Why Does God Allow Child Abuse?

            *Children should never be left in abusive situations.  If you suspect that a child is being abused or neglected, please call or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 or visit their website at childhelphotline.org.  All calls are confidential.

It has been reported that during the COVID-19 pandemic, instances of child abuse have been increasing.  Such statistics give us pause.  One of the hardest questions to contemplate is why God allows suffering – especially in the case of children.  For grown adults who are processing the effects of the abuse they suffered as children – including myself – the question can be haunting.  Where was God?  Why did he let it happen?

                The Scriptures give us one story of child abuse, and that is the story of Joseph, found in the Torah in Genesis 37-50.  Joseph had ten older brothers who were jealous of him due to their father Jacob clearly favoring Joseph.  When Joseph was still young, only a teenager, his brothers threw him into a pit and then sold him into slavery without their father’s knowledge, later telling their father that he had been killed by wild beasts.  At a very vulnerable and crucial time in his development, Joseph was betrayed and abused by his own family members, kidnapped, and taken far away from his home to another country – Egypt – to be subject to forced labor.  While there, he ran the household of a man named Potiphar, but was sexually harassed by Potiphar’s wife, who lied to her husband and said he had assaulted her.  Joseph was then unjustly thrown into prison after being harassed and committing no crime.

                In this situation – having been betrayed and abused by his own family, the chances of him ever going home again almost non-existent, and then being harassed and betrayed by those in power over him – it would have been very easy, even understandable, for Joseph to have lost hope and to have concluded that God had abandoned him.  But he continued to serve others in jail, and eventually was released after correctly interpreting a dream that affected a fellow prisoner, who later told Pharaoh about him.  After correctly interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph was elevated to second in command of the entire country, got married and had children of his own.

                This would have been a fitting end to the story – Joseph was finally able to rise above the ashes of his painful past and start a new life with a new family.  But his brothers showed up in Egypt during a famine 20 years after he had been sold into slavery, and they did not recognize him when they met him – they thought he was dead.  This would have been a perfect opportunity for revenge – with Joseph’s high rank, he could have had them all thrown into prison or sold them all into slavery.  Given the pain he had suffered over the years because of them, it would have been understandable if he had.  However, he subjected them to tests instead, the final test being one of putting a cup into his younger brother Benjamin’s bag and accusing him of stealing it, saying that he would enslave Benjamin.  The other brothers stepped up and offered themselves in Benjamin’s place.  Realizing that they had changed and repented of their evil, Joseph revealed himself to his brothers, forgave them, and had them bring their father and the rest of the family to live with him in Egypt.

                Joseph’s story ended happily.  Not all stories of child abuse end that way.  In some instances, there is forgiveness and reconciliation later in life, but some abusers are not repentant, do not wish to change, or do not even want to acknowledge that they did anything wrong.  Most of our stories will not end as Joseph’s did; we will not become second in command of an entire country, and many of us will not be reconciled with the family members who abused us.  Since our stories will not always work out the way his did, we must come to an understanding of what our own story meant.          

                Did God abandon Joseph when he was a child?  Joseph did not see it that way.  He said to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).  Had Joseph never been abused by his brothers, he most surely would have stayed in Canaan and never gone to Egypt.  As a result, the famine that he helped Egypt prepare for when he was second in command would have killed many people.  Joseph found meaning in his tragedy – it had to happen that way, so that lives could be saved.

                If you were abused as a child, as I was, it may take you time to find meaning in what happened.  Where might you have ended up if the abuse had not happened?  Would you live in the same place?  Would you have chosen a different profession?  Would you have met the same people that you met over the years, or would you not have had the opportunity?  Are there skills that you learned, either in childhood or later in life, that you might never have learned had the abuse not occurred?  And, is it possible that the abuse you suffered as a child was a living lesson never to treat others that way, and to build a better life for yourself?

                These are not easy questions, but as Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, noted in his book “Man’s Search For Meaning” after he survived the concentration camps – “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

                Like Joseph, us survivors of child abuse can challenge the notion that we were abandoned by God, and instead work out why the abuse happened to us, what meaning we can draw from it, and how we can use the lessons we learned to build a better life for ourselves moving forward.  Then healing can truly begin.