I first heard Nicole Braddock Bromley speak in January 2006 in Edman Chapel at Wheaton College. With courage and grace, she shared her testimony of surviving childhood sexual abuse and incest at the hands of her stepfather. Part of her story is about her mother’s powerful role in rescuing and removing her from danger.
When Nicole told her mother what her stepfather was doing, her mother believed her and immediately left the home with her daughter. Nicole’s stepfather was an apparently outstanding member of the local church community in leadership, and no one, including his own wife, realized what he was doing to his daughter in secret. He successfully deceived everyone around him. But when the truth came out, he lost his cool. He came after his wife and daughter when they left and tried to harm them. By God’s grace, they remained safe and protected. Later, tragically, the man did not repent and change his ways but instead took his own life, ashamed of the truth that had been made public.
Nicole’s story makes it clear that mothers can be deceived just like everyone else when it comes to the abuse their husbands are perpetrating against their children. Once they learn the truth, mothers have a choice about how to respond to it. They can believe their young and innocent children and courageously take action. Or they can retreat into fear and denial, blaming the child who was victimized instead of holding their husbands, the perpetrators, responsible for their sinful actions and criminal behavior.
The courage it takes to believe should not be underestimated. A married woman derives much of her sense of identity from her husband, her financial security is tied to his, and her emotional health and well-being is supposed to be reinforced by her husband but is being drastically undercut when he is sexually involved with their children. However, many mothers do have this courage. As I recently read in the book Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, when men are brought up on criminal charges for childhood sexual assault, it is usually because their wives had the courage to report their husbands’ devastating actions to the police and follow through in the courts.
The author of Rocking the Cradle, a feminist without religious affiliation, is very clear in her opinions and assessment of the way that mothers have been maligned by psychologists and the justice system. In her view, which is based on her research into court cases dealing with childhood sexual abuse and their outcomes, mothers are called passive by psychologists and often blamed by the courts for failure to protect their children from their abusive husbands. The children are sometimes removed to child protective custody rather than given to either of their parents in such cases. Sometimes the mother who reported is labeled “crazy” by her husband’s attorneys, and as a divorce proceedings go through, the children are given to the fathers who abuse instead of the mothers who dare to report. The situation in the courts can be very bleak indeed, especially when abusive fathers fight for themselves so adroitly there.
Not all mothers are protective. Sadly, some are profoundly emotionally unhealthy and cannot deal with the truth when it is revealed. They may have been abused themselves as children. For it is a strange but consistently observed psychological pattern: many sexually abused girls grow up to marry abusive husbands. How can women who never resolved their own childhood abuse experiences truly help their own children when they suffer the same fate?
Other mothers who try to protect cannot because of circumstances beyond on their control. Children who have been abused by their fathers inevitably experience feelings of rage not only at the abusers, their fathers, but their mothers, too, partly because they’re reacting emotionally from a child’s innocent belief that their mothers could or should be all powerful — as they are in the child’s life but aren’t in the real world.
Abuse has a terrifying and destructive impact on entire families, but Nicole’s story is one of hope for children trapped in incestuously abusive homes. Since statistics suggest that approximately 80% of childhood sexual abuse cases involve a father or stepfather perpetrator and a daughter victim, it is clear that the mother’s response to the situation can make the pivotal difference in her child’s immediate rescue and long-term recovery.
To read Nicole’s story, visit her website or pick up a copy of her book.
Dr. Jane Beal
JSASSN International
