A Survivor-Centered Framework for Addressing Spiritual Harm

Conceptually robust and practically grounded, the proposed framework comes from both scholarly research and direct advocacy with survivors. It is designed to be intersectional, anti-carceral, contextually flexible, and feminist. It takes survivors’ voices as authoritative without presuming any individual survivor is all-knowing or infallible. It treats spiritual harm as an individual experience that is also always systemic. It recognizes that while maintaining ethical standards is paramount for communities, we need a flexible set of tools for response—there is no one-size-fits-all solution to specific instances of spiritual harm. This framework takes seriously that spiritual harm is pervasively entrenched in western modernity and also envisions societies free of it. It holds the maintenance of human dignity together with the urgency of social accountability. The goal is to address spiritual harm in a manner that, itself, models the spiritual and ethical integrity that was called for, abandoned, and degraded in that instance.