SETTING THE STAGE
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 far back does "the truth" go in your family?
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 rules and require you to do so also?
Do you consider your childhood to have been "happy?"
Did you have a
meeting in your home? What kind of meeting? (Sun, Wed,
Childhood/abuse
As a child, how did you feel about the workers? How did your parents feel?
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 with being in good stead with God?
When did you realise that the abuse was wrong morally?
When did you realise that the abuse was wrong legally?
Did you report the abuse to legal authorities?
If not… what held you back?
How did you come to report it?
How did you feel about reporting it?
How long after the abuse did you report it?
Who did you report the abuse to?
Did you report the abuse to the workers… 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?
After-affects
Did you seek out
someone with whom to share your abuse information, doubts, fears and questions?
Did they reinforce the reality of the problem by being sympathetic?
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 did you feel the cost of reporting the abuse would be?
What was the very hardest thing?
What emotions did you experience? Anger? at whom? Guilt? for what?
What advice would you give to children and parents who are going through similar abusive circumstances right now?
What helped you overcome your fears of speaking 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?
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?