CNN published an online story last month about what it referred to as a “rape academy”: a website and associated Telegram group on which men advised one another how to drug and rape their wives and girlfriends and sell one another drugs for this purpose. CNN reports that this website had 62 million global visitors in February alone.
This shocking behaviour may seem a world away from the parishes of England; the CNN report, however, tells the stories of three women who became victims of this kind of sexual abuse. The first is Zoe Watts, from Devon, who “learned that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping medicine into her tea and raping her while she was passed out”. The report continues: “Her then husband’s confession came on an otherwise ordinary Sunday in 2018, after the couple — who share four children — had returned from church” (italics mine).
The Gisèle Pelicot case in France (TV, 27 February) and, now, this show that violence against women by their own husbands and partners is not rare: it is a prolific problem in every country, and every culture, and every religion.
A STUDY by the Christian charity Restored, In Churches Too: Church responses to domestic abuse, published in 2018, suggested that 25 per cent of churchgoers had experienced domestic abuse in their current relationship, and that 42 per cent had experienced abusive behaviour in a relationship.
Restored’s research does not stand alone: previously, both the Evangelical Alliance and the Methodist Church have carried out research that also demonstrates that Christian women experience domestic abuse at similar rates to women in the general population. An Australian study, published in 2021, said that 44 per cent of Anglicans reported being victims of domestic abuse, compared with 38 per cent of the general population.
The sad fact is that, in churches up and down the UK, women are being abused by their husbands, most of whom sit next to them in the pews on Sunday and take a full part in church life as stewards, worship leaders, Sunday-school teachers — and, sometimes, even members of the clergy. I wonder how many of the 62 million visits to that website in the CNN report were made by men who professed to follow Jesus.
At the heart of a man’s choice to rape, abuse, or coerce his wife sits a set of beliefs about his entitlement and about the worth of women. This is where Christians ought to be able to counter attitudes that lead to abuse. All too often, however, Christian teaching and culture are used to justify abuse. If we want to resolve the problem of violence against women, we have to tackle the aspects of our doctrine which are misappropriated by abusers. We have to teach — overtly — better theology.
THE most fundamental teaching of the Bible about human nature is that all are made in the image of God, male or female (Genesis 1.27). Sadly, there are Christian men who argue that men were made in the image of God, and then women were an afterthought, made simply for the pleasure of men.
The Bible teaches clearly that women were made in God’s image (Genesis 1.27). When Adam first sets eyes on Eve, he declares, quite beautifully, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2.23). Men’s and women’s shared humanity is a crucial aspect of the creation narrative.
Indeed, Jesus later affirms this shared humanity as a reason to prohibit violence against women explicitly. In biblical times, it was almost impossible for a woman to divorce her husband. Women whose husbands divorced them had to rely on the kindness of a male relative to support them; otherwise, they would probably become destitute, and prostitution would be their only means of survival.
This is why the prophet Malachi declared that the man who divorced his wife “does violence to the one he should protect” (Malachi 2.16). In biblical times, divorce was an act of gender-based violence; so, when he was asked, in Matthew 19, whether it was permissible, Jesus referred his audience back to the creation narrative, reminding men that their wives were “flesh of their flesh”: fully equal human image-bearers of God, which meant that they could not simply be discarded.
There is much about the Church’s culture and theology which needs to be talked about to address the prolific problem of violence against women in the Church. The most fundamental and basic thing that we can start with, however, is to teach, overtly, that women are created, wonderfully, in the image of God, and have the same inherent value as men. We should challenge any misunderstanding of the creation narrative which suggests otherwise.
Sally Hope is a writer who specialises in faith and domestic abuse. She is the author of No Visible Scars (Books, 7 November 2025), and the creator of Always Hopeful, a recovery programme for Christian survivors of domestic abuse.