“I discovered my husband had abused our daughter”: One mother’s journey from trauma to healing

A Woman Alive reader shares her journey of surviving abuse as a child and the devastating discovery that her now ex-husband had also abused their daughter. She now supports others affected by abuse, offering hope, faith, and the reminder that healing is possible with God.

Child sexual abuse and incest damage a child long after physical recovery. Its’ insidious evil takes all trust, innocence, security, peace and potentially, their future. It skews their belief system, in both God and people; reduces confidence to anxiety and becomes the lens to which the child sees all decisions, ideas and future.

As an abuse survivor myself, I understood all this from bitter experience, and when my five-year-old daughter disclosed sexual abuse from her father, (‘William’)*, I knew exactly what he’d taken.

I was much older, (11-15), although no less confused or frightened, when a close family friend betrayed me. We were advised that attaining a conviction was low, so it wasn’t reported. In contrast, ‘William’ was prosecuted and incarcerated for five years from 1995, the same year we divorced.