I have no idea. There is another board I go to that is support for families of sex offenders. There are all sorts of different circumstances that bring people there but there is a lot of knowledge and experience with legal systems and you might get an answer there. support-for-families.boards.net I know there are residential treatment centers for juvenile sex offenders but what they're thinking of for him, I have no idea.

With your daughters being the victims, are you getting any info from the DA's office or victim services? We actually found out legal news about our son from the DA's Victim Services office running things by us on her behalf. Do you have any kind of resource like that?

Thinking of you today, wondering if you've gotten any info... Do you mind if I ask your children's ages? How are your daughters doing? Have the younger ones had to give testimony?

At some point in my journey I found this website https://humanstress.ca/stress/understand-your-stress/sources-of-stress/ with lots of info on stress--when I saw their recipe for stress it helped validate how freaked out I was, because I realized that our situation was through the roof on all 4 stress factors:

NOVELTY Something new you have not experienced before
UNPREDICTABILITY Something you had no way of knowing it would occur
THREAT TO THE EGO Your competence as a person is called into question
SENSE OF CONTROL You feel you have little or no control over the situation

I'm sorry to hear that you're facing another source of uncertainty, Notch8. Please update.

brknhrt, that is a valuable link. Thanks for posting.

Another factor not on that list but that is also through-the-roof in our world is the factor of social ostracism/isolation. I wish I could remember where it was, when I read this it made so much sense. It says that threat of social isolation/shame can be as stresssful as threat of death, because for most of human history, a human who wasn't part of a group would be dead before long. It was just too hard to survive alone. This is one reason the fear of public speaking is pretty much universal and so irrationally terrifying--standing alone with a lot of eyes on you is exactly what a single, cornered individual surrounded by predators would experience.

We had a thread of the families of offenders board where we all agreed that finding out someone you love was an offender wasn't unlike finding out they had died, and we speculated about why. I have heard multiple rape and abuse victims say their former self, or part of them, or their soul, died. At the time of the Kavanaugh hearing there was an op-ed where a man explained that it's easier for a man to admit to murder than to sexual assault. And just today I was listening to a podcast where a survivor of childhood abuse was trying to explain how hard it is to tell what happened, that for a long time she felt she'd rather die than tell anyone her secret.

So anyway, if it feels like a death to you, you're not alone.

This was definitely true for me, brknhrt. Disclosure brought me the news that the daughter I thought I knew had been killed 16 years earlier.

It was also true that I died, too, when I learned the truth. I could talk to very few people about what I was going through. The rest of the people who knew me had no idea that the person they thought they were seeing was gone. It was "The Sixth Sense" in reverse -- I knew I was dead, but other people thought I was alive. (Oh, geez -- I hope I haven't ruined the ending for anyone....)

So, grief was a huge part of my suffering, and it was a grief my husband and I suffered largely alone.

Brknhrt, you've put this in terms I hadn't considered. When and where religion was/is the center of people's social life, that was/is exactly the purpose of excommunication and shunning. It tells the banished: "You are dead to us!" So no wonder that becomes fact sooner than later. No one ostracized us parents of children who have been sexually abused, but we protectively withdraw as we struggle to shield our children's privacy and protect ourselves from public shame (instead, we generate our OWN guilt and shame). No one except the members of this group -- not even my husband -- knew that, like someone shunned, for at five years after disclosure, I went to sleep every night hoping that I would not wake up the next morning.

AND YET....thank God that many children do come forward to tell their stories. It can be the first step toward healing and maybe, if they're lucky, justice. The fact is that loving parents will suffer greatly at and after disclosure. But we are willing to bear that grief to help our children survive.