A mom is urging parents to be unafraid to ask their kids difficult questions after she followed her gut and asked her daughter if she was being abused. The truth was heartbreaking — it was her husband who was abusing her daughter — and now she’s speaking out so no one will wait to ask their kids if something is wrong. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it is incredibly important.
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The mom first started to suspect that something was amiss when her daughter started saying 'vague things that worried me.'
“I lived in constant worry that I was missing something,” TikToker @tountapemymouth wrote in her heartbreaking video from September 27, 2021. The mom worried “deep down” that her daughter was being sexually abused.
'But who could be abusing her? the mom wondered.
At first, she didn’t ask her daughter directly. ”I didn’t trust my own judgment, worrying maybe my own abuse as a child was making me see things that aren’t there. I was afraid I’d scare her,” she explained in the caption.
The mom suspected that it might be her father-in-law.
So she told her husband her fears, and he “vowed to help me find out and protect her.”
“Meanwhile, she kept getting sick. UTIs, kidney infections. She even stopped eating,” she wrote in the video’s caption. “I felt sick, afraid to know the truth, but I knew I needed to ask her.”
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Finally, she asked her, 'Do you have a secret?'
Her daughter did.
“She told me her secret. My husband, her father, was sexually abusing her,” she wrote. “It felt like the whole world shattered.”
Her husband was arrested three days later “and convicted.”
One commenter summed it up best — this whole thing was 'heartbreaking.'
Others praised her for taking action.
“That was me, I was your daughter,” wrote one person. “I didn’t tell my mom until I was 12. As an adult I grew resentment towards her because she never asked.”
“You stood up for your daughter and stopped the abuse, good job mom,” another person wrote.
“OMG. How. This app breaks my heart and makes me so proud of the strength of women. I’m so sorry,” another commenter added.
In a separate video, the mom shared that they’d talked about body privacy with their daughter before the truth came to light.
And by “they” she meant she AND her husband.
“That’s how he made her feel responsible for the abuse,” she explained in another video from October 26, 2021. “He would say, ‘I taught you that you shouldn’t let people touch you like that. I was testing you to see if you remembered that you weren’t supposed to let people touch you like that.”
She urged parents to still have these conversations with their kids but keep in mind “those conversations are important but they’re not fool-proof.”
That is why the mom is now offering her important piece of advice: “Ask your child. Even if you’re terrified of the answer.
“Ask them. Ask them. Ask them,” she wrote.
If you suspect that your child is being abused, RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, is available to help. Calls are toll-free, confidential, and operators are available 24/7. Call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
