Suggestions for Writing about Child Sexual Abuse
Consider these questions and include in your story what is applicable to your situation.
Background:
Are you Male/Female?
What geographical area do you live in presently? And what areas have you lived in?
What is your approximate age range?
How many brothers and sisters do you have? Where do you fit in birth order?
Were you raised in a professing home?
Did both your parents profess?
How many generations back to the first person in your family to profess?
Parental Support
Did you feel loved by your parents? Wanted? Mistreated?
What was your parents’ style of parenting (authoritarian, permissive, reasonable, etc.)
Did your parents strictly follow the workers rules and require you to do so also?
Do you consider your childhood to have been “happy?”
Did you/your parents have a meeting in your home? What kind of meeting was it? (Sun, Wed, Union, Special, Convention, etc.)
As a child, how did you feel about the workers?
How did your parents feel about the workers?
Childhood
What relationship did your abuser have with you? Family/elder/worker etc
How did the abuse commence?
Were you under any threats to keep quiet?
How did you feel at the time about the abuse?
Did you ever associate the abuse as God will for you?
When did you realize that the abuse was wrong morally?
When did you realize that the abuse was wrong legally?
Reporting the Abuse
Did you report the abuse to legal authorities? If not… what held you back?
What were the circumstances that led up to your decision to report it?
How did you feel about reporting it?
How long after the abuse did you report it?
To whom did you report the abuse?
Did you report the abuse to the workers…if so, how did they respond to you?
How did the workers’ response make you feel?
Did you report the abuse to your parents? How did they respond to you?
How did your parents’ response make you feel?
What did you expect/fear would be the benefits and the downside of reporting the abuse to the authorities?
Did your fears happen?
After Effects
Did you seek out someone to share your abuse information, doubts, fears and questions?
Were they sympathetic? Understanding?
Did they downplay the reality of the problem and encourage you to re-evaluate the situation?
How has this abuse affected your spiritual walk with God?
What was the hardest thing/s about your experience?
What emotions did you experience? Anger? at whom? Guilt? for what?
What advice would you give to children and parents who are currently going through similar abusive situations?
What helped you overcome your fear to speak out against your abuser?
Why did you choose this method of speaking out?
Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
Did any significant changes occur in friendships you value? How?
Did the quality of some of your family relationships change? How?
Do you still occasionally feel pangs of guilt? panic? fear? What triggers them?
What do you do about them?
If raised in professing family, how did you meet your spouse?
How long did you know each other before you married?
How did you tell your spouse about the abuse?
How did you spouse react to the abuse news?
Did your spouse profess when you married
How old were you and your spouse when you married?
How many children do you have? Do they profess now? Did they ever?
What steps have you put in place to protect your children from this sort of abuse?