A woman who was abused by her father, an active figure in the church, for seven years, is speaking out about her suffering and how she rebuilt her faith in God.
Cambodian-American stay-at-home mom and homeschooler, Debora Shanley, 35, was born in Thailand in a refugee camp and moved to the United States at the age of 5 with her mom. Today, she lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband of 14 years and their three kids.
“My grandparents on my dad’s side, they came to America first to escape from the holocaust in Cambodia,” Mrs. Shanley told The Epoch Times. “When my dad came here, I was only a week old. It was about four or five years later, after he was separated from my mom and I, that we were able to reunite with him in Houston.”
‘A Tyrant in Control’
Mrs. Shanley says her father held several leadership roles in the church including deacon, pianist, choir singer, and Sunday school tutor for seniors. Later, he would do mission work. His public face was “very charismatic, very outgoing, very friendly,” but at home, he was “more like a tyrant in control,” she says.“Before he started to be inappropriate, he was already placing fear in my life—he called it ‘disciplining,’” she said. “I was already afraid of him, not just as a father but this authority figure in my life that I was supposed to respect and honor. I really was groomed and conditioned by him to not fight back, physically or verbally.”
When Mrs. Shanley was in the fifth grade, her mother, who was suffering domestic abuse, took her three children and fled to Minnesota to stay with a friend from the refugee camp in Thailand. A week later, Mrs. Shanley’s father found them and “sweet-talked” his wife into returning home. That was when the sexual abuse began.
“When I was 12, I just remember him coming into my bedroom,” Mrs. Shanley said. “We lived in a two-bedroom duplex, my mom and him in one room, and my two siblings and I in one room. We had a bunk bed; I slept on the top bunk.
“My mom, she started to work at the airport as a custodian. She would leave at nighttime and come back home a little bit later in the morning time, so that was the time my dad used to come to my room and touch me inappropriately.
Empty Promises
Mrs. Shanley was first raped by her father in the seventh grade. Groomed into silence, she never spoke of the abuse to anyone, finding solace only at church and school. When she was a freshman in high school, her mother summoned the courage to leave her husband. The kids had a choice: Leave with mom or stay with dad.“My dad manipulated the situation. He told my mom, ‘If you let the three children live with me, you won’t have to pay all the divorce and court fees or child support money,’” Mrs. Shanley said. “He said to me, ‘When we go live at this new house, you’ll have your own room, you‘ll have a lock.’ I think he was trying to tell me that he wasn’t going to do anything to me anymore, but that was going to be a lie.”
Mrs. Shanley trusted her father and agreed to live with him, along with her younger brother and sister. Her mother moved in with friends from work and saw her children only on weekends. Mrs. Shanley would often stay behind, manipulated by her father to take care of him.
She said: “My mom thought that her kids must have not loved her because that was the illusion that my dad created. On the other side, my dad created the illusion for me to think that my mom didn’t care about us and that it was safe to be with him instead. I grew up not being able to say ‘no’ to him, ever, and that just further damaged my relationship with my mom.
Painful Revelations
Everything changed after Mrs. Shanley left for college, which was four hours from Houston. A few months into her first semester, her brother called to say that their sister, Rebecca, had admitted to being sexually abused by their father. Mrs. Shanley was distraught.“I started crying right away, and I ran to my resident director of my dorm and told her, and she called the police back in Houston,” Mrs. Shanley said. “They arrested my dad right away, that night, and my mom came to pick up my brother and sister from my dad. From that point on, was when my siblings lived with my mom.”
Mrs. Shanley says her father was arrested and taken to jail but called on his connections to bail him out. She went to live with her mom and siblings. During the two-year trial that ensued, their mother was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer.
“I knew my siblings were going to go into the foster system,” Mrs. Shanley said, “so I suggested for all of us to lie and say that we made up the story that he sexually abused us. I signed an affidavit at the trial ... they closed the case. My dad didn’t go to prison, and, months later, my mom passed away from cancer so my siblings ended up living with my dad again. He remarried, and that’s how life moved on.”
Mrs. Shanley’s younger sister, Rebecca, passed away at the age of 19. Her younger brother is now 30. She also has an older half-sister, born in Cambodia to her father’s first wife. Upon reconnecting with her older sister, Mrs. Shanley learned that they had a tragic shared experience.
The Road to Healing
Mrs. Shanley’s personal healing journey began when she was married at 21 to her husband, whom she'd told about the abuse when they started dating.Her father was present at the wedding; he was remarried, and it “really seemed like he was a better person.” But Mrs. Shanley and her husband had a personal rule: Her father would never take care of their children.
It wasn’t until the age of 29, settled into family life and with a close-knit church group, that Mrs. Shanley felt safe enough to share her story. The first people she told were at church.
“I think the community I was developing with them, it made me feel safe,” she said. “They encouraged me to go to Christian counseling, and they provided for me to do that.”
In counseling, Mrs. Shanley “felt a fog lift” from her mind. She decided to pursue therapy on her own and prayed to God for a therapist who would understand her experience. After months of searching, she found a Christian therapist with her own history of sexual abuse and is seeing her to this day.
Heroes vs. Villains
Mrs. Shanley learned that she had dissociated to cope with the abuse, showing the world that she was a “happy, outgoing” person while minimizing her situation to herself, never experiencing rage or resentment. Through healing, she has been able to tap into a “righteous anger” and feels compelled to share her story to prove that life can be beautiful, even after trauma.While her father has never apologized, she has learned to choose forgiveness each time she relives a painful memory and has repaired her relationship with God through understanding that His love is nothing like her earthly father’s.
“Everybody responds differently in how they might think of God after they experience something traumatic. They could either reject God, they could withdraw from God, [and the] last one I didn’t know was cowering,” she said.
“I realized that the view I had of my dad was what I projected onto God. I only wanted to say pretty things to God, good things—I wanted to make sure God will always love me. I’m having a lot of revelations in my healing, and these revelations contribute to rebuilding my faith and rebuilding that intimacy I have with God.”
Mrs. Shanley feels happy that her mother and Rebecca are no longer living a life of suffering and wonders whether God has lessons for her father. Healing from childhood sexual abuse while raising her own children has been one of Mrs. Shanley’s biggest challenges, but it has also kept her going.
“It’s been beautiful to see that God has used motherhood and homeschooling my children to be the motivation and inspiration for me to keep healing,” she said. “At the same time, it’s been redeeming because what my children get to have now in their childhood is what I didn’t get to have. So it’s been healing for me to see them experience that.
“I heard a story, I love the analogy. A hero and a villain. They have very similar backgrounds; they had a traumatic childhood. But the difference between a villain and a hero is that the villain goes on to hurt other people because life hurt him, and the hero chooses to take the pain that happened to him and prevent it from happening to other people. I love that.”
Mrs. Shanley hopes that sharing her painful story will help other survivors to know they’re not alone; encourage them to have hope; and believe that they deserve to experience a beautiful life, rebuild what was taken from them, and use their own story to help and protect others too.
“There is a God, for sure. There’s meaning in life,” she said.
