Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/10/2024
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Categories No Categories

The role of religious leaders and clerics in mediating marital conflict and responding to domestic violence in faith communities is well-established. Numerous programmes seek to build the preparedness of religious leaders and clerics to respond with sensitivity to the needs and risks faced by domestic violence victims and survivors and to leverage on their influence and religious authority in changing distorted or unhelpful understandings and attitudes in their communities. Many such trainings have tended to take a culture-sensitive and faith-specific approach, working with clerics of specific religious traditions and cultural contexts. Others have involved clerics of different faiths by taking a more generalising approach employing secular gender-based violence resources in a culturally sensitive manner. Generalist approaches could be limiting as they might homogenise domestic violence in different faith communities and are unable to respond to the theological sensibilities of each group. Approaches that are context-specific and theologically grounded are limited in their application and cannot easily be generalised beyond the faith community and group of clerics that they are created for. There is currently no accepted framework to conceptualise these different approaches or the role of theology in these trainings, nor sufficient evidence about the advantages of one over the other.

In the current webinar, we will present findings from a study that was conducted in Ethiopia and Egypt that engaged Christian and Muslim organisations working with clerics to respond to domestic violence. The study explored the importance of religious teachings as a resourceful means in such trainings, the approaches used by faith-based programmes and organisations in Ethiopia and Egypt to engage clerics and talk about domestic violence, and the feasibility of an inter-faith training approach for clerics in these countries and what such an approach might look like.

The study was funded with the support of the Interfaith Collaboration Prize 2022 awarded to Dr Romina Istratii and Dr Mahmoud Ali Gomaa Afifi by the Gingko Library, a UK-based charity that works to improve mutual understanding between the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the West.

The webinar is organised by the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS with the support of the Gingko Library.

Register here