Gifted for Leadership

Gifted for Leadership is a US website and community of Christian women in leadership. About a year ago they commissioned a survey on sexual harrassment within the church in the US, and have since produced a resource looking at the issue. Roxanne Wieman, the editor of the site, writes:

'First, it surprised me just how many women had experienced sexual misconduct or harassment in some way at work or in the church. Out of the 779 self-described "active Christian women" we surveyed, more than a quarter of them have personally experienced sexually inappropriate behavior, and one fourth of those who experienced it said it happened in a church or ministry setting. One in four women is a lot. And even more surprising to me than that, was how many women said they'd never been the victim of sexual harassment, but then went on to report they had experienced sexually inappropriate behavior such as touching, suggestive jokes, or gender-based discrimination. If that's not sexual misconduct, I don't know what is.

The results of our survey seemed to say that a lot of women don't know how to define sexual misconduct or harassment, and don't know what to do about it when they are the victims of it. In the survey, 53 percent of women who reported being sexually harassed said they had no intentions of reporting it—a number that goes up in the ministry setting. Why wouldn't they report it? Maybe they were embarrassed. Maybe they didn't want to stir up controversy.'

You can download the resource from here. Gifted for Leaership also send out a regular email that you can sign up to from their home page.