From victim to overcomer

Dear Rachel says: I hear you. But it also says: God hears you too, and His attention is what really matters. Dear Rachel is not a manual. It is a letter from the heart to the heart – a conversation with women. It offers solace as well as solutions. But most importantly, Dear Rachel challenges women to progress from being victims and survivors to being overcomers.

Rachel is a mother, sister, daughter, aunt or niece. She is every woman who has ever experienced the pain of sexual abuse, whose childhood was blighted with the grief and terror of sexual violation, or who, as an adult, became, or continues to be, a victim of rape.

Rachel weeps for herself, and she weeps for her children: for babies who were snatched away at the moment of birth, foetuses prevented from reaching maturity through consensual or forced abortions. She weeps for the child whose very existence is marred by the circumstances of their conception . . . and for the child she will never bear.
Rachel is tormented by the thought that the cycle of abuse seems inevitable; she is inconsolable at the thought that her own daughter is in peril of becoming a victim too.