The Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific has established a taskforce that will develop policy and resources to decrease the incidence of domestic violence among its members.

The church’s family ministries director, Bryan Craig, is encouraged the church is addressing the issue. “We’ve never acknowledged it in a significant way before,” he says.

“The reality is that physical assault and violence occurs in families. Governments are spending huge amounts of money addressing the problem, yet we’ve tended to ignore, minimize or even deny assault and violence occurs in Christian families. And silence has been interpreted as neglect.”

The 1993 Valuegenesis survey of the church’s young adults found 19 percent of women and 12 percent of men had suffered assault. Some 58 percent of the perpetrators regularly attended church. The 1995 Adventist Family Study found 12 percent of women had been physically assaulted—a significant number of them by their spouse.

“The cost of domestic violence to the community is high,” says Craig, “and the cost to the individual is huge, to say nothing of the cost to children.”

The taskforce will consider appropriate protocols and training for ministers and ministry leaders to help deal with the issue in local churches.