The data analysis allowed us to identify nine themes organized in three meta-themes: (1) Parents: alerts and search for support; (2) between parents and adolescents: a disruption in relationships due to the disclosure and its legal consequences; (3) disclosure at the level of the family: the possible reactivation of a traumatic past and the search for a new equilibrium (See Table 2).

Table 2 Summary of themesParents: alerts and search for support

This first meta-theme describes how parents were alerted by their teens’ signs of distress, the emotional reactions associated with the disclosure, and their search for individual support and for guidance in their parenting.

Before disclosure: what alerted parents and how they sought care for their child

Signs of ill-being alerted the parents and led them to mobilize to find appropriate care for their child. The participants reported perceiving their children’s ill-being because of their anxiety, sadness, social isolation, or cutting and other forms of self-harm. Risk behaviors also frequently warned parents about the existence of a problem in their adolescent:

“It was the first time that we’d seen her in this state [of drunkenness], a child who hadn’t ever drunk! Well, an endangerment, in fact, an endangerment, but dreadful. She vomited all night (P10, 16) (Parent, child’s age at disclosure).”

These parents perceived that the child’s distress might affect her relation to school, with either absenteeism, or a degradation in her grades.

Parents also worried about changes in the child’s relationships with their peers or with themselves.

“But in fact I rapidly understood that at a physical level she couldn’t stand for me to touch her, for me to come near. She hates my smell, my breath, in fact, even if she doesn’t smell it, she smells it very well. That is, there’s a real rejection (P4, 14).”

The onset of conflicts or ruptures in communication also alerted parents about the child’s distress:

“She didn’t want my help anymore in her work, which I’d always done before, that is, when help was asked for, there was no problem. Now, ‘no’ was systematic, ‘I don’t need it.‘ The situation, the communication between us deteriorated progressively throughout tenth grade (school year 10). … Our relationship with Rose was entirely made up of conflict (P8, 15).”

Several parents shared the impression that they no longer “recognized” their child and worried that something that would hurt her might be hidden from them.

Thus, the feeling of reaching one’s limits for understanding the child’s difficulties and being incapable of providing help led families to seek professional help and begin specialized care The observation of psychological distress and inability to find a solution led parents to look for help outside the family:

“I said [to my daughter]: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but in any case, the three of us can’t solve it, because we’ve tried and failed… (P10, 16)”.

During disclosure: emotional reactions including shock, guilt, anger, and empathy

The start of psychiatric care for the adolescent provided the occasion to reveal the CSA, past or present. After disclosure to the physician, the parent was informed either directly by the adolescent (for six parents), or by the physician (seven parents).

Parents described their shock, their stupefaction at the moment of the disclosure, using numerous metaphors to underline the intensity:

“I swear, I was thunderstruck … It’s a tsunami in a parent’s face, a thing like that (P1, 16).“ “I fell off a cliff. … I was stunned. … It was as someone had cut off my legs (P5, 15).”

Sometimes, related to this shock, several parents could not help but express doubts about the veracity of the facts reported:

“We [father and mother] are flabbergasted, especially me. I even doubted it because, as there was some tension, I didn’t know how much truth there was in what she said (P11, 16)”.

The primary affect, dominating all others in the entire set of interviews in this study, remained guilt. To not have seen, not have known how to listen to the child, not have known how to protect her: parents reproached themselves strongly:

“It was pretty hard to take that in. To take it in because you have a feeling of failure… of not having seen that she wasn’t well. Because if the sexual assault dated to the 7th grade (when she was 12), that means that there were signs, that we didn’t see them (P10, 16).”

They often had the impression that they had failed to fulfill their role as parents.

It also happened that parents felt responsible for the child knowing the abuser. This was the case here, where the mother’s partner was the abuser named by her daughter. The guilt was thus intense:

“No one is going to feel sorry for me because I’m the mother of a child who was abused. Because in fact no. There is obviously something wrong because for a parent to put [the child] in a relation with an abuser, well finally, that’s it. That can only happen through school or the family. That’s clear. But [we’re] the link between the abuser and the child, that is, the victim (P4, 14).”

Parents also express great anger toward themselves, but also towards the abuser, voicing ideas of vengeance:

“Knowing that a boy abused my daughter, what should I have done? … Go to the school and break this little young man’s legs because I was furious? … I felt angry (P11, 16).”

Finally parents proclaimed especially their empathy towards their child:

“[We said to her] that we really felt awful for her and that now that she had talked about it, that was really good, and that was going to be able to help her, truly (P6, 14).”

But the parent’s empathy could also be expressed toward the juvenile aggressor:

“For us, somewhere, he was also a victim of this, he will also have to take himself in hand to heal in fact, that he also needed to heal from that (P1, 16).”

After disclosure: parents seeking individual support and guidance in parenting

After the disclosure of CSA, parents were very affected emotionally and sometimes reported a need for psychological support for themselves. The child’s psychiatric care means that the parents met regularly with the doctor to discuss the course and management. Parents were able to feel institutional support for themselves, from their child’s psychiatrist, in relation to the difficulties they were experiencing with the child. This association was important for them:

“And from the beginning of therapy, therefore from before the disclosure until today, we always had this link with Madame X, we could always call her, we could always see her, for every question, every problem (P7, 14).”

Inversely, some parents reported that inadequate time was allocated to them to allow them to discuss their concerns and ask their questions after the disclosure. Beyond wanting to express their personal feelings as parents, they talked about their need for guidance for the family in this exceptional situation:

“How do we tell the other children? Do we have to tell them? At what age? How do we explain family secrets? …. That’s what I would have needed (P1, 16).”

Several parents expressed the need for interviews for themselves or individual therapy, which they had missed:

“The management isn’t adequate, really. It’s not adequate. … it would be good if there was more systematic support for parents (P7).”

They had doubts about their parenting skills and would have liked to be guided individually in their decision making:

“I’ve made an appointment with a shrink in private practice to be able to discuss some things, because in fact we don’t know if we’re doing things right or not. There’s nothing offered for parents for that (P6, 14).”

Between parents and adolescents: a disruption in relationships linked to the disclosure and its legal consequences

This meta-theme deals with the effects of disclosure on the dynamics of the parent-teen relationship, as well as the legal procedures and their effects on this relationship.

Disturbances in the relationship equilibrium and in parent-child communication

After the disclosure, the balance in the parent-child relationship was disturbed, and their communication could be impeded, even interrupted.

The difficulty in adjusting to the shock of the disclosure could come from the parents rather than the adolescent:

“Up until yesterday evening, when we talked a little, our relationship had not actually improved… I realized that I was not ready, in fact, and that she certainly expected that (P1, 16).”

Or the distancing could come from the adolescent:

“But it’s very hard not to be able take her in my arms and give her big kisses. Anyway, it’s hard to be rejected all the time; it’s complicated (P4, 14).”

The important increase in parental worries after the disclosure sometimes impeded the pursuit of a more peaceful parent-child relationship:

“In any case, that created a relationship strongly marked by all that; that is; I worried very much… I also pointed out to her that she was sick, that she’s ‘not well’ in quotation marks. And as a result there’s still a kind of anxiety still there between us (P6, 14).”

Communication in the family was also questioned according to whether it was or was not possible to talk about the facts disclosed. The subject might be experienced as too difficult to talk about or needing to be avoided completely, so that it’s not thought about anymore and the family can “turn the page”:

“I haven’t talked about it because for me it’s finished, over and done with. … The page is turned (P3, 15).”

Another choice parents could make was to voluntarily avoid the subject of CSA, with the idea of leaving the child free to raise it:

“We don’t talk about, we don’t talk about [her brother]. If Chloé wants to talk about it, we will, we’re here (P5, 15).”

Legal proceedings: relief, doubt, and rejection

Some parents experienced the reports written by the health professional after the adolescent’s disclosure as a relief and a recognition of the child’s status as the victim of a crime:

“There was a lot of gratitude and recognition that it was done, that it was put down as non-negotiable in fact. It’s like that and it was so good (P1, 16).”

But the report to the child protective authorities was sometimes experienced as a violent procedure difficult to accept, in particular in situations disclosing intrafamily sexual abuse, as for this mother whose daughter reported incest with her oldest son:

“When they [the doctors] talked to us about an investigation, the police, there it wasn’t the sky but the universe that crashed down on my head (P3, 15).”

The consequences of reporting was sometimes very frightening, especially because of how slowly legal procedures move. Some parents explained to us that more than a year after the disclosure and the report, they were still awaiting a response by the child protective department or the court system:

“We’ve always got a knot in the stomach about what’s going to happen. … But in the end, we’ve waited days, weeks, months, and we’re always afraid at every moment that the doorbell will ring, after we’ve resumed our life (P3, 15).”

This late legal response can make the family work still more complex, freezing the conflicting relations and postponing the possibility of work to find a new family equilibrium.

As to filing criminal complaints, that happened only for one study participant. Most refused to do it because of uncertainty about the expected effects.

“In fact therapeutically, I’m sure that it’s important to do it, … but after you also have to balance: what is going to happen and is that not going to take away everything positive that’s happened? (P1).”

But they based their decision most often on the choice of their child, who did not want to bring charges:

“She has repeatedly made it clear that for the moment she absolutely does not want to file charges and does not want us to do it. … We are not going to go against her wishes for this, because we think she’s mature enough to make this decision (P6, 14).”

The parents therefore described living through very different experiences of this reporting process, between those who felt supported and relieved by this procedure, and those who felt hurt, living through an apparently interminable anxiety-ridden situation. Parents might understand filing charges as an important process, but some obstacles overcame this, especially the child’s opposition.

Disclosure at the family level: possible reactivation of a traumatic past and the search for a new equilibrium

This meta-theme concerns the memories that the disclosure calls up in the parents about their own history, changes in the family dynamics, and finally the perspective of a new family equilibrium.

Reactivation of old family trauma

Five participants spontaneously mentioned their own history of CSA, linking what they had experienced to what their child had reported.

One mother, for example, recognized feeling that she confused the attack on her daughter with the one against her some 30 years ago and worried she was reacting as a child exposed to abuse rather than as the mother of such a child.

“I was abused at the same age for years, and I’d forgotten it. It took me 31 years, with lots of symptoms all my life … for these memories to return. … I feel that I sometimes forget that it isn’t me involved. It’s rather in the other direction, I forget that it’s Audrey who’s involved. And so I feel that my reaction is not that of Audrey’s mother but of the little girl I was (P1, 16).”

The difficulty in differentiating herself from her own daughter, when it comes to this trauma resembling her own, shows how this mother’s parenting capacity is undermined by this repetition of her own history in her daughter’s life.

One adolescent’s action distancing herself from a parent also recalled the reaction her mother herself had had in childhood after the abuse:

“Finally I understood, as I had also experienced CSA when I was a small child, and thus it’s by the similarities to my reactions to my parents … finally I could not approach them. It was a physical rejection, a rejection I couldn’t control (P4, 14).”

Some parents reported a repetition of this violence across generations, even though they themselves had not directly experienced this abuse. When his daughter disclosed the CSA she was subjected to, her father remembered the story of his mother, who had revealed that she had been abused by her own father. This father’s questions then confronted him with the taboo a family can create around these questions:

“I had asked too many questions and besides, yes I was the one, according to my sisters, who was stirring things up… My parents were quite old and I spoiled their end of life by stirring up shit a little (P7, 14).”

Search for a new equilibrium

After the disclosure, intrafamily relationships moved from their temporary fragility to a reorganization that could, according to some participants, help improve communication and reinforce the weakened family structure.

After the disclosure, several parents felt that the equilibrium in their family had become fragile:

“It’s very complex in fact, to not trivialize it, to give it enough importance, and at the same time, to not drag the entire family dynamic into it. Because there are also other children (P2, 16).”

But later on, after the disclosure, a new equilibrium was sought. Parents mentioned the need for family care for this. How can family life be maintained? How can we talk as a family? How can the siblings be supported?

“We have a family, it’s a family system, we take care of the child, it is important to take into consideration the repercussions of this announcement within the immediate family… In fact, I think I would have needed a space to talk with a family therapist so that we could talk about it as a family (P1, 16).” “We also worry about the little brother; he can’t be overlooked. There we were advised, we took the step, we started a work of family therapy, to give him a space to talk too (P6, 14).”

The disclosure could be recognized afterwards as propitious to change in the relationship:

“She didn’t have to weigh her words, to pay attention to what not to say. Now it’s opened up the relationship some. … There’s movement, that’s what I feel, it’s that there’s movement; therefore it’s positive if there’s movement (P1, 16).”

Finally the dynamics often moved toward rapprochement and increased support between the family members:

“We talk much more today than before with my daughter (P7, 14).“ “Yes I’ve got my daughter back. … Disclosure led to a real rapprochement (p8, 15).”

Moreover, support between the couple grew, even during these trials:

“My husband and I supported each other (P3, 15).”