To keep children safe from sexual abuse in our churches, we need to listen to them without judgment, believe them when they speak up and respect their voices and feelings. (Oupa Nkosi)
Child sexual abuse adult survivor Suzie poignantly asks “Who would I have been, if I had not been abused? I lost almost half of my life due to early child sexual abuse. What would my life and the life of my children have been like if I had been treated with dignity and respect during my childhood? Trauma is always intergenerational”’. Her powerful words reinforce the message of the 2025 South African Child Gauge which focuses on disrupting intergenerational harm against women and children.
This evidence guide also highlights the key role that faith leaders can play in this shared task, given that the large majority of South Africans of all ages attend a church regularly. Suzie was sexually abused by two male relatives who were leaders in her church. Her own church remained complicit in this abuse by silencing her voice, taking the side of her perpetrators and presenting her with distorted theologies of submission and forgiveness.
Suzie’s story is just one of thousands. Over the last decade, Christian churches around the world have faced a series of horrific revelations. Detailed testimonies show that churches across denominations can no longer deny the part they have played in perpetrating and perpetuating child sexual abuse. South Africa has not been immune to these revelations either. As a result, many local churches are hastily assembling formal child protection policies. This raises the question: How can we ensure that such policies do not merely gather dust on a shelf but translate into living documents that keep our children safe?
As we approach the end of 2025, we sit between International Child Safeguarding Week and the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children, with World Children’s Day (20 November) falling in the middle. Amidst the risks of rhetoric to centre children temporarily before they fall back into culturally and religious infused patterns of being seen and not heard, opportunities arise for deeper reflection within our churches on what it means to move from words to actions around child safety.
The Faith and Helping Children Thrive Without Violence course, first developed in 2025 and hosted by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative Working Group (SVRI)’s Community of Practice on Faith and Gender-Based Violence, dives deeper into child sexual abuse in churches and other faith institutions. It helps practitioners and faith leaders across Africa and beyond to explore together what it means to take child safeguarding seriously. The SVRI’s 2025 learning brief Child Safety in Faith Communities: Moving from Words to Action features the diverse voices and wisdom of course participants such as Suzie, including faith leaders, survivors and NGO activists to identify some key steps that churches can take to prioritise this issue.
Thembelani, a course participant and pastor from the Eastern Cape, shared: “We believe every child is a gift from God, created in God’s image, deeply loved, and deserving of protection, dignity, and care. But many children in our communities are not safe in their homes, schools, or even churches, and suffer in silence because they fear not being believed or supported. We have a responsibility to be watchful, to listen, and to speak out. Child protection is not just a legal matter, it is a spiritual duty. Protecting children is not separate from our faith, it is a living expression of it.”
The use of storytelling within the course has been transformational. One story was shared of a South African pastor whose daughter couldn’t tell him that she had been raped because when she came home late, his response was to give her a ‘hiding’ and send her to bed. She told him years later that despite his own role as a gender-based violence activist in the community, he had not been a safe person for his own daughter to turn to.
Equipping faith leaders as first responders with a deeper understanding of trauma-informed care for child survivors is a critical step in this change. As people of faith, we must all ask ourselves the question: Am I a safe person for children to turn to? We must be willing to ask the children in our faith institutions what they think and need to feel safe and be safe.
Churches must also challenge their own assumptions. They shouldn’t just protect children from outside ‘stranger danger’, but also from the most common sources of violence found in families, homes, schools, and even churches.
Building a culture of safeguarding in our South African churches is a challenging and long-term process, but every congregant can make a start by supporting their church to take the following steps:
- Listening to and learning from past survivors like Suzie who work professionally with churches. This will make it easier for other survivors in churches to feel safer to speak out rather than being silenced by shame, stigma and lack of belief. Mesa, another course participant from Zimbabwe, notes that “Adult survivors like Suzie should be involved in educating faith leaders and helping design programs within faith communities. Survivors can help faith leaders understand the real impact of abuse, the failures of current systems, and what meaningful support truly looks like as a powerful way to break silence, challenge harmful norms, and ensure that safeguarding responses are survivor-centred”.
- Developing regular mechanisms that enable all children in your church to speak up, participate, be heard and educated — without being dismissed in favour of more powerful adult voices. Fatuma, a course participant from Uganda insists that, “Children need to be able to identify what is violence and what they can do as active participants in their own safety. When a child is empowered, they can report violence and contribute towards safety interventions.”
- Engaging proactively with distorted theological doctrines that are harmful. Much sexual abuse of children in churches is accompanied by patterns of spiritual abuse. Perpetrators tell children that this is God’s will or exploit gendered fears of not being holy or virginal, or of being labelled homosexual to keep them quiet and ashamed. Oluwasegun, a course participant and pastor from Nigeria notes that, “Children may be told that if they disobey their parents, question religious teachings, or fail to perform religious rituals perfectly, they will go to hell, be cursed, or bring misfortune to their family. This leverages sacred texts or spiritual authority to instil fear, shame, and guilt. Becoming a safe person for children means creating an environment where they feel heard, valued, protected, and free from judgment or fear.”
To keep children safe from sexual abuse in our churches, we need to listen to them without judgment, believe them when they speak up and respect their voices and feelings. We must also ensure that all children understand their right to say “no” to anything that feels wrong or unsafe to them — even with adults they know and trust.
Dr Selina Palm is chair and course lead on the Sexual Violence Research Initiative Working Group on Faith and Ending Violence against Children. She is also a violence prevention research fellow at Stellenbosch University and a faith leader at Rondebosch United Church.