I’m Barbara Roberts. I’m a survivor of marital abuse (from two abusive husbands), spiritual abuse, organisational systemic abuse/betrayal, and non-consensual sexual attack (violence) done to my body when I was a child.
Since 2017 I have been the sole-leader and owner of this blog. Page last updated Jan 30, 2026.
If you find broken links, typos, or demonstrable errors of fact on this blog, please email me.
barbara@notunderbondage.com
If you have a theological question or a moral-dilemma question, I prefer you ask it by submitting a comment at the page or post on the blog which sparked the question in your mind. Please airbrush any personal details so that your abuser and his allies cannot easily identify you. Use a pseudonym for yourself if you wish. I do my best to protect the safety of every victim of abuse who comments at this blog. Every comment is moderated by me before it gets published. Not all comments are published.
My Publishing Policy says what I will and will not publish at the blog. It prioritises the safety and dignity of people who have been heinously abused by so-called Christians and society at large.
You might like to check out my Non-negotiables for effective and biblical abuse ministry.
A Cry for Justice is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program
A bit about me
I was born again in my mid 20s but didn’t get to church for 13 years. During those years in the wilderness (you can read more about them here) I married an unbelieving man and we had a daughter. After five years I left because of my husband’s abuse.
In my country (Australia) the court can finalise child custody and division of assets after marital separation, even though neither spouse has applied for divorce — so that’s what I did. In the lead-up to the court battle for who would get custody of our daughter, I started attending an evangelical church. The court eventually granted me custody of our daughter and my husband was allowed fortnightly weekend access to her and half the school holidays.
I know what it’s like to fight for your child in the family court, to endure post-separation abuse (especially during visitation handover) and to have to seek protection orders and report family violence crimes to the police. I know what it’s like to be in fear of your life because your abuser is unpredictable. Even if your abuser has not used physical violence before, that doesn’t mean he will never use it. Some abusive husbands who never used physical violence during the marriage, do grievous bodily harm or kill their wife when she leaves the marriage. Killing the wife can be done by murder, or by other means such as coerced suicide (the abuser intensifies the abuse to drive the victim to suicide).
I told my story to a female assistant pastor. I asked her if I had grounds for divorce. She said I had to stick to the marriage vows I’d made, regardless of what my husband had done. I bought books on divorce by Christian authors. The books said divorce was a sin and even if adultery or ‘desertion by an unbeliever’ were grounds for divorce, abuse was not.
My husband hadn’t committed adultery during the marriage, to my knowledge. Believing that the bible didn’t allow divorce for abuse and that I would commit sin if I divorced, I remained separated from my husband but was still legally married. What a mess! If I had died, my abuser (as my legal spouse) would have easily got all my assets, and taken full custody of our daughter.
After four years of marital separation, my estranged husband appeared to become a Christian. So in 1998 I reconciled with him. He moved into my house and we had a church ceremony where we renewed our vows. The church was packed!
A year later I had to separate from him because I realised that he was still employing and escalating his abusive behaviours, and I was very afraid for my safety. That was our final separation.
Several years after that, while I was writing my book on the doctrine of divorce, I sought permission to divorce from my Presbyterian pastor and the church elders. They eventually put in writing that I had biblical grounds for divorce, and I divorced the man who had fathered my daughter. I do not believe a victim of spousal abuse has to obtain permission from a church to divorce the abuser. According to 1 Corinthian 5:11-13, domestic abusers should be put out of the church and handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh; but many churches are ignoring that commandment.
I still had to take my daughter to him every second weekend and the school holidays, as per the Family Court Order I had obtained years before. He used the visitation to continue abusing both me and her.
I started supporting other victims-survivors. I published Not Under Bondage: Biblical Divorce for Abuse, Adultery and Desertion [Affiliate link]. Read reviews at my website Not Under Bondage.
I wrote the chapter “Pastoral Responses to Christian Survivors of Intimate Partner Sexual Violence” in the book Intimate Partner Sexual Violence: A Multidisciplinary Guide to Improving Services and Support for Survivors of Rape and Abuse [Affiliate link].
When I was in my fifties (~ 2011) I married another man who I believed was a Christian….but I was mistaken. The first year was good but he started abusing me in the second year of the marriage. So I had to go through the whole separation and divorce process again. It was easier the second time because I had not borne a child to him.
In late 2011, Ps Jeff Crippen contacted me to ask permission to reprint something from my book Not Under Bondage. That led to me becoming a team member at this blog in 2012. I have been the sole leader of this blog since Jeff Crippen resigned in 2017.
In 2018, through no fault of my own, the blog went offline overnight! You can imagine my horror. All the material that had been so helpful to abused wives was no longer online. The only remedy was to change the blog’s URL from .com to .blog — which broke every link in the blog that pointed to another item in the blog!
A woman who used the pseudonym Reaching Out volunteered to be my assistant in late 2017 or early 2018 (I was extremely stressed at that time and I don’t remember the date). Reaching Out is a survivor of multiple forms of abuse, from multiple abusers, and in multiple environments. I gratefully accepted her offer. She spent untold hours fixing all the broken links. I am eternally grateful to her for doing that and for all the other help she gave me keeping things working at the back of the blog, fixing eternal links that had broken, and saving articles to the Internet Archive so they can be found even if they get scrubbed from the website that published them.
Reaching Out emailed me Jan 23 2026, saying that she was following the leading of the Holy Spirit and resigning from the blog. I replied, “I’m grieved, and shocked. But I trust that the Holy Spirit is leading you and I respect your decision. Thank you for all the myriads of things you have done in assisting me at the blog. 🙏🙏🙏 I hope we can still be friends. With love and warm wishes for your future — Barb.” I haven’t heard from her since. She truly loves the Lord, and I trust that she is okay.
My favourite English version of the New Testament is the New Matthew Bible. The Old Testament of the New Matthew Bible is in preparation; it will probably be published in 2026 or 2027.
More biographical info about me can be found at Angela Ruth Strong’s interview of Barbara Roberts.
