When the Mother Is Blamed
From Dissertation to Essay
When a child is sexually abused by their father or by another man in the family, one might assume that attention would be directed first and foremost toward the person who committed the act.
This is not always what happens.
The questions often turn toward the mother:
Where was she?
What did she know?
Why did she notice nothing?
Why did she not intervene?
How could a mother allow this to happen?
These questions may be necessary. Some mothers knew and failed to protect. Some rejected the child when the child disclosed what had happened. Others were themselves emotionally absent, violent, or abusive. Mothers are not exempt from responsibility because they are women or because someone else carried out the sexual act.
Yet a moral displacement often takes place.
The person who committed the abuse gradually disappears from view. The mother remains as the person who should have seen, should have understood, and should have stopped it. She is made responsible not only for her own actions and omissions, but also for the man’s abuse.
In this way, the mother is blamed for something she did not herself do.
In my doctoral dissertation, I called this Mother-Blaming and Mother-Shaming.
The Idea of the Mother
We all carry an idea of what a mother should be.
She should see.
Understand.
Comfort.
Protect.
She should know what the child needs, even when the child is unable to say it. She should discover the danger before it becomes visible to others. And if the family is threatened, she is expected to place the child before everything else.
This expectation has an understandable core.
Children need adults who protect them. Caregivers bear a real responsibility. When the mother is absent at the moment the child needs her most, that absence may be experienced as a profound betrayal.
But the idea of the always present and all-seeing mother may also become inhuman.
No mother sees everything.
No parent understands every sign.
Children subjected to abuse may conceal what is happening because they are afraid, threatened, loyal, or without words. The perpetrator may act in ways specifically intended to prevent discovery. From the outside, the family may appear ordinary and safe.
Yet the idea persists:
A good mother would have known.
If she did not know, she cannot have been good.
“She Must Have Understood”
In the interviews, several participants said that they felt ashamed of their mothers. Some believed that the mother had in fact known about the abuse without intervening. Others said that she had not known, but that she should nevertheless have understood that something was wrong.
They missed the mother they should have had.
A mother who saw.
A mother who believed them.
A mother who placed herself between the child and the person who violated them.
Behind the accusation, there was therefore often grief.
Not only over what the mother did or failed to do, but over the family that had never existed in the way the child had needed. When they looked back as adults, they discovered that the mother had not been the person they had imagined or hoped she would be.
The question “Where was Mother?” therefore contained more than accusation.
It contained longing.
Why did you not come?
Why did you not see me?
Why was I not important enough for you to protect me?
Such questions cannot be dismissed as unreasonable. They express the child’s experience of having been abandoned in a situation where they were entirely dependent upon adults.
Yet it remains necessary to ask what the mother actually knew, what power she possessed, and which possibilities were available to her.
Responsibility Must Be Examined Concretely
There is a danger in both directions.
On the one hand, we may minimise the mother’s responsibility. We may explain her passivity through fear, dependence, or lack of knowledge and thereby overlook the child’s actual experience of betrayal.
On the other hand, we may make the mother responsible for everything that happened within the family, including actions she did not know about or had limited ability to stop.
Neither is just.
Responsibility must be examined concretely.
What did she know?
What did she have reason to suspect?
How did she respond when she learned the truth?
What power did she possess within the family?
Did she have the economic and social means to leave the man?
Was she herself subjected to violence, threats, or control?
Were there people or institutions able to support her?
Did she attempt to protect the child, even if the attempt failed?
These questions should not be used to excuse the mother in advance. Their purpose is to prevent judgement from being passed before the situation has been understood.
Guilt and responsibility must follow knowledge, power, and genuine possibilities for action.
When the Mother Herself Lives in Fear
Several of the mothers described in the dissertation material appeared to have lived in patriarchal families in which the man made the decisions and exercised power over both the woman and the children.
In such families, the question “Why did she not leave?” may seem simple from the outside.
From within, the situation may have been different.
The woman may have been financially dependent.
Socially isolated.
Threatened.
Worn down over many years.
She may have known that resistance would lead to violence, loss of housing, or loss of the children. She may have lacked language for what she experienced and been convinced that no one would help her.
This does not mean that the child experienced the betrayal less deeply.
The child needed protection and did not receive it.
But the mother’s failure to act does not necessarily mean that she was indifferent. It may also express that her own capacity to act had been undermined.
A person may bear moral responsibility while at the same time possessing very limited freedom.
That is precisely why such situations are difficult.
The Passive Woman and the Responsible Mother
Society may place contradictory demands upon women.
She should be loyal to the family.
Keep the marriage together.
Avoid exaggerating conflicts.
Avoid accusing the man without secure evidence.
But at the same time, she is expected to be the one who sees everything, protects the child, and acts immediately if something is wrong.
The same woman may be criticised for breaking up the family if she leaves, and for failing the child if she stays.
She is expected to be subordinate and forceful at the same time.
When something serious happens, the ideal of the good mother is used against her. She is judged not only according to what she actually did, but according to everything a perfect mother should have been able to prevent.
The man is judged for the act he committed.
The mother is judged for the entire family.
This is a gendered distribution of responsibility.
When the Child Protects the Mother
A striking feature of the material was that several participants both accused and defended their mothers.
They might say that the mother must have known, while at the same time explaining why she did not intervene. They could feel anger and shame, but also compassion and loyalty.
This is not necessarily a contradiction.
A daughter may be furious with her mother and still love her.
She may understand her mother’s fear without cancelling her own experience of betrayal.
She may long for closeness and at the same time keep her distance.
She may want the mother to take responsibility while also protecting her from blame.
Human relationships can rarely be divided into pure emotions.
Love may exist alongside hatred.
Longing alongside rejection.
Understanding alongside accusation.
When we demand that the daughter choose one true story about the mother, we make the experience smaller than it is.
She may have been both abused and betrayed.
The mother may have been both oppressed and responsible.
When the Mother’s Betrayal Feels Most Painful
Some participants described the mother’s failure to protect as almost more painful than the father’s sexual betrayal.
At first glance, this may seem difficult to understand. The father committed the abuse. Why should the feelings toward the mother become stronger?
One possible explanation lies in the significance of the relationship.
The abusive father may gradually lose his place as someone from whom the child expects care. Trust is destroyed. He becomes the dangerous person.
The mother may remain as the significant other.
She is the person who should have seen and rescued. Precisely because the expectation of her remains alive, the disappointment may become so profound.
A person may stop expecting anything good from the perpetrator.
It is more difficult to stop longing for the mother.
The shame and rage directed toward her may therefore be connected to a relationship that still matters.
The accusation does not only say:
You failed me.
It also says:
I needed you.
Feeling Ashamed of One’s Mother
Mother-Shaming concerns more than holding the mother responsible.
The mother may also be condemned and reduced through contempt, humiliation, stigmatisation, or exclusion.
She becomes the bad mother.
The weak woman.
The one who allowed it to happen.
The one who does not deserve contact.
Some daughters may also feel ashamed of being the child of this particular mother. The mother’s actions or passivity become part of the daughter’s own self-understanding:
What does it say about me that I have a mother like this?
Here again, shame reveals its relational character. We do not feel ashamed only of ourselves. We may also feel ashamed of people to whom we are closely connected, because their actions seem to cast a light back upon us.
The daughter may attempt to create distance:
I will never become like her.
I will always protect my own children.
This may be an important moral decision. But if the whole identity is built in opposition to the mother, the mother remains a hidden centre within the life.
When the Mother Actually Failed
A critique of Mother-Blaming must never become a new way of silencing the child.
Some mothers knew.
Some chose not to believe.
Some protected the man or the reputation of the family rather than the child.
Some threatened the child into silence.
Others subjected the child to physical or emotional violence themselves.
In such cases, it is not unreasonable to hold the mother responsible.
To understand her life situation does not mean cancelling what she did. Explanation and excuse are not the same.
The mother may herself have been subjected to oppression while also failing the child.
She may have had limited possibilities while still choosing not to use the possibilities she did have.
The child’s experience must not be sacrificed in order to create a more nuanced picture of the adult.
The nuances must contain both.
The child had a right to protection.
The mother must be judged according to what she actually knew and could do.
The perpetrator must continue to bear responsibility for the abuse.
The Shame of Not Knowing
Mothers may also carry shame about what they failed to discover.
How could this happen in my home?
Why did I not see the signs?
What kind of mother am I if I did not understand?
Such questions may arise even when the abuse was concealed and the mother had no reasonable possibility of knowing.
After the truth is known, the past may look different. Small events acquire new meaning. A change in the child’s behaviour, a remark, or an uneasiness that at the time had many possible explanations now appears as a sign she should have understood.
But the knowledge she possesses afterwards was not necessarily available to her then.
The mother too may judge her former self with knowledge she acquired only later.
Shame tells her that a good mother should have seen what was invisible.
She does not then need a quick reassurance that she bears no responsibility. She needs help in examining the difference between what she could actually have known and what she now believes she should have known.
Suspicion Without Proof
The dissertation also described how difficult it may be for a mother to live with the suspicion that the child may have been abused when there is no secure knowledge.
She may see signs that concern her without knowing what they mean. The police or other authorities may close the case because the evidence is insufficient. Yet the suspicion does not disappear.
The mother may then remain in an unbearable uncertainty.
If she believes the suspicion, she risks accusing an innocent person.
If she dismisses it, she risks failing the child.
She may never receive a final answer.
In such situations, the helper’s task is not to create a certainty that the material does not justify. It is to support the mother in living and acting responsibly within uncertainty.
Here too, shame may become intense:
I should know.
I should be able to protect.
I should find the truth.
But sometimes complete certainty does not exist.
When the Helping System Looks for the Responsible Mother
Professional social work and other services may themselves contribute to Mother-Blaming.
When a child has been abused, attention is often directed toward the mother’s capacity to provide care:
Why did she not protect?
Can she continue to care for the child?
Is she strong enough to stand against the man?
Such assessments may be necessary for the child’s safety. But they may also lead to the mother’s failures being examined more thoroughly than the perpetrator’s actions and the social conditions that isolated the family.
The mother is the available person.
She attends the meetings.
She must explain.
She must carry out the measures.
She must secure the child and cooperate with the services.
The person who committed the abuse may be absent, deny everything, or remain unavailable.
The demands of the helping system therefore gather around the mother.
This may be understandable in practical terms, but morally problematic. The person who is most available is not automatically the person who bears the greatest guilt.
Better Questions
Instead of immediately asking why the mother did not leave, we may ask:
What prevented her?
What support was missing?
What threats did she live under?
Whom could she have approached?
How was she received when she tried to speak?
What does she need now in order to protect the child?
Such questions do not release her from responsibility.
They make responsibility concrete.
They also open the possibility of action. If the mother lives in fear, financial dependence, or social isolation, it is not enough to ask her to become stronger. Her actual scope for action must be expanded.
She may need housing.
Legal protection.
Financial support.
Knowledge.
People who stand with her when she breaks with the man or the family.
To demand courage without offering support is an easy form of morality.
Professional help must make action possible.
Recognition Is Not Acquittal
To meet the mother with recognition does not mean declaring her innocent.
It means meeting her as a human being before reaching a conclusion.
She must be allowed to describe what she knew, feared, and attempted. Her life situation must be examined without allowing the child’s experience to disappear.
Recognition may also mean saying clearly:
You should have protected the child.
What you did was not sufficient.
The child has a right to be angry.
But such confrontation must be directed toward specific actions and omissions. It must not become a judgement upon the whole person:
You are a bad mother.
You are weak.
Everything is your fault.
The first may open a path toward responsibility.
The second creates shame.
A Destructive Spiral
In the dissertation, I described Mother-Blaming, Mother-Shaming, Child-Blaming, and Child-Shaming as parts of a destructive spiral.
The father or another adult violates the child.
The child receives guilt and shame.
The mother is accused of failing to protect.
She carries her own guilt and shame.
The child may protect the mother while at the same time feeling furious with her.
The mother may become so overwhelmed by her own shame that she has less capacity to meet the child’s pain.
The child may then experience that they must once again take care of the mother.
In this way, the burdens move between them.
The person who committed the abuse may disappear from the relationship, while mother and child remain with guilt, anger, grief, and shame.
Shame does not clarify responsibility.
It binds them to one another in a painful way.
Separating Guilt from Grief
For the daughter, it may be essential to be allowed to grieve the mother she did not have.
Not only to accuse.
Not immediately to forgive.
But to grieve.
She may have lost the idea of the protective mother even though the mother is still alive. This is a loss without a clear ending. The relationship exists, but it is not the relationship the child needed.
Grief may contain several truths:
I love her.
I am angry with her.
She failed me.
She was herself afraid.
I understand more now.
What happened was still unjust.
Such grief does not have to end in reconciliation or renewed contact. But it may make it possible to live without allowing shame and accusation alone to organise the entire relationship.
The Mother Also Needs Help
If the goal is to protect children, we must also help mothers who live under oppression.
Not because their needs are more important than the child’s.
But because the mother’s ability to protect often depends upon the support she herself receives.
A mother who is met only with criticism may become more ashamed, more defensive, and less able to act. A mother who is met with respect, clear accountability, and concrete help may gain a greater ability to stand with the child.
She may need to hear two messages at the same time:
The child must be protected.
You should not stand alone in the work of protecting them.
This is not indulgence.
It is practical wisdom.
When Responsibility Finds Its Proper Place
It is not always possible to create a story in which everyone is understood and the relationship is repaired.
Some mothers never take responsibility.
Some children do not want or need further contact.
Some relationships are so abusive that distance is necessary.
The goal therefore cannot be to reunite mother and child at any cost.
The goal must be to place responsibility truthfully.
The perpetrator bears responsibility for the abuse.
The mother bears responsibility for what she knew, did, and failed to do within her actual scope for action.
Society and the helping system must examine which forms of protection and support were absent.
The child does not carry the guilt of the adults.
When these distinctions become clearer, the destructive spiral may perhaps be broken.
The Mother Is More Than the Judgement
Shame readily turns one failure into the whole truth about a person.
It says:
She did not protect. Therefore she is nothing but a bad mother.
But a human being cannot be reduced to a single description, even when they have failed seriously.
To see more does not make the failure less serious.
It means holding on to the fact that responsibility and human dignity may exist at the same time.
The mother may be held accountable without being humiliated.
The child’s anger may be recognised without being used to continue society’s contempt for women.
The power relations within the family may be examined without making the mother’s actions disappear.
This is demanding because we often seek one guilty person.
The guilty father.
The failing mother.
The silent family.
Reality may contain all of these at the same time, but not with the same responsibility.
When the Mother Is Blamed
The mother is blamed when she is made responsible for more than she knew, could do, or actually did.
She is also blamed when society’s expectations of motherhood are used as the standard for a perfect protection that no one can guarantee.
But the critique of Mother-Blaming must never cause the child’s experience to be explained away.
Some mothers failed.
Some failed seriously.
The child has a right to say:
You were not there when I needed you.
At the same time, social work must ask:
What happened to the mother’s ability to be there?
Who controlled the family?
What support did she receive?
And why is she left carrying responsibility for the act another person committed?
Perhaps the practical-philosophical task lies precisely here:
To refuse the simple judgements.
To see both the child and the mother.
To place responsibility precisely.
To face the betrayal without creating new shame.
For if we oppose violation by humiliating yet another human being, we have not broken the movement of shame.
We have only passed it on.
For if we oppose violation by humiliating yet another human being,
we have not broken the movement of shame.
We have only passed it on.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This essay is number 14 in the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based particularly on the doctoral dissertation’s chapters on mothers and on Mother-Blaming and Mother-Shaming. In the material, all participants mentioned the theme of mothers and shame. Several placed a particular responsibility for protection upon the mother, even when she had no knowledge of the abuse, while others described genuine experiences of passivity, rejection, or betrayal. The dissertation discusses how the blaming and shaming of mothers may be based on idealised images of motherhood and gendered expectations, while at the same time emphasising that mothers’ actual responsibility must be assessed concretely. It also points out that several mothers may have lived within oppressive, patriarchal relationships and may themselves have needed support and recognition rather than further blame and shame.
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