SCARS ACROSS HUMANITY:
Understanding and Overcoming Violence
against Women
By Elaine Storkey
SPCK. 276 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 281 075 089
In Scars Across Humanity, Elaine Storkey sets out to investigate the reasons for female oppression and to consider how violence against women can be challenged. This is a laudable aim. I hoped to find the book enlightening. Sadly, I found it unsatisfying on various levels.
The first nine chapters represent a phenomenal amount of work, and catalogue the ‘global pandemic’ of violence against women. Well over 100 million females are missing in the world due to gender selective abortion, infanticide or neglect. Globally, women and girls are more likely to be kept in slavery and be the subjects of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Other markers of female oppression include so-called honour killings, mass rape, female genital cutting and high levels of maternal mortality in many countries (terribly exacerbated where girls are forced into early marriage). Sadly though, these chapters read rather like an academic listing. Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, Virago Press 2010, provides a more readable and compelling treatment of the same theme.
Not a persuasive case
Secondly, the pressing question is whether the Bible supports or condemns this oppression? Storkey only really begins to address this near the end of the book. She doesn't make a particularly persuasive case in the Bible’s defence. Her one chapter on ‘Christianity and Gender’ begins, not with Scripture, but with selected misogynistic quotes from some of the early church writers. Her feminist perspective leads to an extremely negative view of most of church history. Of course, the fall into sin means that through history women have often been oppressed, including within the church, but Storkey sees oppression involved in any affirmation of male leadership. Any defence of authority and submission is associated with spousal abuse. Complementarians who abhor violence and who believe that husbands have a God-given role to lead, for the purpose of protection and provision, are ignored.
Thirdly, Storkey misses the opportunity to celebrate the fact that one of the reasons for the rapid spread of Christianity during the first three centuries AD was the dignity and worth it afforded to women, in contrast to the surrounding cultures (see The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark, HarperOne the 2011, and How Christianity Changed World by Alvin J. Schmidt, Zondervan 2001).
Fourthly, Storkey is so anxious to be evenhanded in her treatment of the major religions that she fails to state plainly that women suffer most appalling abuse where Christianity has had least impact. When you look at any of the countries where women are held back, forbidden an education, married off young, or subjected to systematic abuses such as honour killings and genital cutting, those are the countries where Christianity is disallowed. Of the 130 countries rated in 2014 by the World Economic Forum according to the status of women, the 15 at the bottom are countries which don’t permit the Bible to be taught. Conversely, for a brilliant insight into how biblical Christianity has worked to attempt to elevate the dignity of females in India I would recommend Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World, Thomas Nelson 2012.
Fifthly, Storkey condemns conservative (‘patriarchal’) Christianity as condoning violence against women, seeing feminism as liberation. She fails to acknowledge the fact that radical feminism was inextricably linked with sexual ‘liberation’ and was an assault on traditional morality and the married family. This has, in turn, fuelled an epidemic of sexual violence.
In conclusion, while Storkey is right to highlight the problem of violence against women, I cannot recommend this book as a helpful analysis of either the reasons for, or the solution to, such violence.
