As Dee can attest, there is never a good domestic situation for anyone to intervene. My wife has worked in the domestic relations field all her career. I have been involved in cases in my work in the health department and in EMS. I have had a woman who had just shot her boyfriend plead with us to help him, but block our access. I have looked up from a man's guts coming out of the shotgun wound to see the perpretator standing next to another man holding the weapon (he was an off-duty deputy, but I didn't know that, and was about to run over my partner out a side door). I have had to go to court nine times to testify on the presence of a bacterium in a father's throat that had nothing to do with his daughter's gonorrhea infection, because the social workers had no understanding of STD's.
Some abuse is a shot time thing, other times it is chronic. Some situations allow for an almost institutional atmosphere of abuse to continue. My wife has seen cases in a religious community that is close-knit and that holds itself apart from larger society. This group is living in the middle of the public square compared to the group in Texas. If a bad streak gets started in such a group, there is usually nothing to stop it, as has been shown in groups as large as The Peoples Temple.
As to outcomes of these cases, even the successful ones have casualities, often among the victims. I have had to deal with victims who were ostracized by the rest of the family because the crime came to light through them. There is a mainline fundamentalist church near where I live that allows a woman convicted of sex crimes with young boys to continue to work with children, because her family is a major contributor to this church. I am not a member of that congregation, but I have a number of friends who go there, and they have had to wrestle with their faith in the face of this. I wold hope that this woman does not re-offend, but the risks are so large, and the repercussions of her doing so would affect the rest of the lives of the younger generation at that church.
The issue of sexual abuse is difficult for most people to deal with as it stands some of our most important beliefs on their heads. Heather eloquently testifies to the love of a devoted mother. Your children are specially blessed to have you. To hear another woman, one in our area, who made her daughter have sex with two other men, so that they could get them to kill her husband (and the gilr's father), insist that she is also a good mother, is monstrous. Sadly, such is the world we live in. Thanks be to God that the Heathers of the world vastly outnumber the others.
