Forgiveness for the abuser when there’s justice for the victim

“Individual forgiveness on the part of the victim does not remove the need for justice on the part of the abuser.” 
— Psalm 82 Initiative

One is often required and the other just doesn’t happen.  It’s frowned upon in Christian circles if someone has a battle to forgive someone who has abused them.  But the advocating and executing of justice is a completely different matter; it’s often put in the too hard basket.

It’s easier to require the victim of the abuse to absorb the pain of the abuse that’s occurred to them simply because those who would abuse are the kinds of people who slip away from any justice that might otherwise occur.  But it also must be said that as a society, and certainly as a church, we do expect the victim to repatriate their loss personally.

It’s almost all I want to say, but I can’t leave it at that.

We ought to help the victim forgive their abuser, but just as much we should also be ensuring we have the abuser face up to what they’ve done.  Such is the nature of the convoluted character of abuse — gaslighting, denial, justification, disappearing acts, etc — we will almost always come up empty.

And it is THIS dynamic that makes it all the harder for a victim of abuse to forgive their abuser — this is way forgiveness and justice do tend to work hand-in-hand in issues of abuse.  It is why forgiveness is harder overall; because justice is almost never done.  It’s the nature of abuser to wriggle out of the consequences of what they’ve done.

In an ideal world, a person might abuse another person and then come to their senses, apologise and repent.  Almost without fail there would be a quick route to forgiveness, because there is one pleading the mercy of another.  It’s actually not hard to forgive in such circumstances.

Where it is inordinately hard to achieve closure for forgiveness is when there is no acknowledgement of wrongdoing; no justice for the victim.  An attitude of forgiveness is still possible, however, but it shouldn’t be too hard to see why people cannot achieve a sense of closure for forgiveness when the perpetrator either feels they’ve done nothing wrong — they feel justified doing what they did — or they evade the consequences through denial or lying.

One thing we must understand as a church and as a society is there is still a power imbalance.  We have less empathy for the sufferer of the abuse than we ought to have, and this is often translated as our desire for them to ‘get over it’ and ‘won’t you forgive already’, and we give abusers too much grace, allowing them to not need to face the consequences of their abuse.

These are realities that are faced in every country and culture, because the abused will always abuse, and the abused will always be abused.  One thing we need to do as a society and church is to acknowledge how the scales of justice work in situations of abuse.

Forgiveness works when there is justice.

Photo by Zohre Nemati on Unsplash