Restoration after abuse on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm E. Flamert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

So, Amy, we're going to talk about domestic violence today. It is a really, really serious topic for us to

address. And it's such a serious topic because the pain is so profound and also because the experience of the

difficulty is so wide ranging. So there are statistics that report that anywhere from 25 to 33% of

women will be victimized physically by the male significant other in their life. Maybe that's a husband, maybe that's a boyfriend.

The one thing we know about those statistics is that they underestimate the problem

because domestic violence is one of the most underreported problems that exists,

and also those statistics only account for women. They don't account

for men who are being abused by their wives, and that's a problem. And they don't account for kids

who are being abused. So the problem of domestic violence is massive. And we can't talk about it

in one brief podcast. But we need to talk about this issue at least as it relates to women because it's such a problem

and because I think the church is really confused about how to handle this issue.

Well, what would you say that this confusion looks like in the church?

So I think that there are two extremes that it is easy for Christians to stake out.

I think one extreme that's popular in the culture that it's easy for the church to sort of

pare it is the extreme that when we hear that a woman

has been abused by her husband, we give her counsel that she should never, ever return home.

So we say once an abuser, always abuser. If he hits you once, he'll hit you twice,

those kinds of things.

Abusers don't change. And so you can never go back because it's never going to be safe.

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