When the System Defends the Person Who Hurt Your Child

By Jonah A. Thorne III, author of To the Man I Called Father

When you’re facing any type of injustice, you can’t help but picture what real justice would look like. You play the scene out in your mind — every wrong named, every harm counted, your child finally seen and believed. Then reality arrives, and you realize how naïve you were about the justice system.

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a parent who spent years inside this system fighting for my child. What follows is what no one told us — what we could never have imagined — the things that ambushed us, and what I wish we had known walking in. If you’re at the start of this, I hope what my family went through helps prepare you.

First, understand what this process actually is

The justice system is not a search for the truth. It is a set of procedures for resolving a case on behalf of the state. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them will be one of the hardest parts of this to accept.

If you’ve only seen the television version of our legal system, set it aside. You are in for a wake-up call. Nothing is neat. Nothing resolves in an hour. The system is, at best, glacial, and for a family it is an unbearable waiting game of heartbreak and disappointment — even when you win. Brace for that now. At many points, the process will feel like it is working against your child rather than for them. That feeling doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. It is the normal experience of a family inside it.

The system’s first duty is to protect the rights of the accused — not to deliver justice to the victim.

Understanding that from the start will save you a great deal of heartbreak.

Every state is different — and so is every county

Before anything else, understand this: there is no single “justice system.” There are fifty-plus of them, and they don’t work alike.

The laws that define these crimes, what they’re called, how they’re charged, and how they’re punished vary from state to state. So do the deadlines, the rules for who can testify and how, the rights victims and families are granted, and even the basic vocabulary. What is one charge in one state may be three in another. A protection available to your child in one place may not exist across the state line. And when a case touches more than one state — as ours did — the complications multiply.

It goes deeper than state law. Two counties in the same state can feel like different worlds. The size of the prosecutor’s office, how overloaded the local courts are, how often the court convenes, the temperament of the particular judge you draw, whether there’s a Children’s Advocacy Center nearby — all of it shapes what your family will actually experience, and none of it is in your control.

This is why I can tell you what happened to us, and what tends to be true, but I cannot tell you what will happen to you. Nobody writing a general guide can. So take everything here as a map of the terrain, not a set of directions — and get directions from someone who knows your ground:

Ask your victim advocate, early, to walk you through how things work in your specific jurisdiction — the local timeline, the local rights, the local players.

Find out what victims’ rights your state guarantees. Most states have a victims’ rights statute, and many have a victim/witness office attached to the prosecutor. What you’re entitled to — notice of hearings, input on pleas, the right to be present, the right to make a statement — is written down somewhere, and it differs by state. Know yours.

If your case crosses state lines, expect it to be slower and more tangled, and make sure someone on your side is tracking how the two jurisdictions interact.

When something in this guide doesn’t match what you’re seeing, believe what you’re seeing. Your jurisdiction is the one you’re in.

Watch the calendar — your child may “age out” of your involvement mid-case

Here is something almost no one warns families about, and it stems directly from how slow these cases are: because they can take years, your child may cross a legal age threshold during the proceedings. And when they do, their status in the case can change — sometimes in ways that quietly move you, the parent, to the outside.

Depending on your state, once your child reaches a certain age, they may be treated as the adult party in their own case. The prosecutor may begin communicating with them directly rather than with you. Your access to information, your ability to speak on your child’s behalf, even your standing to be in the room, can narrow or fall away. Nothing announces this. It happens by the calendar, not by anyone’s decision, and a family that started this journey with a frightened twelve-year-old can find themselves, years later, legally on the outside of their own child’s case.

The exact age and consequences vary by state — another thing that differs everywhere, which is why you need to ask about it specifically. But the lesson is the same wherever you are:

Ask your victim advocate or the prosecutor early what happens in your jurisdiction when your child reaches sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. Find out before you get there.

Talk with your child, ahead of time, about what they want their role to be if and when that shift comes — so it’s a conversation you have together, not a wall you hit by surprise.

Understand that even when the law moves your child into the driver’s seat, your role doesn’t end. It changes. Your child will still need you beside them — as support, as memory, as the constant — even when the paperwork no longer lists you as the one in charge.

Delay is a strategy, not bad luck

Continuances — postponements of hearings — will become a fact of your life. Understand up front that repeated delay is a deliberate, legitimate defense tactic. A drawn-out battle wears families down, lets memories be characterized as faded, and pressures exhausted families toward giving up or accepting a plea. The delay often lands at the last minute, after you’ve booked travel and steeled yourselves for the date.

The news of a delay is its own cruelty: it eases the mounting dread and deepens the frustration in the same breath. Many survivors, without strong support around them, collapse under the sheer length of it.

And there’s a structural multiplier most families never learn until it blindsides them: in many states, juvenile and family courts convene only once a week. So a single continuance doesn’t cost you a day — it costs you weeks or more, and they stack. A case you imagined taking months takes years.

Know this going in, so each delay reads as a defense tactic, not a catastrophe.

The bargaining starts on your own side

Here is the one that shocks families most: the reduction of charges often begins not with the defense, but with the prosecution.

Prosecutors tend to charge conservatively — only what they’re confident they can prove and win. Child abuse cases are notoriously hard to prove; often the only witness is the child, physical evidence is scarce, and the case can rest on that child’s testimony surviving cross-examination. So prosecutors de-risk: they charge what’s provable and let the rest fall away. Years of documented abuse can be reduced to a small handful of counts before the defense has made a single move.

To a family, this feels like a second betrayal — watching the person who is supposed to be your champion quietly narrow the case to what’s winnable. It helps, a little, to understand why: a guaranteed conviction on a lesser charge beats a possible acquittal on a greater one, and that is the logic prosecutors operate by.

But you must understand the role, because no one will spell it out gently. The prosecutor does not represent you, and does not represent your child. They represent the state. You may hear that in almost those words. It is not a betrayal; it is the structure. Knowing it lets you advocate within the system instead of expecting it to advocate for you.

What you can do: ask the prosecutor directly and early what they are charging and why, and what would have to be true to charge more. Ask to be heard before any plea is accepted — families often have the right to submit a statement and don’t know to ask. And know that this gap is exactly why many families pursue a civil case in parallel, where the burden of proof is lower and the scope can be far broader than the criminal charges allow.

The prosecutor is shifting sand

In a case that spans years, the prosecutor assigned to it can change — more than once, without notice, and without your input. Prosecutors leave, get promoted, rotate dockets, or simply get reassigned. Turnover in these offices is high.

Each new prosecutor inherits a file, not a relationship. They didn’t meet your child in the early days. They pick up a folder and a caseload of dozens of other cases. Every handoff is a reset: momentum stalls, the new prosecutor re-evaluates what’s winnable, and you have to rebuild trust and re-establish that your child is a person, not a docket number — often exactly when you are most exhausted.

Your victim advocate is subject to the same shifting ground. An advocate can be a lifeline, but they can only relay what the state gives them, and that information is often wrong or changed within days. Don’t mistake a wrong update for a broken promise; the sand under them moves too.

What you can do: don’t anchor your case to a person — anchor it to the record (more on that below). Introduce yourself to each new prosecutor early rather than waiting to be summoned. At every transition, ask where things stand, including whether the new prosecutor’s view of the charges or a plea has changed. Do not assume the plan you made with the last one still holds.

Things fall in the gaps between people

This is the one that still takes my breath. In a case handled by a succession of prosecutors, it is frighteningly easy for something critical — evidence, a filing, a deadline — to go undone, because each person in the chain assumes someone before them already handled it. No single person drops it. The handoffs do. Everyone believes someone else is holding the rope.

If you take nothing else from this guide, take this: assume nothing has been done until you have confirmed, in writing, that it was. Verify that your evidence was submitted. Verify that deadlines were met. The gaps in these cases don’t open because one person failed — they open in the space between people.

Expect the resource asymmetry

If the person who harmed your child has money, prepare for what it buys. A well-funded defendant may field several lawyers at every deposition and hearing, and pay expert witnesses — psychiatric, medical — to take the stand. The imbalance is stark and demoralizing. It does not mean your case is weak. It means you must be organized and relentless in the ways that are within your control.

And be aware that a resourced defendant may move assets out of his own name early — sometimes within days — so that even a civil judgment has nothing to attach to. If a civil case is on your horizon, have a lawyer examine the financial picture as soon as possible.

Your child may not get to testify — and it may not be their choice

One of the hardest things to prepare for: whether your child takes the stand is often not up to your child.

The defense may work to keep your child from ever testifying — through pleas, stipulations, or procedural moves — so the account never gets aired in open court. A last-minute guilty plea can end the case in a way that feels like victory and loss at once: your child will never have to take the stand, and will never get to. Those are two very different things, and a child who was ready to tell their story can be left with nowhere to put it.

But the reverse is also true, and families don’t expect it: keeping a child off the stand is often what the prosecution and advocates want, to protect the child from the trauma of cross-examination. So you may feel your child was silenced when part of the system was actually trying to shield them. When you’re told your child won’t testify, find out which of these is happening, and why.

Reset your expectations — again and again

The single most important emotional truth I can give you: the one thing every family in this system has to do is reset their expectations of justice, and you will do it a lot.

You will lower them when the charges shrink. Again when the plea replaces the trial. Again at sentencing, when you hear terms like “time served,” “suspended,” or “first-time offender,” and realize the number in your head was never the number the system had in mind. Each reset is a small grief. Prepare your family for the resets, so that each one bends you instead of breaking you.

And hold onto the distinction that keeps this bearable: a process that ends slowly, or imperfectly, or in a way that feels like too little, is not the same as your child failing, or the truth being false. Doing everything you could — following through, standing with your child — is itself a form of justice the system cannot take from you.

You are the only constant — so become the record

Here is the thread that ties all of it together. Prosecutors rotate. Judges change. Advocates turn over. Continuances stack. Charges shift. But your family is there from the first day to the last. You are the only permanent party in the case.

That is demoralizing — and it is also the one real power you have. Everyone you deal with carries dozens of cases; you carry one. Their memories are short, not from carelessness but from volume. Yours cannot be. So make yourself the memory of the case, on purpose:

Preserve everything. Every message, photo, record, letter, name, and date that could matter. Keep your own copies, backed up in more than one place. Don’t assume the authorities are holding a clean set — note what you handed over, to whom, and when.

Keep a running journal, updated during or right after every contact — police, detectives, investigators, advocates, prosecutors. Write the date, who you spoke with, their role, what was said, what was promised, the next step, and who is responsible for it. Do it in the moment, not from memory later. Contemporaneous notes are worth far more than reconstructed ones — and they can become evidence in their own right.

Log the promises and the deadlines specifically, so that when the next person assumes something was handled, you have the record showing whether it was.

Follow up in writing. After important calls, send a short email confirming your understanding. It creates a paper trail, prompts corrections, and means the next prosecutor inherits more than a bare file.

Bring the record to every transition. When a new prosecutor or detective inherits the case, your journal is the institutional memory the office lost in the handoff.

Keeping a record during the worst period of your life will feel like one more unbearable task. It isn’t busywork. It is the one form of protection entirely within your control when everything else is out of your hands. When the system forgets, your journal remembers.

A word about the defense, and about endurance

Criminal defense is a legitimate and necessary part of the justice system, even when it is agonizing to sit across from. The tactics in this guide — the delay, the credibility attacks, the pleas — will feel extremely personal, but they aren’t; they’re what criminal defense lawyers do. Naming them is not about outrage. It is so that when they happen to you, you recognize them as strategy rather than truth, and they lose their power to break you.

You will not control most of what happens in that courtroom. What you can control is whether you endure it — and enduring it, standing beside your child through all of it, is itself part of protecting them. That is the part no lawyer, no delay, and no plea can take away from you.

Don’t let the pursuit of justice cost you the people you’re fighting for

A feeling of justice matters to a survivor’s health and healing — the research is clear on that. But hold onto what “justice” actually means, because it is not the same thing as a sentence, and it looks different for every survivor. For one child, it might be a conviction. For another, it can be as simple as telling their story, in their own voice, and being believed. Let your child define it. What they need may be smaller, and more human, than the outcome you’re chasing in that courtroom.

And through all of it, don’t lose sight of the most important thing: spending real, ordinary time together, outside the legal chaos. The case will try to swallow everything — every conversation, every meal, every quiet moment. Don’t let it. The relationships you’re fighting to protect are the ones that need protecting now, not just at the end. Guard the dinners, the small joys, the pieces of life that have nothing to do with the case.

Do not let the pursuit of justice consume you, or the family you are pursuing it for. In the end, they are the only thing that will matter.

If you or a child needs help

If a child is in immediate danger, call 911.

Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — call or text 1-800-422-4453 (1-800-4-A-CHILD), or chat at childhelphotline.org. Free, confidential, 24/7, in over 170 languages.

National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN) — call 1-800-656-4673 (1-800-656-HOPE), text HOPE to 64673, or chat at hotline.rainn.org. Free and confidential, 24/7.

National Children’s Alliance (nationalchildrensalliance.org) can help you find your nearest Children’s Advocacy Center, which coordinates support and a dedicated victim advocate for families going through this process.

Stop It Now! — 1-888-773-8368 (1-888-PREVENT). Confidential support for anyone with concerns about child sexual abuse, including non-offending parents and family members.

To report suspected abuse, you can also contact your state or local Child Protective Services; the Childhelp hotline above can direct you to the right number for your area.

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