Mennonite Weekly Review

After Julie Prey-Harbaugh was abused by a youth pastor, she healed by telling her story.

Several women recently launched the Dove’s Nest Collaborative to end child abuse and neglect.

Today she is sharing her hope by helping to create safer places for children in Mennonite Church USA’s families and communities.

Recently she and several other Mennonite women launched the Dove’s Nest Collaborative, born at the MC USA convention last July in Columbus, Ohio, when they discovered similar concerns. The collaborative seeks to empower and equip Mennonites through awareness, education and resources to keep their children safe in their homes, communities and churches.

Prey-Harbaugh, a member of West Philadelphia Mennonite Church, joined forces with Linda Gehman Peachey of Mennonite Central Committee U.S. and Jeanette Harder, a member of First Mennonite Church in Lincoln, Neb. They are taking on a big problem. U.S. government statistics show that in 2007 more than 1 percent of children, or 794,000 children, were victims of maltreatment or neglect.

These shocking statistics may be artificially low.

“There’s a lot of pressure in our society and in our congregations to keep quiet about abuse,” said Prey-Harbaugh, director of One Childhood Consulting and a chaplain at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “It’s not that it’s not happening. It’s that we aren’t talking about it. Denial protects us from the horror of thinking about the situation, but it only serves to make the actual horror much worse.

“In my training and consulting, I strive to help organizations and congregations to break open conversations in ways that haven’t been done before.”

Harder, a social work professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and three graduate students interviewed pastors and social service providers, learning of the need for Dove’s Nest to build bridges within the community.

“We worked with the question of what keeps congregations from sending families to counseling centers and what keeps social service agencies from sending families to churches,” she said. “Both sectors said they would make more referrals but that they didn’t have an open relationship with the other party and didn’t trust its motives and methods.

“Churches often don’t report abuse because they want to forgive. They don’t want to meddle in personal business for fear they will drive families away from the only spiritual home they have. And agencies are reluctant to bring God into their clinical concerns.”