The daughter was the one molested. What ever happened to the idea that it’s her choice who gets to know about it?
I know if it were me, I would have told the bare minimum of people. If I wanted to live with mom, I definitely would not want dad to know, as it’s pretty clear that dad would take me away. And no one else would know about it until I was an adult and knew I was over it.
Of course, like in most threads, I am taking the OP at face value. I don’t have enough information to speculate about alternate interpretations. It does become a whole different kettle of fish if any abuse is ongoing, or even if the incident was much worse than described.
But I do know that it’s a two way street. If mom was required to tell dad, despite him overreacting, then dad should be required to tell mom what’s going on now. If, on the other hand, emotion is allowed to be a factor now, it should have been allowed to be a factor then.
Assuming we have all the facts, I offer no condemnation to the OP for doing what her daughter wanted.
(And I don’t give a crap if “no one else thinks this way.”)
The only problem with that is that the girl was 12. There’s a reason why kids have parents right?
So what else should be deferred to the kid’s judgement just because that’s the way she wants it? What if it was daddy that was molesting her and she didn’t want the police told - would you still defer to her judgement?
But yes, I do agree that the dad now has an obligation to tell mum what is going on.
**Sleeps **is a nurse, so I’m inclined to believe that the hospital would do such a thing when presented with a minor child whose primary guardian was saying that a Rape Kit was necessary. Does the DA have to order such a thing when someone’s a minor and their guardian is asking for it?
I feel all kinds of ways about the situation. Yes, I understand how, when faced with something horrible that happened to her daughter, a parent would want to soften the consequences by adhering to the kid’s wishes. I can understand that while also thinking it was not the best thing to do.
As someone who was molested, you can be damn sure that I would react in a similar way to the OP is confronted with the possibility that it might happen again, or that worse could happen. I would rearrange my schedule. I would put both kids in therapy. Even if it was groping. Obviously I do not know if the OP also has such a history, but I can safely say that the idea of anyone harming either of my kids makes me positively nuts and I don’t always believe that I would react in a way that others without those experiences would think of as right-sized to the situation.
BTW, I do know a woman whose sexual abuse experience was limited to groping. it doesn’t change how she feels about the betrayal by a family member.
I think a father who insists his daughter get a pelvic exam and cuts off all contact with the family that she’s lived with the last two years, after she discloses that her step-brother grabbed her boobs two years ago, is a nutcase. And I’d feel absolutely betrayed by his grotesque overreaction. Not to mention that it’d be a long day in hell before I ever divulged anything else to him again.
So either the father is a nut, or the daughter has revealed more abuse. Those are the only two plausible scenarios that I can imagine with the limited information given.
Abuse is horrible and for years we swept it under the rug, which was wrong. But must we go from one extreme to the other? Is there no moderate middle ground?
Yes, you were hiding something from him. Frankly, the thing that most disturbs me is that you don’t own that.
I can see all three points of view here:
As a girl who was molested by her stepbrother, I didn’t want my Daddy to know, either. I knew Mom would tell him, so I told nobody for years until I confided in some friends who went to the school counselor (sound familiar?) So I completely empathise with your daughter.
As a mom of a daughter, I can understand why her dad flew off the handle when he heard she’d been sexually assaulted and never told (and you never told him). I would be furious with both of you, and trying to regain some sort of parental control and authority, both out of a bruised ego and out of genuine concern for my daughter’s safety, living with her abuser. So I empathize with him, as well. And really, honestly, can’t you? Can you just imagine for a moment if your daughter was groped by his roommate while she was at his home for the weekend and he didn’t tell you about it when he learned of it? Can you honestly say that you would just shrug it off and say, “Oh, well, he handled it, so I didn’t need to know.”?
As a mother of a daughter with whom custody is shared with an ex with a history of overreaction, I know how tempting it is to keep things from him, especially if I feel that I’ve handled them already. It makes total sense from an emotional, and to extent, logical, point of view. From a LEGAL and ethical point of view, however, it’s wrong. It’s infringing on his equal rights as a parent to know what your daughter is experiencing. Doesn’t matter whether you have primary physical custody or he does, on paper or in reality - he still has all his parental rights, and those include the right to information about his daughter’s health - mental and physical, schooling and religion. You violated his rights.
I’d suggest taking out those papers and reading them again. I don’t know exactly what you wrote and agreed to, but here’s the relevant portion from mine:
Obviously, I could not do what you did under that agreement, which is pretty standard boilerplate I cut and pasted from the internet during our pro se divorce. If yours is similar, you absolutely need to get a lawyer today, because you are in violation of your Parenting Agreement.
A third could be that the father is terrified that there is more to the story that the daughter is afraid to reveal, and thinking “better safe than sorry.” Taking the thread at face value, the father only knows what he does because his son told him. The daughter didn’t come to him the first time something happened, so it’s understandable that he’d be reluctant to take her word for it that nothing else took place.
This is also what I’m thinking. Were I in that situation, I wouldn’t know what to believe with regards to whether or not the abuse was still continuing. I would take the better safe then sorry route. I certainly wouldn’t trust the mother since she didn’t deem it necessary to inform me even though it appears as though her whole life changed as a result of this. If the grope should be deemed as relatively unimportant, then why the years of therapy? Why stay home to guard against any future incursions? I’d be looking at that reaction of the mother as one that says to me that the abuse either was a lot worse or is still a current threat.
The thing is, there are at least…let me count (father, mother, daughter, stepson, son) five points of view in this story and probably more like 20. And we are getting only one. Who knows what is really going on?
OP, the only thing I will say to you is apologize to your daughter’s father and do everything you can to get in her life again. She needs you still, and right now it has to be all about her. Good luck again.
If you agreed through mediation that your ex is the primary care giver then yes he is the court ordered primary care giver. The only difference is you agreed to it and it wasn’t a judgment decided by the court. Legally that doesn’t make a difference.
Honestly I hope you don’t get your daughter back. I was assaulted as a child in the exact same way you described and it still affects me 20+ years later. The fact you would expect your daughter to live with the person who did this to her is beyond disgusting.
But…did you read the part where the OP got therapy for the son, continued the daughter in therapy, and changed her work schedule to always be home when the daughter was? Many people are saying that that response to a boob grab is disproportionate.
I understand (completely!) that what you went through affected you, but both the victim and the groper are the OP’s kids. She was supposed to cast out one of her kids because he brushed against her other kid’s chest? I can’t imagine how not throwing the stepson out or making some other arrangement for that level of groping counts as beyond disgusting.
For all you who are saying all he did was “grab her boobs”, I don’t see that anywhere in the OP. She said “my step son touched my daughter inappropriately.” That does not necessarily mean “grabbed her boobs.” There are other places to touch and other ways to touch them.
So apparently according to her in that post, he didn’t even grab her boob, just brushed his hand across it. I find it hard to believe anything the OP is saying, when she claims that she quit her job and changed hers & her children’s entire lives around because a 12 year old once ran his hand across another 12 year old’s chest.
Yeah, there’s gotta be waaaay more pertinent detail than what we’ve been told here. That said, I’m going to predict that this is gonna be another one of those threads where we don’t get the satisfaction of an update …
I can. I mean, it’s one of those things where it’s a 75% chance that it is nothing but a 25% chance that it could be the beginning of something very ugly. Brushing boobs without consent is unusual enough that you can’t ignore it, but it’s also not unheard of for a 12 year old boy to have impulse control problems that go away with age. Constant supervision is really the only option: if you exile the boy (sending him to relatives at best, foster care at worst if no relatives are willing to take him), you risk doing him a tremendous injustice over a small, stupid mistake, given his age. If you proceed as before, you risk exposing your daughter to repeated abuse, and the very real risk that she won’t tell you a second time. If you loved both kids, what else could you do?
I agree with this. I’ve known enough people struggling with the legacy of childhood abuse to know that expecting someone to stay with their abuser is obscene.
Also, I notice that the OP is only talking about how she feels, and not at all about her daughter’s feelings. These things combined make me think that she should’ve gone to her fathers house 2 years ago and never returned.
Except that if she didn’t want to go to her father’s house, it would have been kicking her out of her home because of what someone did to her. That hardly seems fair, and it sends the message that she was at fault somehow.