Mother’s Day arrives every year wearing the same face. It’s about flowers, brunches, and hand-drawn cards from children. The version our culture wants is soft and uncomplicated, full of warmth and gratitude.

But for a significant number of the mothers among us, and for a significant number of the people who once were someone’s child celebrating Mother’s Day, this day is something else entirely. It carries the weight of what was done to them. What was not prevented. What was denied, concealed, and protected by institutions that placed their own reputation above the safety of the children and people in their care.

For those people, this weight is present every day. And we think of those mothers who are survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking every day, not just on Mother’s Day.

The Version of Mother’s Day No One Talks About

Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis to honor her own mother. It was designed as a personal, intimate celebration of sacrifice and love. It was not intended as a day of universal triumph.

The lived reality for many women is considerably more complicated. There are mothers among us who were sexually abused as children by a family member, a religious figure, a school employee, or a coach. And these mothers have spent years, sometimes decades, carrying that experience alone before anyone believed them or gave them a legal path to achieving institutional accountability. There are mothers who were trafficked and exploited by networks and businesses that knew exactly what they were doing, and those businesses calculated that no one powerful enough would ever hold them responsible.

Both groups share something in common beyond the harm itself. In most cases, an institution stood between them and their safety, and chose the institution’s interests over theirs. It might be a diocese that transferred a priest. It might be a hotel that kept booking rooms to known traffickers because the revenue was predictable and good. It might be a school that declined to investigate because investigating would have caused a scandal. Ot it might be a youth organization that looked the other way and buried the complaints because the program had a good reputation to protect.

These institutions did not fail passively. In most cases, they made active, documented choices. And those choices, including the meetings, the memos, the transfers, the settlements with NDAs, the deliberate silence, are exactly the kind of evidence that civil litigation is designed to uncover and hold accountable.

For Mothers Who Are Survivors of Sexual Abuse

If you are raising children and also carrying the weight of your own childhood sexual abuse, you are doing something that deserves to be named plainly – you are parenting across two timelines simultaneously. One timeline is the one your children are living – bath time, homework, the ordinary chaos of being small – and the other timeline is the one you survived.

Many survivors who become parents describe a fierce, specific kind of protectiveness that can morph into hypervigilance. A doctor’s appointment that has to be navigated carefully. A youth program that has to be researched with more scrutiny than other parents apply. A question from your child that lands somewhere unexpected and requires a moment to absorb before you can answer it. These are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs of someone who understands, at a cellular level, what the failure of institutional protection actually costs.

What research on survivors who parent consistently shows – drawn from organizations including RAINN that work directly with survivors – is that a history of being harmed does not predict harming. Survivors are not, by virtue of their history, a danger to their own children. Many of the most trauma-aware, present, and attentive parents are people who survived something hard and made a decision, early and determinedly, that their children would not live the same story.

For Mothers Who Are Survivors of Human Trafficking

Human trafficking does not end the day someone escapes it. The psychological weight of exploitation, particularly when that exploitation was enabled by a business, a platform, or a network that knew what it was profiting from, can persist for years, layered with shame that belongs entirely to the institutions responsible, not to the person who was harmed.

For mothers who were trafficked, Mother’s Day may arrive carrying a particular kind of complexity as they contemplate the distance between the family being built now and the circumstances that surrounded the trafficking. They keep asking themselves the question of what to carry forward and what to set down. And they are outraged by the ongoing reality that the businesses and organizations that enabled the exploitation have often faced no consequences at all.

Federal law, specifically the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act’s civil liability provision under 18 U.S.C. § 1595, gives trafficking survivors the right to sue the businesses that knowingly benefited from their exploitation. This includes hotels that ignored warning signs, digital platforms that hosted solicitation, labor contractors who supplied trafficked workers to employers who knew. These are not abstract legal theories. They are active, pursued, and winning cases in federal courts across the country.

The Particular Grief of the Institutional Cover-Up

There is one dimension of survivor experience that deserves more coverage than it usually gets, particularly on a day that is supposed to be about family and care. It’s the grief of discovering that the institution you or your family trusted was not only aware of what was happening, but actively worked to conceal it.

We see this in CLG’s work constantly. The mother who discovers, years later, that the diocese had received prior complaints about the priest who abused her child. The woman who learns that the hotel chain had documented incidents of trafficking at that specific property and did nothing. The survivor who finds out, through litigation discovery, that there was an internal memo about their situation, that someone knew, and that a decision was made to look away.

The psychological impact of that discovery, layered on top of the original harm, is its own category of injury. It is the confirmation that the system was designed to protect the institution, not the person. And it tends to transform grief into something sharper and more purposeful, which is the understanding that accountability is not just personally meaningful, but structurally necessary. That holding this institution responsible may be the thing that prevents it from doing the same thing to someone else.

You see, in civil litigation, cover-up behavior is not a complication, it is evidence Internal memos, documented prior complaints, reassignment records, NDA patterns, as well as whistleblower testimony are exactly the materials that CLG’s institutional litigation practice is built to pursue. The institution’s attempt to hide what happened does not weaken a case. In most instances, it strengthens it.

For Mothers of Survivors

There is one more group this day touches that rarely has a platform. It’s the mothers who learned, sometimes years or decades after the fact, that their child was sexually abused by someone they had trusted and welcomed into their life.

The grief in these cases is layered in ways that are hard to describe. There is the grief for the child’s experience. There is the rage at the person who caused the harm and the institution that protected the perpetrator. And underneath both, in almost every case, there is an incessant question that can become corrosive – how did I not know?

The honest answer, in most institutional cases, is this – you were not supposed to know. The concealment was not an accident. Perpetrators of institutional sexual abuse are, in most cases, skilled at grooming not only the children they target, but the adults around those children by building credibility, choosing settings that look safe, isolating their victims, and relying on the institutional weight of a church, school, or organization to suppress disclosure. The parents who didn’t see what was happening were looking at what they were meant to see. The shame in these cases belongs solely to the perpetrator and to the institution that enabled them. It does not belong to the parent.

If you are a mother who learned that your child was harmed by someone connected to an institution that has never been held accountable, you should know that civil litigation is available to your family, and that Constant Legal Group’s institutional abuse practice handles these cases specifically. You are not too late. You are not too angry. And you are not alone in this.

Support for Non-Offending Mothers
MOSAC (Mothers of Sexually Abused Children) is a peer support organization that has been providing resources and community specifically for non-offending mothers for many years.

www.mosac.net

The institutions that cause and enable abuse count on silence. They count on survivors believing that coming forward is too hard, too late, too uncertain. They count on the shame that was designed to be misplaced landing on the people it was intended to silence.

CLG exists to change that calculation. We are a national institutional accountability firm representing survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking in civil litigation against the churches, schools, hotel chains, corporations, and organizations responsible. We have recovered significant settlements on behalf of survivors who were told for years that no one would listen.

If you are a survivor of abuse, of trafficking, of an institution that looked away, and you have wondered whether there is a legal path forward, we will be able to answer your question.

Our consultation is free. Everything you share is completely confidential. There is no obligation to proceed, no requirement to have previously reported anything, and no wrong time to start the conversation. We are here to hear your story.

Mother’s Day comes and goes, but the pain of trauma persists. The case for accountability does not have an expiration date.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still file a civil lawsuit for childhood sexual abuse that happened years ago?

Possibly yes. Multiple states have enacted lookback window legislation that revives previously time-barred civil claims for childhood sexual abuse survivors. Active windows are currently open in California (through December 2027), New York (GMVA window through March 2027), and Louisiana (through June 2027). Delaware has permanently eliminated the statute of limitations for childhood claims. CLG can evaluate your specific situation and state for free.

Can I sue the hotel or business where I was trafficked?

Federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 1595 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, gives trafficking survivors a civil cause of action against any business that knowingly benefited from the trafficking. Hotels, online platforms, rideshare companies, and labor contractors have all been successfully sued under this statute. CLG handles TVPRA civil claims nationally. A prior criminal conviction or police report is not required to file a civil claim.

What if the institution covered up what happened?

Cover-up behavior, including internal memos, prior complaint records, reassignment decisions, NDAs, and document destruction, is not an obstacle to a civil case. In many institutional abuse cases, it is the most powerful evidence available, because it demonstrates that the institution knew about the harm and chose concealment over protection. CLG’s institutional litigation practice is specifically designed to surface and use this evidence.

How do I contact CLG for a confidential case evaluation?
Call 855-906-2561, or complete the “Contact Us” for on our www.constantlg.com website. A CLG attorney will respond within 24 hours. Everything you share is protected by attorney-client privilege from the moment of first contact. There is no cost for the consultation and no obligation to proceed.