Dr. Danielle Tumminio Hansen has written one of the most comprehensive texts on how we individually and collectively talk about sexual violations. She provides us with a recipe for both how to tell our stories and to have others believe our experiences. More than that, she brilliantly and painstakingly provides a compelling through-line from the individual instance of harm to the need for communal accountability. She is bold and incredibly brave.

I am trained as a criminologist and have spent my twenty-year career studying sexual violations and the people who commit them. Ten of those years I remained silent about my own rape, despite the fact that—and in many ways because—it did comport with traditional notions of rape. It was not long after my own public disclosure that I became a restorative justice practitioner with a focus on individual and institutional cases involving sexual violations. It makes sense on many levels why I would engage in dialogue with Dr. Tumminio Hansen about her book.

There is not a single word with which I disagree.

Many of the topics about which Dr. Tumminio Hansen writes I cover in my courses and with my restorative justice clients. It is true that sexual violations happen all around us every hour of every day. It is also true that the people who commit these violations are most often people with whom we have a prior relationship. They are people we care about, respect, and even love. It is, perhaps, easier to believe that someone is lying about having experienced a sexual violation than it is to believe that someone we respect is capable of engaging in one. And if we cannot look at the sexual violation inflicted by someone else, we certainly cannot look at our own complicity. How, then, do we hold people accountable in meaningful and effective ways? Is restorative justice the answer?

Dr. Tumminio Hansen defines restorative justice as a “philosophy that proposes that the primary goal of justice is to make things right for those who experienced wrongdoing.”1 At Ampersands Restorative Justice, the organization I co-founded and own, we define it as “a human-centered approach to repairing and preventing harm.” If, as Dr. Tumminio Hansen suggests, it is true that the public conflates the ability of a person to make poor choices with an overall poverty of character, then members of the public are unable to see the humanity of the person who made those choices. Similarly, in order to help someone stand in true accountability, we must help them to see that the harmful choices they made do not define who they are. This is true whether we are dealing with individuals who engaged in direct sexual violations or with leaders of institutions or communities within which these violations occurred.

In chapter 7, Dr. Tumminio Hansen lays out the framework for restorative justice for sexual violations, including an important discussion of the benefits of restorative justice for those who have experienced sexual violations and those who have inflicted them. For instance, she writes, “restorative justice gives the victimized party an opportunity to speak freely, without limits on their tone or time, and to define the contours of harm in terms that relate to their particular body’s experience of it . . . the epistemic freedom granted through restorative justice allows individuals to speak in a way that gives them agency over the words to use, when to use them, and how to use them.”2 She argues that the “speech that occurs in a restorative space has a chance to directly counteract the harm done to the self during a sexual violation.”

Similarly, restorative justice offers benefits for those who engage in sexual violations. It allows them, if they are ready and willing, to engage in active and meaningful accountability. Accountability measures are not punitive. They are tied directly to the needs of the person who experienced the violation. Authentic amends are active; they require the person who inflicted the violation to make significant and meaningful changes, including undergoing a process to better understand why they inflicted the harm and the impacts of the specific violation. As Dr. Tumminio Hansen notes, this is “a far more challenging form of justice to engage . . . because it requires active participation.”3

Dr. Tumminio Hansen also introduces the role and importance of the community in restorative processes. Indeed, neither the person who experienced the violation nor the person who inflicted it can move forward without help from others. Sometimes, this requires community members or institutional leaders to also be accountable for the harm they committed by allowing a culture that breeds sexual misconduct. Sometimes it requires community members to step in as accountability partners. There are many ways that “the community” can be involved.

Finally, and importantly, Dr. Tumminio Hansen offers some notes of caution. She is correct that not all instances involving sexual violations are appropriate for restorative justice. Some survivors will never be interested in engaging in such a process and should never be coerced into doing so. Similarly, some individuals who sexually violated others may be unwilling or unable to be held accountable for their behavior. Of course, in these instances restorative processes are not recommended.

As I stated from the outset, there is not a single word in the entire book with which I disagree. I found myself nodding along, underlining, and even writing multiple exclamation points throughout the book and especially in chapter seven. In this final chapter, Dr. Tumminio Hansen proposes that “we need a different way to enact justice that restores narrative agency to victimized parties while also creating meaningful accountability not just for those who inflict sexual violations but for the larger system from which those individuals emerged.”4 I wholeheartedly agree. Every word Dr. Tumminio Hansen wrote about restorative justice in cases of sexual violations is correct. However, the difference between the promise of restorative justice as outlined and the reality of its everyday practice is not inconsequential. Here, I’d like to shift the conversation to expand on her notes of caution (and temper the hope offered).

At Ampersands Restorative Justice, we typically receive two types of calls for facilitation. In the first scenario, someone who has experienced a sexual violation reaches out in hopes that we can help create the conditions for a restorative justice process with the person who inflicted the violation. Only in rare instances do these processes include community accountability.

In the second scenario, an institution reaches out hoping that we can help them provide restorative processes for survivors who were harmed within their institution. Rarely do institutional leaders understand that they, themselves, have inflicted secondary harm through the cultures they create and/or allow, and by their responses to disclosures. Rarely do they have an understanding of what restorative justice entails and what it asks of them. And rarely do these processes include individual accountability on the part of the person who inflicted the initial violation.

Restorative justice is only limited by the creativity of the people involved in a given process. When created in collaboration with the various parties, magic can happen. However, I think there is a misconception about where that magic occurs.

Restorative justice requires many of the elements about which Dr. Tumminio Hansen described. For example, it requires “practicing a hermeneutic of belief . . . a way of listening that starts with empathy and assumes belief.”5 It requires both active and layered listening.6 And it requires listening from narrative trust.7 However, people do not come to a facilitator with these skills. If they do have these skills, they certainly have a difficult time employing them when they are the one accused of inflicting harm.

As such, restorative justice is a multi-stage process that entails months of preparation. It requires the facilitator to help those who have experienced violations to think beyond how they will share their experience to consider their accountability needs and their goals for the process. Facilitators must work with those who have experienced harm to share their experience in a way that can be heard by others. This is not about limiting or controlling what a survivor might say. It is about helping them to say what they need in a way that they can truly be heard.

The magic actually happens in the early stages, in what we often term pre-conference work. I have had processes where pre-conference preparation took over a year. I have stopped processes during pre-conference because the person who inflicted a violation was unable to take accountability and needed more intensive therapy with a therapist who specializes in sexual violations. Conversely, I have paused during pre-conference work because, as we approached the actual restorative justice circle process, the survivor showed signs of re-emerging PTSD.

The journey from initial inquiry to the actual restorative justice conversation is not a straight or easy path. It is a meandering river with challenges that arise throughout. Participants often want rushing rapids. They just want to get to the conversation. But processes never happen as quickly as participants want them to. To move to that stage without absolute readiness on the part of the various players could be disastrous. These are deliberate and painstaking processes where we seek to leave no stone unturned. This is especially true in institutional cases in the faith-based world.

Institutional accountability requires not only meeting the needs of those who experience harm but creating lasting change that prevents sexual violations and poor institutional responses from happening again. It leads to the kinds of questions that have kept me up at night. For example, who within an organization should participate in a process? More precisely, who are the right people from within an organization who should participate? Who gets to decide? What if there are multiple people who experienced harm and their needs are opposing? How can an institution meet opposing needs without causing additional harm? What if an institution wants to be accountable for known harms, but no survivors are willing to come forward? How does an institution engage in active accountability when they do not know what those who were harmed actually need? How do we define community? In the case of a place of worship, does the process include the entire congregation?

I have yet to facilitate a process with individuals or within institutions that was not without challenges. While magic has happened in these processes, I have to note that they have also fallen short because of the above-noted limitations.

The reality of restorative justice and its limitations occur at the intersection of how Dr. Tumminio Hansen and I define restorative justice. Recall that Dr. Tumminio Hansen defines it in a way that centers the primary goal as trying to make things right for those who have experienced a violation of some kind, whereas I define it as a human-centered approach to repairing and preventing harm. The difference is subtle but has real implications. In Dr. Tumminio Hansen’s definition, it seems that survivors are in control of the process. In my definition, survivors are in the driver’s seat. Their needs are front and center, but they do not control the process. They are co-collaborators, along with the person (or people) who inflicted the violation.

A survivor-centered approach to restorative justice requires centering the needs of the person who experienced a violation. To meet those needs, facilitators must build relationships with the person or people responsible for the harm. It is within those relationships of trust where steps toward accountability begin. These individuals, even those who cause direct harm, are not the enemy. This is not an adversarial process. Yet some people who experience harm approach restorative justice as if this is the case. Their righteous anger, pain, and sense of betrayal are real and valid, but can (and sometimes do) derail processes. There is necessary accountability on the part of those who experience harm, too.

Facilitators are not survivor advocates. They must remain multipartial, considering the needs of everyone involved and seeking to ensure that no additional harm is caused to anyone. This means that sometimes there must be negotiation about how to meet the needs of the person who experienced a violation. The reality is that in some cases an individual or an institution cannot meet a specific need. In these instances, we ask them to consider the spirit of the ask and whether there is a way to meet it.

The relationships we build with those who have harmed and the reality that restorative processes do not (and cannot) meet every need can be frustrating and upsetting to survivors.

While restorative justice processes are often discussed as straightforward, one-off conversations, the reality is that they are complex processes that take an immense amount of patience and trust. They require education, skills-building, and an embodied shift in understanding for all parties involved. Only then can the actual process occur. As Dr. Tumminio Hansen states, the more powerful party, whether that be the individual or the institution responsible for the violation, should “concede some of their power as a way to make things right.”8 Though possible, this is not, by any means, easy to achieve.

Still, with each process and with each step toward accountability, we are slowly and steadily building a world in which we can begin to look at ourselves, our relationships to community, and our complicity in creating a world where sexual violations are allowed to occur.

Dr. Tumminio Hansen’s book was daring, thought-provoking, and above all, extraordinary. It offers a path forward that provides those who have experienced sexual violations the language and framework to speak about our experiences and to be met with a hermeneutic of belief. I hope I offer a picture of what that looks like in reality. I look forward to Dr. Tumminio Hansen’s response to this reality from the various perspectives she embodies, but in particular from her theological and survivor perspective.

We’re all responsible for what happened to you.

Your experience deserves to belong in words, and we all need to make space for it (102).

These are words spoken to Dr. Tumminio Hansen by a divinity school professor during her first year of graduate school. The words were spoken to Tumminio Hansen as she struggled with locating language to talk about the rape she experienced as a young adult. The professor’s insistence that rape is a communal issue—for which our church communities and wider society bear responsibility—and that the sexual violation perpetrated against Tumminio Hansen and so many others deserves linguistic attribution are key messages of this heart-wrenching and powerful book.

The text opens with a spare recounting of Tumminio Hansen’s own rape. In the 200+ pages that follow, Tumminio Hansen builds a compelling scholarly case for better and more precise language to bear witness to experiences of sexual violence not only by White women like herself, but by Black, Brown, queer, and male-identifying persons of widely varying backgrounds and contexts. What makes this book in turn haunting, empowering, and extraordinary is Tumminio Hansen’s crafting of a scholarly argument within a narrative structure that reflects her (and many others’) harrowing journey from silence to speech and agency regarding rape’s traumatic aftermath. That she offers over a hundred thousand words about rape is a testament to the emotional, spiritual, psychological, and intellectual work that Tumminio Hansen has done to claim language that resists conventional understandings of rape. The words convict this reader and inspire reflection on how Christian theologies and communities might better respond to the repeated calls for communal responsibility to dismantle the culture of rape and make more space for victims of sexual harm.

Early in the text Tumminio Hansen names a significant challenge facing those who recount stories of sexual harm: the issue of whether or not they are understood by others as trustworthy narrators of their own experiences. Tumminio Hansen’s voice is a steady, authoritative one that narrates this story in ways that are both novel and compelling. She acknowledges that the setting for the story is “a society that primes victims to distrust the experiences of their selves—their bodies, agency, desires—and that primes individuals to undertake sexually harmful acts for the same reason” (ix). She goes on to describe that “because setting impacts character,” these systems and cultural patterns influence how we think and speak about sexual violence in our communities. The predictable plot of sexual violence that gets rehearsed time and again is limited to one person sexually violating another. Another critical aspect of Tumminio Hansen’s argument is that the language we tend to use to talk about this violence is shaped by “destructive, insidious ways of knowing” that keep victims silent and communities both from attending to those who’ve been harmed and confronting the epidemic of sexual violence more broadly.

In her narration of her own rape and immediate aftermath, Tumminio Hansen recounts how being forced into sex with her boyfriend didn’t conform to the common societal expectation of rape as being perpetrated by a stranger. Because of this, the word “rape” didn’t seem to fit, and she wasn’t equipped with other linguistic options to describe what happened to her.

That Tumminio Hansen’s training and work as a scholar is steeped in trauma studies sharpens her ability to attend to the traumatic aftermath of those victimized by sexual violence. Drawing on Judith Herman, Susan Brison, and others, she notes that “communication is imperative” for trauma survivors. However, Tumminio Hansen explains, “if the words that survivors have do not assist in the process of being heard, then they face additional barriers in their own healing” (xvi). Tumminio Hansen recounts how her body found ways to communicate when words were not forthcoming. Her body spoke the language of trauma: flashbacks and fear, hypervigilance and being startled, emotional numbness, dissociation, nightmares, and the recurrence of an eating disorder. “I couldn’t find a way to tell the story, and so the story was telling me” (xvii).

The primary claim of the text—that sexual violence is shaped and endorsed (tacitly or indirectly) by society and communities—is also bound up throughout the text with the second critical claim: that words do something (58), that the ways we often talk about sexual violation do further harm to those who’ve experienced such violation. In the opening chapter Tumminio Hansen takes on ways that our linguistic choices around sexual violence can perpetuate harm. Examining legal inconsistencies in defining what acts constitute “rape” (5) to pervasive operative myths about the “ideal” victim and the “ideal” perpetrator, she examines the varied terms we employ to talk about sexual harm: “sexual violence,” “sexual abuse,” “incest,” “gender-based violence,” “violence against women,” and “criminal sexual conduct,” and explains how the imprecision of these terms can linguistically gaslight those who live in the aftermath of sexual harm. Using wide-ranging illustrations of sexual violation from contemporary culture, Tumminio Hansen effectively demonstrates the need to recognize the diverse forms of sexual violations with words that acknowledge diverse forms of harm.

After ushering the reader into the traumatized setting of those who live in the aftermath of sexual violence, Tumminio Hansen intentionally disrupts the book’s narrative flow. “Here we pause for an interruption,” she writes. “It’s unscheduled and undesired, and it would be more convenient to avoid, but sometimes we don’t get to choose what stalls the story, what traps the narrative” (36). This textual disruption in narrating the story of those who’ve experienced sexual violence is done to emphasize the reality that in the story of sexual violence, there is never just a single story. A daunting, ongoing challenge for the one whose narrative has been fractured by another’s violation, then, is to “not only stop the interruption and to rebuild the narrative of the self” but also “speak in a way that recognizes the presence of the one who interrupted while not giving them power to write the rest of the story” (43).

How, then, can those who experience sexual violence begin to construct a new narrative of the self? Rebuilding one’s narrative post-rape is so difficult because—in addition to all the other disruptions and disorientations—victims experience what Tumminio Hansen calls an “epistemological crisis” (xvii). For instance, when she is able to say, “I was raped” to describe what happened to her, Tumminio Hansen describes how, on the one hand, it helped make sense of the many reactions of trauma she experienced for years after the rape. Yet at the same time, “it didn’t solve all my problems” (155). Her self-interrogation about why she didn’t resist the rape, why she couldn’t name the behavior as a violation for so long, created disorienting forms of unknowing. But as her sense of self and assumptions about the world are remade, a new self painstakingly emerges, articulated in a community of trusted people whose support helped make speech possible.

If theologians and church-goers like myself are convicted by the divinity school professor’s insistence that “we are all responsible for what happened” to Tumminio Hansen and countless others who experience sexual violence, how can Christian theologians and communities make more space as they journey to construct new narratives of the self that are necessary for healing?

The accent of Tumminio Hansen’s engagement with theology, ecclesiology, and pastoral care in the text is on the communal failure of Christians to show up, take responsibility, or accompany survivors on their road to healing. She references theologian and rape survivor Monica Coleman’s story about her pastor’s reluctance to talk about rape in worship (7), enforcing the point that Christian spaces often offer few-to-no linguistic options for survivors of sexual trauma. Tumminio Hansen touches on arguments by feminist theologians about how exclusively masculine words for God have what Elizabeth Johnson calls “an effective history” that bestows authority on male voices and bodies, authority that is often denied women. This analysis leads to a discussion of rampant sexual abuse perpetuated by Roman Catholic priests and the ways in which a lack of understanding sexual harm as a communal issue is also bound up in the persistence of abuse in that context.

Tumminio Hansen’s analysis of Christian purity culture is another indictment of how Christian speech limits linguistic options about our lives as sexual beings. Christian purity culture’s emphasis on female purity in particular, and the promotion of the perspective that it’s women who tempt men sexually, encourages a culture and narrative where women are blamed for sexual violations and “endangers the epistemic resources available to those who experience sexual violation” (105).

These are all necessary and important critiques; it is imperative we understand work that must be done to dismantle these powerful forces that still plague Christian communities.

Tumminio Hansen’s constructive proposals for societal and communal change are focused on the legal, criminal justice, and legislative spheres, all vital spheres that influence the lives of those impacted by sexual violence, and spheres where Christians should also have a voice. The book’s conclusion notes that while demands for reform from the #MeToo movement have led to passage of a number of new laws, “the vast majority of perpetrators still walk free, just as the misogyny and racism that enable sexual harm still remain pervasive and, at times, glamorized” (211). Even as changes in laws are urgent and necessary, Tumminio Hansen notes that changing minds is just as urgent and necessary. While Tumminio Hansen offers some hints of how religious leaders and communities can create change, I have no doubt that this pastor and theologian has specific ideas for the role theologians and churches can play in opening up space for more just ways of thinking and speaking about sex and intimate relationships, and I’d love to hear more about them.

One dimension of her own narrative of healing that would be beneficial for theologians and pastors to reflect on more deeply is the role music—and liturgy more broadly—can play in helping people who’ve experienced sexual harm. A life-long singer, Tumminio Hansen refers repeatedly throughout the text to how, when she did not have words to talk about the harm she experienced, she often found solace in singing with others. Her description of making a recording of a medieval chant of Psalm 22 and an a cappella version of Psalm 121 for a graduate school course presents an opportunity for further theological reflection on how the practice of lament, using words of the psalm (especially when words about one’s own trauma are scarce) can help mitigate the isolation brought on by traumatic events like rape (178). Making more explicit how elements of liturgy and worship can create more space for those who’ve experienced sexual harm may empower clergy and theologians to attend more explicitly to the epidemic of sexual violence.

Theologians and church leaders should also attend to Tumminio Hansen’s powerful exploration of the way in which speaking about sexual violence can constrict or expand possibilities for self-knowledge and narration for survivors and the communities of which they are a part. In her chapter on “Listening Well,” Tumminio Hansen describes the profound role shame often plays in lives of those who’ve been sexually violated. It’s putting the needs of the most vulnerable first, Tumminio Hansen explains (172), through active listening that helps develop “narrative trust” in those who’ve been harmed (177). That the weakest members of the body deserve the most attention in the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:23) is indeed a central conviction of the church. I’d love to hear Tumminio Hansen’s reflections on what that looks like in an ecclesial setting.

My reflections only scratch the surface of ways Speaking of Rape calls on theologians and communities of faith to work toward overcoming a culture that permits and encourages sexual violence. I hope this book will be required reading in seminary and undergraduate courses, and that there will be church communities courageous enough to pick up and be convicted by this book and help the church become one of the societal forces that leads us toward a time where such harm is rare, and when it occurs, those who’ve been harmed are embraced, supported, loved, and believed as they do the hard work of birthing new stories of themselves as strong, courageous, and beloved for life in the aftermath.

In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus undertakes forty days of fasting in preparation for the beginning of his ministry. Following this desert fasting and temptation, Jesus returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and begins to teach in the synagogues. What is his message? When he comes to his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah:

He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:17b–21).

Of course, as we find out a few verses further on, “the prophet is not accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24). Tumminio Hansen uses a paraphrase of this when she highlights the valuable epistemic credibility a rape survivor can have through narrating and interpreting their experience (137). Valuable and credible but speaking a truth that some, at least, will not want to hear.

I start here because this account of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry was in my mind throughout reading Tumminio Hansen’s book, even before she made the prophet’s hometown reference. These words of liberation—proclaiming and performing release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and a declaration of the Lord’s favor—summarize the good news of Jesus. If Christians are determined to follow Jesus and imitate him, these are the things Christians, the church, are also called to do; the Gospel to which Christians’ witness is, or at least should be, this.

Alongside this Gospel narrative, another story from someone’s life played on my mind as I read Speaking of Rape. This was an email I received from a clergy person. I had delivered some training on being a trauma-informed church, and this person emailed me to say thank you and to tell me that they had been abused by a more senior clergy person. When they had found the courage to report this abuse to other more senior members of their denomination, they had been asked to not make this public so that reputational damage could be avoided. For the last five years, as I have been working in the context of trauma theology, I have received one or two of these emails a month.

Tumminio Hansen constructs a framework for listening well to those who have been raped and wish to talk about what has happened to them. This is constructed in the context of the individual listener to whom the person who has been raped has trusted to share their story. But Tumminio Hansen also makes it clear that it takes a village to rape someone. A disquieting statement that makes the point that rape is not just the violent actions of a few that come out of nowhere, but that rape happens because we live in a society that has structures and systems that perpetuate misogyny and patriarchy and create the environments in which not only does rape happen but it goes largely unpunished. Research undertaken by the charity Rape Crisis England and Wales indicates that “fewer than 3 in 100 rapes recorded by the police in 2024 resulted in someone being charged that same year. Let alone convicted.”1 In the United States, RAINN statistics indicate that every sixty-eight seconds an American is sexually assaulted, and only 25 out of 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison.2 Rape has been virtually normalized and decriminalized.

It takes a village to let this happen. And the church is not exempt from this village. Tumminio Hansen draws attention to the damage done by the prevalence of purity culture, toxic forms of male leadership, the masculinization of God, and the sanctification of patriarchy. The church might only be the setting for some rapes, for some sexual assaults, for some abuses; but it cannot be excused from contributing to a culture of rape that means rape is accepted and almost no one is punished for the crime.

In this response to Tumminio Hansen’s brilliant book, I want to amplify her framework of listening well from the individual to the collective, specifically the collective body of Christ that is the church. The church is called, after all, to be a witness and a manifestation of the good news of Jesus that binds up the broken-hearted, proclaims release to the captives, and freedom to those who are oppressed. Tumminio Hansen makes clear the need for epistemic freedom for those who have been raped; a need to be liberated from false ideologies, from myths about rape and the perfect victims. Is this liberation what the church proclaims to those who have been raped? Or rather is the church complicit as a pre-accomplice in rape, just as the rest of society is? Can we argue that the church currently has a rape ecclesiology? An ecclesiology of abuse? That the ways in which the church upholds patriarchy and prioritizes its reputation over all constitutes an ecclesiology of rape?

What would an ecclesiology of rape look like? Ecclesiology is simply the study of the nature of the Christian church. An ecclesiology of rape would, therefore, be a church in which it was its nature to rape. This sounds startling, but bear with me. To claim an ecclesiology of rape, we would have to be able to point to numerous instances, throughout history and around the world, in which there is—to use Tumminio Hansen’s definition of rape—active power that uses sex to violate agency, body, and desire (49). I think this is relatively easy to recognize whether via the child sexual abuse scandals that have been prevalent in the Catholic Church (among others), or the safeguarding crises in the Church of England, or in the ways in which dominant charismatic evangelical male leaders have drawn sexual and spiritual abuse together in the name of control (see Mark Driscoll).

Of course, throughout history, the church has engaged in a variety of forms of rape: rape of language, rape of epistemologies, rape of the natural world, rape of people in the name of colonization. So frequent and so consistent has been this attitude of the church that it is fair to say that the church has had, at least in some quarters and at some times, an ecclesiology of rape such that rape is part of the nature of the Christian church.

Shocking. But predictable.

I argue that this ecclesiology needs to shift toward an ecclesiology of humility. And I argue that Tumminio Hansen’s framework for listening well and restorative justice might provide the basis for such an ecclesiological shift. At the moment, at least in some parts of the church, it is difficult to identify an ecclesiology of humility. Instead, we find an ecclesiology of self-defense and self-righteousness, an ecclesiology of reputational integrity above all. To inhabit Tumminio Hansen’s framework of listening well, the church needs to enact such listening both individually and collectively, adopting a position of humility. It is only in this enacting that the church might become a place where those who have experienced rape, and perhaps those who have experienced trauma, might become places where a person can engage in the post-traumatic remaking of the self.

In revealing an accusation of rape, the person who has been raped enters into a further performance of vulnerability (167). It is when a person is in this vulnerable state that the church must choose to act as one who listens to the person who has been raped and witnesses to their experience. As Tumminio Hansen points out, it is the listener that has the power to grant social belonging to the person who has been raped or not. There is great power in the listener’s evaluative role. In my work in trauma theology, I describe this as one of the stages of post-traumatic remaking in which the person who has experienced trauma is given the space and the epistemic power to construct a narrative of their experience (via a variety of modes of expression, not merely verbal) that is witnessed and believed. Tumminio Hansen’s framework of listening well reflects this—giving narrative agency to the victimized party, engaging in active listening through all our senses, engaging in empathy as a form of solidarity, and reflecting on our own reactions and limitations.

For the church—the body of Christ—to move out of its ecclesiology of rape, it needs to inhabit these practices just as the individual does. From a position of humility, the church must find ways in which it can recognize the power that it has in terms of exercising narrative trust and extend such trust and epistemic credibility to the person who has been raped. This needs to be a holistic endeavor, involving all our senses even in this collective context, such that this cannot be the work of a few but must be the posture of the institution as a whole pastorally, liturgically, systemically, ecclesiologically. It requires paying attention to the ways in which the institution instinctively reacts to such narratives and resisting impulses to self-justify and protect reputations at the expense of those who have been made vulnerable. More than anything, it requires the church to reckon with the harms it has caused via a multitude of rapes across centuries and to attend to the damage this has caused in both individual and collective contexts.

To listen to a person who has been raped from a position of narrative trust can be transformative and is the first step toward a place of restorative justice. The church is called to be a witness to the transformative and liberative good news of Jesus; the good news that sets people free and enables their healing transformation. To do this, however, the church must be willing to ride on a donkey, to wash dirty feet, to share what it has with those who need it most, to challenge societal expectations and norms, and to recognize the log in its own eye. The church needs to be humble and to take action to make right what it has been complicit in getting wrong. Tumminio Hansen’s work can be read as a wider call for justice for those who have been raped beyond the individual response to a victim of rape. Indeed, it can be read as a challenge to ecclesiologies of rape that have characterized parts of the church, and as a call to hermeneutic and epistemic humility, narrative trust, and restorative justice.

In Speaking of Rape: The Limits of Language in Sexual Violations, Danielle Tumminio Hansen writes, “words that are supposed to give victimized individuals a voice can effectively function as a type of linguistic gaslighting, preventing those who have experienced a violation from naming or categorizing it as such. This is most obviously a danger when the pragmatics of the violation stray from rape stereotypes—when the victimized party is minoritized, a man, or transgender; when the party who inflicts the harm is white and an acquaintance; when the person on the receiving end of it fails to represent the ideal. It makes sense, then, that so many survivors do not identify themselves as such, given that they’re left out of the words and the stereotypes that define them. If you don’t see yourself included in the language, then what is there to say?” (28).

Professor Tumminio Hansen speaks of “the ideal” instance of the rape survivor, where our concepts of survivors color our concepts of rape, and vice versa. To not live up to that ideal—as would be the case with, for example, a non-white transgender victim in a society that idealizes white cisgender females as itself a picture of ideality (which is to say, purity)—is to effectively not be included among those who suffer rape. If you don’t fit the ideal type the concept covers—are not included in what is called “rape”—then, as Tumminio Hansen rhetorically asks, “what is there to say?” The force of Tumminio Hansen’s question is to conjure up the image of someone rendered mute, or worse, as having nothing to say, no story to tell, no violation to report, indeed, no violation at all. This leads to not only “gaslighting” but, as Tumminio Hansen says next, “self-gaslighting” inasmuch as the survivor suffers the limits of the concept, unable then to describe for themself what has happened, leading to the possibility that nothing has happened.

For Tumminio Hansen, these two violations—an initial violation followed by “a kind of linguistic rape”—go together since a society that rapes and allows and enables rape will also marginalize and block utterances that might name rape. This “inability to categorize harm” then speaks to a difficulty on top of a difficulty, the first having to do with rape and the second having to do with the inability to name rape, where the first eludes the concepts on offer to name rape’s occurrence. Crucially there is, for Tumminio Hansen, no easy recourse to a private language, where the survivor can at least attend privately to that which cannot be dealt with publicly, since the same “inability to categorize and to speak” means that one lacks the concepts even to speak to oneself, resulting again in what Professor Tumminio Hansen calls “self-gaslighting.” Indeed, the inability to publicly name rape makes any private survival to be had hellish rather than salutary, according to this account.

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The inability of “rape” to capture some instance of rape does not mean that inability will always be the case. Insofar as language answers to the world, language grows as a pragmatic enterprise with the world. What previously didn’t count as rape might eventually. Just as “rape” did not at some point exist in some language and eventually came to, so uses of the term that do not currently capture certain instances can. Some set of speakers might not currently envision the non-white transgender victim of rape as a victim of rape, but it could. Some people don’t think that males can be victims of rape, especially at the hands of females, such that a male rape victim to them would not count as having suffered rape. But those people could change their minds.

When I was growing up, an episode of the 1980s sitcom Too Close for Comfort had one of its main characters, the effeminate and suggestively closeted gay male character Monroe (who served as the show’s constant butt of homophobic jokes), kidnapped and raped by two women. Initially the show presents things as just another instance of Monroe-as-the-butt-of-jokes, funny to the audience precisely because nothing presented about him required we take him seriously, much less something so serious as sexual violence—more so in this case because the language on offer could not yet imagine women as capable of rape, men as capable of being raped by women, gay men as rape victims, etc. As if aware of these strictures, the episode presents the show’s female characters as mostly unable to recognize Monroe’s victimization. The story takes a turn, however, once one of the main characters begins to treat Monroe as a rape victim, and in fact the show at that point begins to use the word rape, expanding at least for a moment the ideal type of rape victim.

We might imagine Too Close for Comfort at this moment trying to expand for its audience application of the terms “rape,” “rapist,” and “rape victim.” Whether viewers of the episode had their terms expanded or whether they continued unable to think of what happened to Monroe as rape, perhaps even still finding it funny, is part of the biography of not only the term “rape” but also the human life in language generally, part of that biography’s terrors. Stanley Cavell memorably puts it this way: “We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections . . . . Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.”1 The projection of our words—say, the “growth” of our language—opens up new possibilities. But those possibilities do not always go the way we hope or expect; by their nature they are capable of both oppression and liberation. Professor Tumminio Hansen recognizes as much throughout the book, and while she’s right to feel the dangers of its implications for the epistemic freedom she champions, she’s also wise enough to keep those dangers in front of us—quoting along the way philosopher Susan Brison: “It has been hard for me, as a philosopher, to learn the lesson that knowledge isn’t always desirable, that the truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes, it fills you with incapacitating terror, and then, uncontrollable rage” (157). To have “rape” name some experience you’ve encountered frees you into naming what has happened, which also leaves you with the difficulty of naming what has happened.

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There are the obvious philosophical difficulties with rape, and accordingly philosophical treatments of rape and much philosophy are well prepared to take these on, often in proximate relationship to practical considerations like the prosecution of rapists, and what can be presumed about human action and their attending moral psychologies, etc. These, no matter how complicated by actual cases, can be straightforward enough, owing to questions about intent, consent, evidence, and so on. But the complications so often attending these philosophical notions when dealt with practically sometimes make what Professor Tumminio Hansen relates in Speaking of Rape an instance of what the philosopher Cora Diamond calls a “difficulty of reality”—by which Diamond imagines scenarios that push our capacities to conceptualize things past their limits, experiences where our concepts come up short: “the difficulty lies in the apparent resistance by reality to one’s ordinary mode of life, including one’s ordinary modes of thinking: to appreciate the difficulty is to feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach.”2 Diamond goes on, “To attempt to think it is to feel one’s thinking come unhinged . . . the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling” (Ibid.).

The confidence one comes across in the relevant case law around rape belies the difficulties of reality Diamond intends and Tumminio Hansen documents. For someone like Diamond, the problem comes in when difficulties of reality are, for their difficulties, turned away, deflected from difficulties of reality to difficulties of philosophy, as if the difficulty Tumminio Hansen documents can be solved or dissolved through better accounts of intent, consent, evidence, and so on. The philosophical and practical difficulties should surely motivate as much clarity as can be had, but even that won’t save us from difficulties of reality. It is the nature of our lives in the world to run ahead of our language of the world, and hence Tumminio Hansen’s “what is there to say?” and Cavell’s “It is a vision as simple as it is difficult and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.”3

The question posed by Diamond’s “difficulty of reality” as applied to rape goes something like, “What if rape is the kind of thing that necessarily eludes our linguistic abilities?” If that is the case, and Tumminio Hansen’s book certainly suggests that it is, then the difficulty of reality Diamond talks about attends rape as much as it does language. Speaking of rape then can be thought of as a species of the larger difficulty of being human, that we simultaneously have the world in language and that the world consistently outstrips our ability to put it in language. This question begins as a deadly practical one, having to do with a society’s ability or inability to capture reality in order to name and therefore act in a way that stops rape. It goes from there to press into broad questions about the limits of language and the human life given those limits. Veena Das similarly gets at this in talking about the sexual violence that occurred during the South Asian Partition. She writes, “The precise range and scale of the human form of life is not knowable in advance, any more than the precise range of the meaning of a word is knowable in advance. But the intuition that some violations cannot be verbalized in everyday life is to recognize that work cannot be performed on these within the burned and numbed everyday.”4

All of this makes speaking of rape both an especially salient case of a general difficulty of the human life in language, where reality proves difficult—reality being difficult—insofar as rape proves “too much for our concepts.”5 But it also makes speaking of rape its own problem, or a problem predatory of a prior one, a scenario where rape exploits inbred vulnerabilities, which then speaks to a vulnerability of the human life insofar as the human life is a life in language. Rapists exploit a human vulnerability they know at some level will block the truth of what they have done. The challenges that come with speaking of rape enable rape, both in the commission of the violence and its accountability, where the latter names not simply an accountability from others, say victims or the law, but from themselves. Insofar as speaking of rape, as Tumminio Hansen documents so powerfully, makes naming rape and its terrors and violence so difficult to come by, so the rapist has neither to confront what they have done nor the person they have done it to. In many cases, it simply isn’t rape to them, since what goes by rape in their mind does not include them. Speaking of rape comes no more naturally for the victim than the rapist, who has the most to gain from its conceptual elusiveness, just as victims and survivors have the most to gain—though still plenty to lose—from its conceptual clarity. To use Austin’s idiom, both rapists and the raped do things with “rape”—when the term is clarified, the victim names what has happened (as in the Too Close for Comfort case), and when left unclarified, the rapist continues in the fog of what has happened.6 Again, as Das says, “the intuition that some violations cannot be verbalized in everyday life is to recognize that work cannot be performed on these within the burned and numbed everyday” (Ibid.). Both rapist and victims live in the “burned and numbed everyday.”

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One of Christian theology’s great philosophical contributions is the way it talks about sin by employing a sophisticated moral psychology. It is part of this moral psychology to both try to explain evil—as something having to do with disordered desire and the unhinged things that happen when desire detaches from the ends that give it meaning, purpose, and life—and to find such explanations wanting precisely for the (un)reason that evil defies the grammatical demands of explanation, which can only make sense of that which makes sense. The idea that one would choose self-ruin rather than meaning, purpose, and life is for Christian theology something so beyond the pale of what can be understood that to try to explain it is to introduce madness into explanation. Instead of explaining sin, Scripture displays it, narrating its history and documenting its many cases, making Speaking of Rape a kind of scripture. Scripture performs this deed, as painful as it might be, because it does not think that abstractions are sufficient for explaining sin’s being and doings. Christian theology claims that creatures are created for goodness to such a degree that it is not within their powers to explain what happens when they do evil, when they stop being creatures.

Speaking of Rape shows how all of this applies to rape. The rapist might try to dehumanize their victim, but they succeed only in dehumanizing themself, relinquishing their hold on meaning, purpose, and life. In this sense then it is good news that we cannot speak of rape and that speaking of rape exceeds the capacities of human language. If we could properly speak of rape, if we could grammatically make sense of it, we’d be suggesting that rape at some level makes sense. Think here of why victim advocates work so hard to discuss rape beyond the terms of sex—reminding us that rape has more to do with power than sex—so as to place its occurrence beyond the course of how we normally talk about sex (including terms for intimacy, pleasure, and even love). Rape is something other, and no matter how much the rapist might want to think of rape in terms of sex, rape is possessed of a different grammar (logic) than sex, and in fact possessed of no grammar or logic at all. The difference between how the raped and the rapist speak about rape gets to the reality that there is no easy way to talk about it. And again, as much as this is a brutally difficult thing, there is something to be said for our inability to speak of rape—something important about the performance of so trying, something vital about what Professor Tumminio Hansen is doing in Speaking of Rape.

None of this is meant to deny the difficulties of reality tied to rape and speaking of rape, but only to try to contextualize matters as indeed difficult, and perhaps in the deepest possible ways, and to place the difficulty in a region of thought ultimately beyond where Diamond casts things, not in the realm of reality as such but of reality where God marks the boundary between being and non-being. As a difficulty of reality, rape may be what Stephen Mulhall terms a riddle, which requires the projection and perfection of our concepts into the life of God in order to finally get some handle on what “rape” tries to name. Or likely the converse is the case, that rape will only make sense projected beyond the perfections of God—whatever that might mean, say, on the way to non-being. By doing what they do the rapist speaks themself into nothingness, which is what Christians have sometimes meant by hell.

This movement from being to non-being, from goodness to the surpassed limits of evil, brings us finally to the crucified body of Christ.7 Casting things here means that while no words can capture rape, still that difficulty, like rape itself, is displayed in the wounds of Christ—the Word of God finding expression in the unacknowledged body of Christ. We might accordingly speak about the raped body like we do the crucified body, as when Cavell says, “The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.”8 In Christ’s crucified body, this site between being and non-being, the crucified find acknowledgment, including the acknowledgment of the difficulty of reality that is the difficulty of speaking of rape.