The Grief of a Sister and the Strife Between Brothers

The Grief of a Sister and the Strife between Brothers
2 Samuel 13: 15- 14: 24

I once knew someone who was sexually abused on an ongoing basis by a family member when she was a young girl. She never told me the details of what happened, and to be honest I never wanted her to do so, but I knew that twenty years later she was still dealing with issues that this experience raised. What makes me think about her now is the way she also spoke of the pressure that family members put on her to keep quiet about it when she was grown up and when she wanted to talk about it, partly because she was concerned about other people who might be this man’s victims. In a similar way the British television dramatist Dennis Potter, sexually abused by his uncle who lived with his family, spoke of the way he couldn’t talk about this business because it felt as if it would have been like throwing a bomb into the middle of everything that made him feel secure...