After efforts to persuade the Catholic church in India to deal with sexual abuse of women by clergy, and upset over the church’s slow progress, a group of Christian women, mostly Catholics, announced steps for addressing the issue on their own.
“We should move outside the church to seek answers to abuse cases. We should treat this problem as a crime and take recourse to the law,” said Astrid Lobo Gajiwala, a lay woman theologian.
Gajiwala, who heads the women’s collective Satyashodak (meaning “seekers of truth”), made these remarks at a recent national seminar that studied the impact of religion and culture on the empowerment of women from an Indian perspective.