We began by considering the model developed by Roland Summit, an American psychiatrist. Although we refer to abusers as "he", it is important to remember that a small proportion of children are abused by women. We are also writing about victims of either gender.

Sexually abused children find it hard to tell anyone about the abuse. Summit highlighted key factors which explain this.

Secrecy underpins all sexual abuse. It is imperative to the abuser not to be found out and so he works hard to ensure the child's silence. The core is to bring the child to a point where he or she believes the responsibility for the abuse, and keeping the secret, is theirs. Often the child is made, by threats, to anticipate the consequences of telling. Sometimes the child is made to feel special and is caught in a seductive web by the abuser.

A sense of helplessness follows the secrecy. Societal values emphasise the omnipotence of adults over children. Adults are people whom children are expected to believe and obey. Children are taught to be wary of strangers but this offers little protection when most abuse is perpetrated by known and trusted adults. Children have no mandate to deal with this. They are dependent and need to believe in the intrinsic goodness of adults. The alternative is to fear abandonment. Therefore, the child must take the burden of blame on to their own shoulders believing they, not the adult, are bad. Herein lies the source of the low self esteem which haunts so many survivors.

Sexual abusers use power in a way which overwhelms the child. We may expect a child to cry out, resist or try to escape but none are realistic options. Instead their response is very similar to a small creature cornered by a predator. They freeze, physically and emotionally and so accommodate themselves to the abuse, coping silently with the terror. Sometimes the reaction is so extreme that memories and feelings are buried deep within the mind, as if put into a freezer. Recall may be triggered by later life events or even a smell or an image. The memory which emerges is unprocessed, with every detail remembered. The survivor will experience again what it is to be a small, helpless, frightened child. Normal coping mechanisms will be of little help. Reactions to ordinary events and people may change. Certain words will assume a significance they did not have before and familiar beliefs may fade away.

We can now understand more easily why a child who manages to disclose does so in a tentative, disjointed and, sometimes, unconvincing way. The abuser may be well loved and respected by others. The abuse may have created difficulties in the child's behaviour, so they are already regarded as difficult and unreliable. The child will assume no one will believe them. Sometimes allegations are retracted by the child. This can be quite a normal response when the child sees the effect of their disclosure. He or she will then remember all the means by which the abuser maintained their silence previously and so the power is reinforced.

After considering how abuse affects survivors, we moved on to think about church life in relation to their experiences.

Individuals who have been abused by their fathers may find it difficult to accept God as father because they have known a father who has betrayed them and abused his position of trust and authority. They struggle with the idea that God is love since what they have experienced is a perversion of love. An even scarier image is that of God the Father, creator of the universe who has absolute power. Power is something to be afraid of if someone has never known authority exercised with genuine love and concern.

Survivors are not necessarily any more comfortable with a maternal image of God because they may experience anger towards mothers for not protecting them.

In the Bible males represent power and women, generally, are subordinate and in the background. If their sexual side is acknowledged at all, it is often in terms of sinfulness whether real or implied. For example Eve is portrayed as a seductress who leads Adam astray. There is Rehab the prostitute, Jezebel the scheming woman, and the woman at the well. Although Jesus makes no criticism, this last story is often told and received in such a way as to cast doubt on her moral standards.

The depiction of men as the figures of authority is probably a reasonable reflection of society at the time but can be used by an abuser as justification for his actions since females appear less worth of attention (or perhaps worthless). But it is not only women who suffer from this image. If to be male is to be strong and powerful, how do male victims of abuse feel if that power is taken away by someone stronger?

Survivors of abuse may feel that God is absent from the situation because their prayers for the abuse to stop appear not to be answered. If the abuse has happened within the church, survivors may find it difficult to believe in God at all. Sometimes the Church has responded to a survivor's efforts to seek support by excluding them from the church community for sinfulness and "sexual perversion" after they have confided in a priest. A survivor's experience of abuse can leave them feeling suicidal and to be told that these feelings are sinful is less than helpful.

So how can survivors cope with coming to church in these circumstances? One way is to adapt their beliefs and focus on the areas they can cope with, for example, accepting the existence of God but not being able to call him Lord or pray to him.

We need to recognise emotional pain and allow people to be angry with God. When we talk about suffering we tend to focus on disaster, illness and disability. Domestic violence and abuse rarely appear, perhaps because we still cling to the traditional image of the family. Is it safer to concentrate on broader issues that are not so close to home?

We considered what the term "family worship" might represent to a survivor of sexual abuse. If it means attended by families, not everyone has a family and many children do not have a stable family background. If it means the church family then we need to remember that some people's experience of family is an abusive one.

In family worship, should we pick out individuals to come out and take part in activities if they appear unwilling? They might want to remain anonymous and blend into the background. If survivors have been told they are "special" and been singled out in the past, being the focus of attention could revive uncomfortable memories. However, the picture is not all negative. Some survivors find a safe haven in the Church. They find stability, support, comfort and something they can believe in and trust. They can rebuild their self worth and have a different experience of the "loving parent" relationship ­ one that does not come with strings attached. The problem for anyone leading worship, and for the church as a whole, is that we may never know whether there are survivors of abuse among us, so we need to consider how we can ensure that our worship is safe and non threatening.

We ended our session by having small groups which considered the implications for Sermons and Bible readings, Prayer and Hymns, and Childrens' Work. We aired the subjects and started some discussion. Some of the points raised by the small groups were:

• having a balance of different styles and wordings of hymns since survivors might have difficulty with some phrases.
• being aware of anyone who might have difficulty with certain phrases, for example, the Lord's Prayer "as we forgive them".
• having pastoral support in place
• being more open about the difficulties faced by some families
• explaining some of the terminology we use without assuming understanding
• thinking about how to make people feel they are loved by God without feeling threatened, using phrases such as "you matter", "we are all special to God" and "God cares about us" (some people may not be able to accept the word "love").