Framework
One system, five layers — moving a church from understanding to lasting restoration.
Awareness alone does not protect children. A facilitated, evidence-based curriculum — anchored by a book, not replaced by one — that moves a congregation from understanding, to infrastructure, to restoration.
A single system, built on two axes.
Awareness alone does not protect children. The Shield & Eden framework is a facilitated system — anchored by a book rather than replaced by one — that moves a congregation from understanding, to infrastructure, to restoration. It runs on two axes that are easy to confuse and essential to keep apart: content layers are the bodies of knowledge (the what); delivery tracks are the audiences (the who). The same layer is taught differently to a pastor than to a parent than to a survivor.
FIVE CONTENT LAYERS
Each layer builds on the one before it — from foundational understanding to lasting restoration.
WHAT THE FRAMEWORK TEACHES AND BUILDS
Every layer is evidence-based and citation-backed — designed to be taught, measured, and held to account.
Foundations
The historical and empirical ground everything else stands on. It begins with the sexual violation of enslaved people — women and men — and the institutional and theological inheritances the Black church carried forward.1,2,3,4 It establishes the current empirical picture: child sexual abuse is not rare, affecting roughly one in four girls and one in thirteen boys in the United States.5 And it names plainly that rigorous, community-specific data on child sexual abuse within the Black church remains scarce — a documented gap Shield & Eden treats as a warrant for the work, not a weakness to manage.
Prevention
The evidence-based core: how abuse actually happens — most often through someone a child already knows and trusts, rarely a stranger6 — how access and concealment are gained, and the concrete protective measures a congregation can implement and sustain. This layer translates established prevention science7 and rigorously evaluated training models8 into the realities of faith-community life, adopting the public-health stance that child sexual abuse is preventable, not inevitable.9
Theological Framework
A six-module deconstruction and reconstruction, organized around three moves — reclaim, dismantle, and both. Theology that has been used to enforce silence — forgiveness as forced reconciliation, “touch not God’s anointed” as a shield, redemptive suffering that tells a child to endure — is not softened here; it is dismantled. Sound theology is reclaimed and rebuilt.3,4 This is the layer that distinguishes Shield & Eden from any secular prevention program.
Response & Safeguarding
What a church actually does when a disclosure surfaces — reporting duties, response protocols, and the safeguarding infrastructure that must exist before a crisis. The need is not hypothetical: documented investigations show abuse concealed and moved between congregations under institutional silence.10,11 And because an arrest is made in only about 29% of child sexual abuse cases that reach law enforcement,12 background checks alone cannot protect children — most who abuse never acquire a record to find. This layer carries real legal weight and is developed under child-protection and legal review, not theological review alone.
Healing & Restoration
The long restorative work, resourced for survivors of every gender. It names the barriers that specifically silence Black survivors13 and male survivors — shame, homophobia, and the expectation of masculine invulnerability14,15 — and the compounded burden Black men carry at the intersection of racism and rigid masculinity.16 It draws on evidence that social support and religious coping aid recovery,17 and on survivor-built congregational models of response.18,19 Healing is treated as a discipline a church can be equipped to support, not an outcome left to chance.
THREE CROSS-CUTTING THREADS
Never siloed into a single layer — present in every one.
Survivor voice & leadership
Survivors shape the work, not merely receive it. Their testimony and leadership inform every layer of the framework, which is anchored in survivor-built models of congregational response rather than expertise imposed from outside.18,19
A full-inclusion mandate
Every survivor is held here, regardless of gender — inclusion treated as a discipline, not a disclaimer. Because silence works differently for different survivors, the framework names those differences: the heightened barriers Black survivors face,13 and the shame, homophobia, and invulnerability that silence boys and men.14,15,16
A research arm
Every layer is held accountable to evidence, and revised when the evidence does not support it. The scarcity of community-specific data on the Black church is treated as work to be done, not a fact to be managed.
FOUR DELIVERY TRACKS
The same knowledge serves each audience differently. Four tracks map the five layers against the people who need them — so each receives the right layers at the right depth.
Clergy
Pastors and senior spiritual leaders — carrying the theological framework and the church’s accountability for safeguarding.
Congregational leaders
Lay leaders, ministry heads, and volunteers — the trusted messengers who carry prevention into everyday church life.
Families
Parents and caregivers — equipped with prevention and the realities of disclosure, including what silences boys and men.
Survivors
Survivors of every gender — centered in the healing and restoration layer, on their own timeline.
Delivered as a facilitated curriculum because safeguarding is learned in community, not solo reading. It is also built honestly: some layers rest on decades of settled evidence, while others — such as community-specific data on the Black church — are still emerging. Shield & Eden names that difference openly, directs the most rigorous review to the layers where the evidence is youngest, and holds every layer accountable to evidence rather than good intentions.
Framework — references
- Foster, T. A. (2019). Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men. University of Georgia Press.
- Wyatt, G. E. (1997). Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives. Wiley.
- Douglas, K. B. (1999). Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Orbis.
- West, T. C. (1999). Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics. NYU Press.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Child Sexual Abuse (US prevalence). cdc.gov.
- Darkness to Light. Child Sexual Abuse Statistics (perpetrator proximity). d2l.org.
- Finkelhor, D. (2009). The Prevention of Childhood Sexual Abuse. The Future of Children, 19(2), 169–194.
- Rheingold, A. A., et al. (2015). Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Training for Childcare Professionals: An Independent Multi-Site Randomized Controlled Trial of Stewards of Children. Prevention Science, 16(3), 374–385.
- Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse (E. Letourneau), Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
- Guidepost Solutions (2022). Report of the Independent Investigation: SBC Executive Committee.
- Abuse of Faith. (2019). Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News.
- Snyder, H. N. (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. U.S. DOJ, Bureau of Justice Statistics (NCJ 182990).
- Tillman, S., Bryant-Davis, T., Smith, K., & Marks, A. (2010). Shattering Silence: Exploring barriers to disclosure for African American sexual assault survivors. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 11(2), 59–70.
- Gartner, R. B. (1999). Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men. Guilford Press.
- Easton, S. D., et al. (2014). “Would You Tell Under Circumstances Like That?”: Barriers to Disclosure of Child Sexual Abuse for Men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity.
- Recovery Experiences from Childhood Sexual Abuse among Black Men. (2023). Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 32(1).
- Bryant-Davis, T., Ullman, S. E., Tsong, Y., & Gobin, R. (2011). Surviving the Storm: The role of social support and religious coping in sexual assault recovery of African American women. Violence Against Women, 17(12), 1601–1618.
- Coleman, M. A. (2004). The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence. Pilgrim Press.
- Simmons, A. S. (Ed.). (2019). Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. AK Press.
Statistics are US-focused. “Black church” is used throughout; “African American” appears only inside cited source titles, reproduced as published.
BRING THE FRAMEWORK TO YOUR CHURCH.
The framework names what a church must know and do. Bring it to your congregation through facilitated training — or read how the layers produce measurable change.