled a discernment process in and of itself makes them feel like they've accomplished something, and I see that as something that's rife with the potential for violence. And it's not always violence that is visible to people who come from dominant identities or dominant cultures, but it can be very visible to people who are basically treated like political antagonists, just for their presence in the room.

And that's, you know, that is, that is kind of what discernment feels like for me, just as somebody who's observed so much of it in these, you know, really difficult circumstances and I thought about that a lot when one of the things that I thought about this time around watching the movie which I love, I mean, I love the movie, was how circular and frustrating and futile the conversation can feel. And you see like at various points, people just snap and they're like, this is stupid! Can we just get to the point? You know, I've never actually seen that happen in the discernment process. It's like Liberal Mennonites are way too (sound effect) for that, but. Feel that, you know, just like, what are we doing like that? Even if I thought like, OK, the, the this conversation is staged, this wouldn't actually happen in a plain community. I was like. That that's super relatable and it can feel futile. But I mean the movie. It's like they got it done. They made the decision. I don't know. I don't know how to. Interpret that but.

WC: Yeah, yeah, I think I I really, I appreciate you so much, Stephanie. I've really loved getting to know you over the last month as we've prepared to do this film. I know it's time to open up for the question and answer period. I do want to just briefly add on to the discussion of discernment, because I think it's it's important. So my perspective about the discernment. So I watched the film and I was so inspired by the possibility of discernment. I feel like I've been working on abuse for more than a decade at this point in Quaker community and it's really an uphill thing to be working on. It's incredibly difficult and I have, I have bad moments in in my journey. And I would say that I've actually become a huge believer in discernment as being the way to any kind of rectification of the abuse problem in our community that for years and years I was like policy, policy, policy. Show me your policy. Who has the best policy?

And some meetings do have specifically child safety policies at this point, and I don't want to poo poo policy. I think policy is part of a response, but very often these policies are written by people like me. And they're not really fully discerned inside of the community, and there's not really an understanding of the patterns and abuse and the and so… I just increasingly, I feel like in my journey, my problematic journey as a Quaker, I have become reconvinced as a Quaker in facilitating discernment about some of the hardest things that we face as opposed to positioning myself as an expert who's going to write a very nice policy, even though I also support good policy. Yeah, this movie, this movie is a brilliant depiction. I think of the possibilities of discernment, even with all of its problematic kind of covering over of the power differences between these women.

SK: Well, and they they talk about what cultural change looks like in the like, that's. That's part of what I find really powerful about it, that there are you know, discussions about, when when do the when do the boys become men? How do we teach the boys not to be dangerous, you know, and those conversations are very like they're very familiar to me from like, the conversations that I've had with plain survivors. But just the conversations that we all have in general about the problems with toxic masculinity in our culture. A policy can't erase that stuff, but a discernment process. Can help us like you know, listen to each other and think about like, what would it actually take to change our culture so that like our policy was just there as a safeguard, but our culture was really what kept people safe from interpersonal violence?

WC: And talking about it when it happens.

SK: And that's so hard. You know. You know how hard that is.

Lori Sinitsky: Thank you for that, Windy and Stephanie and a friend just shared with me in the chat, writing and approving policies allows difficult conversations to be brought to the surface, and that feels true and an important reflection and connected to what you were both saying. And so I'm going to now spend a little time asking questions that I've received and I'll remind everybody that time is somewhat limited. It's possible that all, not all the questions will be shared. So thank you for understanding that. This question connects to something that came up early in the movie and early in your discussion just now. Does pacifism require removing yourself from potential violence?

It's a big one.

WC: Do you want me to? You want me to take that one, Stephanie. I you know, I can't speak definitively about what pacifism demands of everyone, everywhere, all the time. When I saw the movie, it really spoke to me as a survivor and some of the thoughts that I had about removing myself from family violence, that, I reasoned that I had to do whatever I needed to do to remove my children from learning to behave in an emotionally violent way. And I did feel that pacifism required that of me, that morality required that of me. But pacifism is it's something I don't think we talk about enough. It's an incredibly complicated thing to live out in the world because, again, I used state violence as a way of removing myself from that situation when they leave, when they leave the men and the boys, what will happen to the men and the boys? You know, I think the main the main moral lesson for me around the topic of pacifism. Is that pacifism requires us to tell the truth about ourselves, primarily that we can never be peaceful when we cannot accept the truth of our situation and our relationships and ourselves and what we're doing and why.

SK: I think. You know, speaking as a former Mennonite, I feel like a lot of Anabaptist tradition has just been about displacing the violence. I don't, I can't speak with a great amount of respect for the pacifism that I grew up with, even though I grew up with the passive like, I'm very grateful for the critique of the military and law enforcement that I grew up with. But I really do see my people as colonizers and people who allowed others to do the violence and have not necessarily done a great job of saying, OK, what happens? What does our pacifism mean when we are still reliant on the violent systems around us to protect ourselves and our, you know, our, our whiteness and our property? You know, it's Mennonites greatly benefited from white supremacy and settler colonialism. And it it's I I don't know like exemption from the military does not make you nonviolent. So I don't know what pacifism requires, but I don't think we've met the requirements. I feel like what I was taught was pacifism requires that you be quiet about the violence happening to you as a woman. And I won't make that-- I no. I don't accept that.

LS: I want to thank you both for your responses to that question and I just want to affirm that it's been my observation that the peace testimony is sometimes easily and conveniently applied to war, and that there are forms of violence that happen in many other ways. And we're much less comfortable opposing those other kinds of violence. As Quakers, we, as Northeast Liberal Quakers, naming my community.

And here's another question. I was struck by the acknowledgement that forgiveness became understood by the hierarchy as permission. The classic abuse of power over then is allowed to persist. The women in the room finally came to terms with the harm that does to everyone. Can you talk more about this from your traditions?

SK: Windy, you want to start?

WC: I started last time.

SK: The the forgiveness stuff was one of the things. That felt during Mennonite to me about the film. You know, and I just, I do work. I work with a lot of different. I work. I mean, I work with survivors from, from Catholic, all kinds of all kinds of Protestant denominations. From extremely conservative to extremely liberal, and forgiveness seems to be quite kind of a problematic area for everybody. But you know, speaking within a Mennonite setting, I don't think that people understand what they mean by forgiveness when they say it. I think what they mean by forgiveness when they say it is “it's your job as the victim of this violence to make it disappear from our community narrative about who we are, we need you to say that you have forgiven the perpetrator of whatever has happened or we need you to say that you've forgiven the church. For whatever it's done to you, because otherwise we will not have peace”

And that that is, I would argue that that's a that's a theology of sacrifice, of human sacrifice. I think that maybe some people would watch it and think that the, you know, we were given two days to forgive the men is unrealistic and I don't know how realistic it is to that particular community or you know, that that particular story. But I will tell you as somebody who works with plain survivors that that demand for immediate forgiveness is, it's pretty accurate. It's a way of keeping the peace and it always makes me cringe when it's idealized by outsiders. You know, like when the nickel mines shooting happened, for instance, and a lot of Amish children were killed. I heard a lot of people lift up the Amish community as being so forgiving. And, you know, I've had Amish friends say to me, those people didn't have a choice. Their bishops ordered them to say that they forgave the shooter because that's what makes the Amish look good. That's what preserves the image that that they're trading on as a brand, you know, and as a people that are that are, you know protected and given a lot of exemptions.

Yeah, I mean I just for people for whom the concept of forgiveness is really is really precious, which is a good thing, I really asked people to interrogate what they mean by it. And be clear about what you mean by it and what you are asking for when you ask for it.

WC: I feel like in the Quaker community, the thing that I feel most called to talk about is this idea that you have to be healed. That you have to present as a whole healed person to talk about, you know, some great harm that has been committed against you. Or that you have witnessed and this has had devastating effects on my life actually. That I have had to, you know, very recently I've been had reason to consider how I, you know, have patched myself up and sent myself back out into the world to address interpersonal violence when I still very much am wounded by my experience of interpersonal violence, and I feel that I have to do it because if I don't show up and be me and tell jokes and stories and be warm and inviting and kind.

If I show up and I say, Oh my God. You know, and I, you know, I really, you know, show you what it feels like to be me and to hear the stories that I hear, those stories won't go anywhere. I have to be put together all the time in order to be taken seriously and even when I am put together all the time and present as a healed person, and you know very carefully, you know, I am publicly vulnerable a lot and that means I get criticized in my vulnerable state that, you know, I maintain, you know, a very positive affect. And even while doing that, it's taken, you know, a decade to have a public showing of a film like Women Talking, for instance. And there were people working on this issue of interpersonal violence decades before me, so it's very slow moving and it really costs a lot to always look peaceful, which I think is very related to the forgiveness question.

LS: Thank you both for reflecting on that question and this next question, there's a lot here and I think it's connected to almost everything that's come up so far. This movie feels a lot about systems of oppression, beyond patriarchy and transmitted trauma, and striving to heal and about the complexity of understanding the nuance and internalization of oppression and trying to name ones part and taking choices to subvert these patterns. I wonder if you could talk about that process, particularly around aspects of a variety of abuse and subverting that abuse.

WC: That's like the mega question.

LS: There's a lot there and I, yeah. So invite I invite you both to respond to what speaks to you.

WC: Can you put that in the chat, Lori? Thank you. I got the glasses out for this one.

SK: Yeah, I'm. I'm going to too.

WC: I think I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this, you know, brilliant question, justice. I think this question deserves a dissertation or two. I think that the thing in the film that speaks to me around, you know, this question of overcoming multiple oppressions. There's a scene. For me, this this film is primarily about being able to acknowledge what is true. For years, these women and children have been assaulted in their homes and they have been unable to acknowledge it and the men were unable to acknowledge it, and now they can acknowledge it. And they hold each other in their pain. They're imperfect, in their acknowledgement of it. They insult each other in that scene where one woman calls another a whore and she's pregnant because she was assaulted. You know, she calls her both a spinster and a whore in that scene simultaneously. And she can do that. And she can still be held.

Everyone can be held in the truth that they're bringing to this space, and ultimately there is a there's a trans male character in the film. Ultimately, that character's name is said. But there's this recognition of what is true. And I feel like what I have learned from watching this film multiple times is this affirmation that the way that oppression exists in the darkness. That all the things we're talking about hurting us exist in the darkness, like when I cover up my wounds so that I can be sort of kind of heard. I'm allowing myself to live in the darkness a little bit. I'm actually complying with oppression and I know it, but I don't know what else to do. And so, I would just invite us into radical truth telling and radical truth hearing as part of our discernment processes coming away from this movie.

SK: I think one of the most effective things in the movie for me is actually the narration at the very beginning, which I can't remember. Some of those words, if I remember right or directly out of Mariam Tave's book, although I'm not sure that that Auche says them because it August is the narrator of the book. What really sticks out for me is her talking about how, just the way that the lack of reality when you can't name what has happened to you when something so disruptive and violent has happened to you and you have this embodied experience of being attacked, being raped. And there's no language for it. I that was, that was what that is a moment that felt really true to me in terms of what I have heard from survivors coming from really fundamentalist backgrounds that they don't have the they don't have the words for rape, they don't have the words for body parts. They don't like, those things aren't part of regular conversation.

You know, and some of the Mennonite advocates that I've worked with do things like sit people down and teach them the names for body parts and encourage them to practice saying penis, vagina breasts in front of their children so that the children, if they are abused, can actually use those words to describe what has happened to them. And I think that that's something that's a little bit incongruous in in Women Talking that that like in the beginning, like she talks about this unreality, this we didn't even have the words to talk about what was happening to us. That's the reality of many, many fundamentalist communities. When you don't give people the language. Of course, they're going to internalize the oppressive systems around. And I what what's really difficult when I'm looking at people who are like, what do we owe people within these communities? How do we help survivors from these communities? One of the first things that I always come back to is don't assume people are stupid just because they don't have the words to name their experiences, or because they say things that ideologically feel really weird to you as a liberal. Language matters. And when you don't, when there is not when it's just that there isn't, it's you don't have the language to describe what's happened, but also there's sort of an unspoken communal agreement that there are some things that aren't talked about. Like just to come back to it, like abuse and violence and oppression thrives in an atmosphere of secrecy and silencing. And if you talk about this, you will be judged for every word that comes out of your mouth. That feels so true to my experience. You know, as an, as an advocate and as a as a survivor of a pacifist community.

LS: Thank you.

SK: I don't know. If I answered the question or not, but.

LS: A complex question. I think we're being challenged tonight. There's not much time left. I want to be mindful that we're really going to end at 9. We've been together a long time, 9 Eastern. We've been together a long time. Here's another one. These patterns seem to be very prevalent in Quaker organizations. As well as across the faith community, a demand for excuse of abuse. What's your sense of how to address abusive patterns within organizations?

WC: Well, predictably, I think that I think that we need to support our truth tellers that we need to go find our Friends and we need to go arm and arm into truth telling about the patterns that we are seeing. That at your meeting, if you see that someone is struggling to tell the truth about their experience, you can accompany them in telling the truth about their experience in a Quaker, a self-described Quaker institution, you can accompany the people that are attempting to tell the truth about their experience. You can choose to be vulnerable yourself and tell the truth about your experience and the patterns that you're seeing. I think that there is definitely a reason to be strategic and to, you know, carefully think about things and especially you know the cost of different strategies over others to value yourself and to value the people around you. But I think that at base we have to make it safer to tell the truth. We have to create spaces where the truth can be shared and the truth is not one thing or two things. It's a whole pattern of things that we all see and so often.

Sorry, now I'm on my soapbox and I will stop in just a minute. But I would say that you know the way that we often describe accompaniment as Quakers is actually a silencing exercise. We say we're accompanying someone, but we tell them to go into an endless and useless clearness process where they're told what they need to be clear about and what they need to be clear about is they need to sit down and be quiet and it really makes me mad, to show, to show my wounds a little bit accompaniment is not that accompaniment is lifting up the truth. It's lifting up the prophetic call from this person. It's lifting up their wound. I mean to be, you know, Christocentric for a while, we just we just left, you know, the season of Easter and you know, what does Jesus do when he returns from the dead? He asks for some fish. He has some bodily needs. He'd like to eat. And he shows us his wounds and he invites us to touch and experience. Has wounds with him. That is a Christian vision that is also a Quaker vision of how to be in the world. It's to ask for that accompaniment to ask for people to see our wounds and to show them.

SK: Can I piggyback on that a? Little bit. I at my organization we… So I'm going to preface this by saying that people never know. What to do about perpetrators. Especially perpetrators that the state isn't going to deal with, which is 99.5% of them probably like most perpetrators are not on the sex offender registry. They've never been reported to the police. They may or may not have done something technically illegal, but even if they did something illegal, they're not likely to ever be held accountable for it legally. But they are in our communities and they do hurt people. So what do we do? I think most pacifists really want to avoid that question and at in my organization there's one way that we answer it, and it's particularly when people have any sort of power or standing in the communities we say, “take away power, take away access and take away the good regard of the community”.

Power, access, and regard, that's the three things that allow people who prey on other people within institutional settings and communities. Those are three things that allow acts, you know, continued abuse to happen. And what I see continually is that particularly when we're talking about men and particularly when we're talking about white men, there's a perception that if you take away power access in regard that you have ruined their lives. And the only way that they can live is if they have access to the very demographics of people that they prey upon. That is an unavoidable question for pacifists trying to live in community. What are you going to do about the people who cause harm? Because if you don't have an answer to that question, it will continue to haunt you. And survivors themselves will be the ones who continue to pay the price. So I really encourage people who are thinking about these things: don't neglect the question of what do we do about the harm doers? What do we do about the perpetrators of sexual violence? You know, we have to have ways outside of the legal system for dealing with this stuff. We can't just default to the legal system because it will fail 99% of the time.

LS: I'm going to squeeze, I think one more question in.

WC: Can I do a little? Can we do a little plug of our organizations before we squeeze the last then because I want to make sure I didn't do a very good job of introducing myself. Just told you. A joke about my name, which is very much like me, I don't think I can send messages to the group. So Lori, could you send this which is so, and I'll invite Stephanie to send a link to into account too, it’s also in the registration materials. So I'm currently convening a listening project that I'd like to invite you to participate in called Life and Power. Quaker discernment on abuse. I see Harold is here and Jade is here. They are both Listeners in this project, there are five Listeners. And we are reflecting back the testimony of Friends in relationship to a variation on the on the Peace testimony. We're asking, how are we living into the life and power that prevents all forms of abuse? So if you feel called to get in touch with me and talk about something and you want to discern whether you'd like to participate in this project, I really invite you to take a look at the website and think about getting in touch with me, getting in touch with me does not commit you to the project. We're trying to build a tool that we're trying, first of all, to help people hear themselves. We're doing accompaniment work, essentially. And secondarily, if people consent to it, we are building a tool with the testimony to help local meetings do good discernment around the question of interpersonal violence. Stephanie, do you want to describe into account?

SK: I’ll do it super quickly into account, is a survivor advocacy organization if you are a survivor and you need help trying to figure out what your options are, or navigating any particular process or trying to figure out if you want to name your perpetrators and how those are all things that we can help with. So we're here for you.

LS: OK. Am I muted?

WC: No, I can hear you.

LS: Sorry, I'm trying to… multitasking, OK.

WC: We did that in one minute!

LS: Here's the last question which I think is a good place for us to end. OK, discernment can be used by meeting members as a way of hijacking a meeting to make a decision go their way, most often by men, and to prevent a decision being made by the rest of the group even though there is clearly consensus and we are ready to move on, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about discernment process as a tool of abuse.

WC: I mean, it's definitely happened to me. There are a lot of things that I have attempted to talk about through committee work or, you know, through business meeting, you know, very often the path towards some kind of formal discipline. Is, you know, continuing to try to engage in discernment with with a community where there is a block to that discernment, usually in the form of a weighty friend. And I don't have any magic ability to get myself out of those situations. I want to acknowledge the truth of what that friend is is saying. It happens all the time. That discernment processes are hijacked Quaker. Process is weaponized. You know, we live in the context of social power and interpersonal violence in the outside world and in our meetings and I think that, I suspect what I have become convinced of, I will say and you know my difficult years is actually to embrace discernment even harder because I don't know what else there is. And so I just keep getting back up and trying harder and because like… What else? I mean, like, we could maybe hire someone to, you know, be an expert. And like you know, tell us what their expert opinion is. Is that better than discernment like that also can be weaponized. I think that, you know, trying to build healthy communities and accompanying each other in, you know, telling the truth and creating infrastructure around good discernment is the answer. But that's messy and it's not like I have, you know, 10 easy steps, you won't believe #5! That's I guess my best response to that.

SK: I wrote a dissertation where my buzzword was violence of process and I got that from. A mentor of mine at the former executive director of the Brethren Mennonite Council on LGBT interest, her name is Carol Wise. Her last name is for real. She's one of the wisest people I know. First ethnographic interviews for my dissertation. She said, you know what Mennonites really know how to do? Process violence. And I sat with that and I was like, boy, does that feel true. Yeah, be aware of process as a as a precious thing that can be weaponized. You're not, you're not crazy. For perceiving that that can happen and does.

LS: So noting that there's about 5 minutes left, there is one question that feels really different than the others that I'd like to try and get in and I just wanted to check with everybody to see if there's any other business we should do that before we close. OK, so this question is. Does being a peacemaker require us to address violence and work to create space to support healing.

WC: Yes.

SK: Yes.

Do you know how? A lot of times, people. Confuse the etymological roots of pacifism and assume that pacifism is equivalent to being passive. It's not. Yeah, I mean, I come from a people whose answer to this question was let's be, let's separate ourselves from the world. It doesn't actually work. It's an illusion. So yeah. All of those things.

LS: This actually feels like a question that. I would like to bring into spaces where I where I face barriers to the truth telling. I'm just thinking about my own religious community, which is a liberal Quaker, one where we like to call ourselves peacemakers and talk about the Peace testimony, and the question feels like one to bring to the space to push back and to challenge. So I appreciate this question actually as a as a tool that I could use in my community.

So I could try one more question. We have about 2 1/2 minutes left or we could say thank you and spend a couple of minutes in in grateful worship together.

WC: I think worship feels right. I think it would be nice to end with some worship.

LS: Me too. So I want to thank everybody that made this possible FGC spiritual deepening program. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you, Windy and Stephanie and also Katherine for being here with us. We really appreciate your leadership and your spiritual accompaniment. And thanks to everybody who came and stayed. I just want to note that we. You know, almost everybody who started stayed with us through the end and I appreciate that commitment to this difficult topic.

Thank you, friends. So let's settle into some grateful worship. Wishing all of you and your loved ones peace and Wellness. Thank you for joining us and good night.