Page last updated Sept 2026.
The name of this blog was inspired by Job 19:7 — Behold, I cry out, “Violence!” but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice.
I’m Barbara Roberts. Since 2017 I’ve been the sole-leader and owner of this blog. I’m a survivor of intimate partner abuse (from two abusive husbands), spiritual abuse, and organisational systemic abuse/betrayal.
If you find broken links, typos, or demonstrable errors of fact on this blog, please email me — contact@notunderbondage.com
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.
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.
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
More about me
I was raped twice: once when I was nine, once in my twenties. Both those rapes began when I was asleep, I gradually woke up as the rape progressed and when sufficiently awake I exerted immense willpower to make the rapist leave. Many times in my teens and adulthood, men have molested me and sexually harassed me.
I was born again in my mid 20s (1981) but didn’t get to church for 13 or 14 years. During those years in the wilderness (you can read more about them here) I married an unbelieving man and we had a daughter. My husband became abusive and a few times I went to a women’s refuge with my baby/toddler daughter. He always managed to persuade me to return to him.
In 1994, in the fifth year of the marriage, I fled and obtained a court protection order, determined never to return to him. Our daughter was in kindergarten.
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 custody, I started attending an evangelical church. In 1995 the court granted me custody of our daughter and my husband was allowed fortnightly weekend access 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. My husband had physically abused me as well as psychologically and emotionally abused me. But even when an abusive husband has never used physical violence during the marriage, he might do grievous bodily harm or kill his wife when she leaves the marriage. (Killing the wife can be done by murder, or by other means such as coerced suicide where the abuser intensifies the post-separation abuse to drive the victim to suicide.)
I told the story of my marriage to a female assistant pastor and 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. She cited the covenant the Gibeonites had tricked the Israelites into making with them, and she pointed out that bad things happened to nation of Israel when it failed to keep its side of that covenant. I accepted her verdict that I shouldn’t divorce my husband, because I didn’t know any better. But I wanted to be sure, so I bought books on divorce by Christian authors. Almost all the books said divorce was a sin. Some of the books said adultery was grounds for divorce, a few said ‘desertion by an unbeliever’ was grounds for divorce, but none of them said abuse on its own (absent adultery and desertion) was grounds for divorce. If they mentioned abuse at all they hedged with qualications and maybes. Many of the books only mentioned abuse in a footnote or a parenthesis. Some didn’t mention it at all.
My husband hadn’t deserted me — I had fled from him. To my knowledge he hadn’t committed adultery during the marriage; he was socially a loner, had very few friends, and was not a ladies man.
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 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. He was not a good father. He mistreated our daughter but I’m going to describe the ways he mistreated her because I don’t want to face a suit for defamation. He was never convicted in a secular court, so it would be only ‘my word against his’.
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 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 had sought their written permission to divorce because I was becoming an author.
1 Corinthian 5:11-13 says domestic abusers should be put out of the church and handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Many churches are ignoring that commandment.
I still had to take my daughter to her father 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.
Since I began attending church I’ve been sexually harassed and molested by two men in two churches. One man was a pew-sitter who was abusing his wife (I know because she disclosed to me when my book came out). The other was a divorced man, a deacon who greeted everyone at the door; during the sermon he would repeat under his breath the phrases the pastor was saying like he was trying to memorise them. I froze in fear when that deacon pressed his body up against my back at the crowded coffee table after church.
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 I married a man who I believed was a Christian….but I was mistaken. The first year of the marriage was good but he started abusing me in the second year. 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 a paragraph 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 and a few abused husbands 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 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 external links that had broken and saving them 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. I hope that she is okay.
The two rapes were possibly the two biggest traumas I’ve endured, but it’s hard to be sure because trauma also develops by the additive accumulation of assaults to one’s dignity. I’ve endured a lot of psychological and emotional abuse from police, the justice system, the Australian Family Court, and the health system in Australia, as well as from relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers. In addition I’ve been subjected to psychological, emotional and spiritual abuse from Christian authors, academics and theologians, churches, pastors, church elders, church attenders, and many of the so-called ‘advocates’ who claim to be offering help to Christian victims of abuse. Some of these so-called Christians have tried to bully me. Some have slandered me online. It seems that many ‘Christian advocates’ and theologians have ghosted me, and the algorithms amplify their ghosting.
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.