Project Details
Projekt
Agency: Vulnerability and Empowerment in the Biographies of Affected Individuals
Applicant
Professor Dr. Christof Mandry
Subject Area
Roman Catholic Theology
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534685649
This research explores agency, vulnerability, and empowerment in the biographies of individuals who experienced sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Survivors' accounts reveal the deep impact of abuse, often leading to feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, with long-term psychological, physical, and social consequences. Despite these challenges, many survivors manage to regain a sense of agency by speaking out, interpreting their experiences, and reclaiming control over their lives, identities, and even their religious beliefs. From the survivors' perspective, "power" is primarily seen in terms of agency: the power exerted by the perpetrator versus the limited control of the survivor. Abuse damages their ability to lead an autonomous life, but their stories also address broader social and institutional factors, particularly the Church's role in both the abuse itself and the later processes of seeking justice and healing. Thus, the common view of the survivor as powerless and the perpetrator as powerful must be expanded to include these wider social, institutional, and temporal dimensions. In a narrative-ethical perspective, the project investigates agency by analyzing autobiographical accounts from survivors, focusing on how they describe their ability to act and make sense of their suffering. It examines how religious contexts influence both the loss and recovery of agency and how survivors navigate the challenges of finding a language to articulate their trauma. This task is shaped by the tension between personal reflection and the demands of public testimony, which has political and social implications. Survivors often describe their past powerlessness as overwhelming and difficult to comprehend. This project systematically studies survivors’ agency by analyzing how they construct their identities and narrate the continuity and change between their past and present selves. The study examines how they build a fragile but livable identity in the aftermath of abuse. By focusing on survivors’ perspectives, the research addresses important theological-ethical questions about how vulnerability and powerlessness are shaped in religious contexts. It also explores how survivors resist the dominance of their abuse experiences, drawing on resources that allow them to continue living and, in some cases, rebuild their religiosity. The analysis reveals how survivors reinterpret religious teachings to reclaim their sense of agency. Through this approach, the project contributes to theological ethics by providing a critical understanding of how agency operates within the social and religious contexts of survivors’ lives and how religious vulnerabilities can both challenge and empower individual agency.
DFG Programme
Research Units
