Forgiving and Not Forgiving as Processes of Sense-Making Among Victims/Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Most research into forgiveness in the contexts of domestic and sexual abuse involves quantitative studies of the benefits or risks of forgiveness for victims/survivors. This paradigm constructs forgiveness as an achieved event, largely overlooking victims/survivors’ forgiveness experiences. Furthermore, existing research scarcely addresses not forgiving among victims/survivors. This article shows both forgiving and not forgiving are utilized in processes of sense-making by victims/survivors. We argue that forgiving and not forgiving in this context should be understood not simply as an achieved event or specific form of experience, but rather as socially available vocabularies through which ongoing processes of sense-making are channeled.

Keywords

forgiveness domestic abuse sexual abuse qualitative research sense-making

Introduction

Forgiveness has become a prominent area of social scientific research since the turn of the twenty-first century (Worthington & Wade, 2019). Within this wider literature, a developing body of (mostly psychological) research focuses on forgiveness among victims/survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. This research is mostly oriented by contrasting quantitative claims about the benefits and risks of victims/survivors forgiving abusive partners/perpetrators (e.g., Freedman & Enright, 2017; McNulty, 2011). A smaller subset of qualitative research has sought to center experiences of forgiveness among victims/survivors (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011; Tener & Eisikovits, 2017; Wu et al., 2021).

This article delivers two critical contributions to understanding forgiveness among victims/survivors. First, we argue that current literature is limited by how forgiveness is conceptualized. Existing studies mostly position forgiveness as a specific event or outcome of a psychological process, which, once achieved, engenders a range of potential benefits, risks, or forms of experience. Drawing on a two-part study, this article shows that forgiveness should not be analyzed simply as an achieved event or a specific form of experience, but rather as an ongoing means of sense-making through which victims/survivors interpret experiences of abuse. From a sample comprised of women victims/survivors, we show that social vernaculars of forgiveness are utilized in the processes of making sense of abuse, perpetrators, and self in relation to reinterpretations of experiences, emergent relational dynamics, and shifting circumstances. This paper therefore advances the conceptualization of forgiveness as a means of sense-making in relationships. This then connects with wider domestic and sexual abuse literature that center on how victims/survivors interpret and evaluate their experiences of abuse (Berns & Schweingruber, 2007; Kelsall-Knight et al., 2025).

Second, we extend existing victim/survivor forgiveness literature by illustrating the underresearched significance of not forgiving as crucial to the processes of sense-making after abuse. To date, quantitative and qualitative literature in this domain has overwhelmingly focused on forgiving, meaning the significance of not forgiving and its role in victims/survivors’ lives moving forward is seldom addressed. We argue that a more nuanced and encompassing picture of victims/survivors’ experiences of forgiveness is generated when participants’ accounts are not restricted to forgiving. While some victims/survivors in this study described forgiving their abusers as a positive experience in their recovery after abuse, more prominent were discussions of regretting attempts made to forgive abusers, deliberations about ongoing challenges in trying to forgive, and powerful articulations of why the abuse experienced could not be forgiven.

Taken together, we argue that forgiving and not forgiving among victims/survivors should be seen as socially available (and often integrated) means through which ongoing processes of making sense of experiences of abuse are channeled. This article thus adds overlooked experiences of not forgiving to existing qualitative literature, while also redrawing how forgiveness is conceptualized (both in forgiveness literature broadly and in violence against women research specifically). We begin by exploring existing forgiveness in contexts of abuse literature, showing the need for more specific qualitative research into victims/survivors’ experiences of forgiving and not forgiving in relation to abuse. We then set out the study's methodology and findings. The conclusion sets out conceptual contributions, which reflect the importance of a richer and more nuanced perspective on women's experiences of forgiveness after domestic and sexual abuse. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

Literature Review

Until recently, academic consideration of forgiveness has been restricted almost entirely to the disciplines of philosophy and theology. As Fincham (2000, p. 3) suggests, the abstract philosophic and religious terms with which forgiveness was associated meant it was seldom “considered […] amenable to scientific study.” This changed from the 1990s and into the early 2000s as psychologists of personal relationships began to identify forgiveness not as a rare or extraordinary virtue, but rather as an ordinary and integral feature of how personal relationships are maintained and repaired (e.g., Enright et al., 1998; Fincham, 2000; McCullough et al., 1997; Rusbult et al., 2005). Since then, forgiveness has become an expansive area of empirical study, with a recent review identifying over 2,500 empirical studies of forgiveness published in the first two decades of the twenty-first century (Worthington & Wade, 2019). The rapid growth in forgiveness research has been predominantly driven by quantitative psychological studies. This literature provides valuable contributions to understanding the psychological processes involved in forgiveness, as well as associations between forgiveness and variables such as personality traits, gender, and relationship type, among much else (Worthington & Wade, 2019).

This research has made considerable strides in identifying forgiving and not forgiving as a relatively common feature of relationships. However, the psychological perspective from which most research has been conducted has focused on studying forgiveness as the outcome of psychological processes. The prioritization of studying psychological processes underlying forgiveness via quantifiable measures has meant that psychological studies generally “stop short of fully capturing the […] experience of forgiveness” (Goman, 2017, p. 170). Furthermore, such research does not explore how notions of forgiveness are used to make sense of experiences in relationships. Currently, only a small portion of research into forgiveness has employed qualitative methods to capture the meaningful nature of experiences of forgiveness (Goman, 2017; Waldron & Kelley, 2008) and only recently have qualitative literature begun to explore how forgiveness is utilized in processes of sense-making (Abbott, 2025).

Empirical research into forgiveness in the contexts of domestic and sexual abuse can be seen as a microcosm of this wider forgiveness literature. It can be categorized along three main themes: (1) quantitative research that focuses on the benefits of forgiveness to victim/survivors; (2) quantitative research that challenges the benefits of forgiveness and focuses on risks associated with forgiveness; and (3) qualitative research that focuses on forgiveness experiences of victims/survivors.

Quantitative Research that Focuses on the Benefits of Forgiveness to Victims/Survivors

A key reason for the explosion of academic interest in forgiveness is the abundance of purported benefits associated with forgiveness, including improvements in relationship satisfaction, reductions in anxiety, depression, anger, and even vulnerability to substance abuse (Lin et al., 2004). Multiple psychologists have consequently formulated various “forgiveness therapies” to be administered by psychotherapists. The dominant models of forgiveness therapies involve assisting participants through a series of stages associated with the achievement of forgiveness (e.g., exploring the hurt that was done, reassessing current coping strategies, reframing the transgression and transgressor) before assessing whether forgiveness has been achieved according to specifically devised forgiveness measures/inventories (Lamb, 2002). Via the work of Enright, one of the founders of forgiveness research and therapies, studies have explored the application of forgiveness therapies to women who have experienced abuse, including partner or parental abuse and childhood sexual abuse (Freedman & Enright, 1996; Lee & Enright, 2014; Reed & Enright, 2006).

The claims made by these studies about the effectiveness and benefits of forgiveness therapies in this domain are substantial. In a review of the effects of three studies into the application of forgiveness therapies for victims/survivors (Freedman & Enright, 1996; Lee & Enright, 2014; Reed & Enright, 2006), Freedman and Enright (2017) argue that women who underwent forgiveness therapies showed significant and lasting reductions in anxiety and depression when compared to those who were either yet to receive forgiveness therapy or received an alternative therapy. Similarly, Ha et al. (2019, p. 10) found positive results for forgiveness therapies (including reductions in depression) among victims/survivors of sexual abuse. Holeman and Myers (1998, p. 182) also recommended forgiveness strategies as being of therapeutic benefit for sexual abuse survivors, having found that female survivors of childhood sexual abuse who had higher levels of adulthood forgiveness “reported significantly higher levels of marital adjustment than women with lower levels of forgiveness.” Rahman et al.'s (2018) study goes as far as claiming to have found benefits of forgiveness therapies for 11- and 12-year-old girls who had been physically and/or sexually abused by male relatives or strangers (finding “statistically higher levels of forgiveness and hope and a significantly lower level of anger” compared to a control group; Rahman et al., 2018, p. 75).

Quantitative Research that Challenges the Benefits of Forgiveness

The use of forgiveness therapies for victims/survivors of domestic and sexual abuse has been met with consternation (Gordon et al., 2019; Lamb, 2002; Murphy, 2003). Indeed, philosophers and psychologists have questioned the normative efficacy of encouraging victims/survivors to forgive perpetrators (Lamb, 2002; Murphy, 2003). Lamb (2002), for instance, argues that forgiveness therapy literature erroneously assumes forgiveness is a virtue because it allows negative emotions such as anger and resentment to be overcome. As well as undermining the moral legitimacy of anger and resentment (Murphy, 2005), this assumption presents a normatively misguided model wherein victims are encouraged to “forgiv[e] their perpetrators […] in an effort to get psychological relief” (Lamb, 2002, p. 5). Furthermore, Lamb (2002) and Murphy (2003) argue that the forgiveness therapy literature often insufficiently considers the extent to which forgiveness can operate as an instrument of power that maintains damaging relationships in their current form. Rahman et al.'s (2018) study provides a case in point: in whose interest is it for 11- and 12-year-old girls to forgive perpetrators of sexual abuse, and what kinds of patterns of behavior and power may be sustained as a result?

As well as normative critiques, contrasting quantitative studies also challenge the notion that forgiveness is psychologically beneficial for victims/survivors. Ysseldyk et al. (2019) found important nuances in the psychological benefits of forgiveness for women who had experienced intimate partner abuse. While forgiveness was “positively associated with psychological health,” this was predicated on “women [being] out of harm's way (i.e. their abusive experiences were well into the past)” (Ysseldyk et al., 2019, p. 2017). Cowden et al.'s (2019) research into the role of forgiveness in mediating psychological distress in women who have experienced psychological abuse in an ongoing relationship also presented a mixed picture: while women who exhibited higher levels of forgiveness toward their partners “scored lower on depression and stress [outcomes] when psychological abuse was lower,” women scored “higher on each outcome when psychological abuse was higher.” This suggests “that there may be conditions in which forgiveness of partner may promote or undermine the mental health of women who experience abuse perpetrated by their current partner” (Cowden et al., 2019, p. 1). Lahav et al.'s (2019) study similarly found that forgiveness may reduce distress among those who experienced “low” levels of abuse, but forgiveness had no significant effect on those who experienced “high” levels of abuse. Speaking to the potential risks of forgiveness, Tsang and Stanford (2007) found that victims/survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) tended to be more forgiving toward perpetrators who exhibited more domineering and controlling personality traits. Tsang and Stanford (2007) argue that this reflects the capacities of these men to better manipulate victims into empathizing with them.

Indeed, as well as challenging the purported benefits of forgiveness in the contexts of abuse, other quantitative studies have highlighted considerable risks associated with forgivingness toward abusive partners (Gilbert & Gordon, 2017; Gordon et al., 2004, 2019; McNulty, 2011). For example, McNulty's (2011, p. 770) study “revealed a positive association between spouses’ reports of their tendencies to express forgiveness to their partners and those partners’ reports of psychological and physical aggression.” Significantly, Gordon et al.'s (2004, p. 331) study of women residing in domestic abuse shelters found that forgiveness “predict[ed] intention to return to partner over and above the other variables studied.” Gilbert and Gordon's (2017, p. 426) study of the same sample “indicates that women in these difficult relationships might achieve ‘forgiveness’ through actively minimizing or even denying the magnitude of their partners’ transgressions.” Combined, these studies suggest that forgiveness among victims/survivors increases risks of remaining in and/or returning to abusive relationships.

Qualitative Studies that Focus on Forgiveness Experiences of Victims/Survivors

While divided in findings, quantitative studies of forgiveness among victims/survivors are unified in their depiction of forgiveness as a specific occurrence that engenders specific (risky or beneficial) outcomes. However, the quantitative nature of these studies means they do not center accounts that victims/survivors give of how and why abusive behavior was forgiven, how they feel about their decisions to forgive or not, nor the significance they attribute to experiences of forgiveness in their lives.

Reflecting the quantitative nature of wider forgiveness research, only a handful of studies have sought to explore victims/survivors’ own accounts of their experiences of forgiveness following abuse (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011; Kerlin & Sosin, 2017; Schneider & Feltey, 2009; Tener & Eisikovits, 2017; Wu et al., 2021). The qualitative studies that have centered victims/survivors’ own accounts provide insights into the complexities of experiences, narratives, and circumstances surrounding forgiveness. Notably, Band-Winterstein et al. (2011) studied journeys of forgiveness among older women who have experienced intimate partner abuse, and used this as a means to explore victims/survivors’ perceptions of abusive experiences over an extended life-course. Band-Winterstein et al. (2011, pp. 461–462) illustrate how forgiveness and self-forgiveness “in old age has a signiﬁcant role in preserving self-value,” allowing older victims/survivors to “construct a coherent story and meaning” out of experiences of abuse. While the authors fruitfully recognize how “[f]orgiveness is part of older abused women's attempts to deal with living a lifetime in violence” (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011, p. 452), what this means for dominant conceptualizations of forgiveness in this domain remains unexplored. Wu et al.'s (2021) study of forgiveness among women survivors of IPV likewise reveals insightful findings into the significance of context and ongoing relationships (e.g., through shared parenting) in accounts of decisions to forgive perpetrators. Yet the implications of Wu et al.'s (2021) illuminating qualitative findings for rethinking current forgiveness concepts in this context are not undertaken. The same is true of the small number of qualitative studies conducted into forgiveness among victims of sexual abuse (Kerlin & Sosin, 2017; Tener & Eisikovits, 2017).

Thus, while extant qualitative research has begun to deepen understandings of experiences of forgiveness in contexts of abuse, what the prioritization of victims/survivors’ experiences means for how forgiveness is conceptualized in this domain is not explored. Furthermore, this qualitative literature overwhelmingly focuses on forgiving (only Band-Winterstein et al., 2011, provide some exceptions). This means that the experiential significance of not forgiving to how victims/survivors make sense of their abusers and the abuse they experienced is underexplored. We thus build on qualitative research in this domain by first showing that notions of forgiveness should be understood as providing social vernaculars through which victims/survivors channel a significant degree of sense-making about abusive experiences, and second that a considerable degree of sense-making is channeled through not forgiving.

Methodology

Study Design

The findings presented here are drawn from data collected by Author 1 as part of a wider two-part study into experiences of forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, and not being forgiven in personal relationships. Author 1 was responsible for the study design, data collection, and the primary data analysis. During the analysis of the data, as discussed below, a significant category theme was generated relating to domestic and sexual abuse. With Author 1's primary expertise relating to personal lives more broadly, Author 2 was invited to bring expertise in relation to domestic and sexual abuse and also to provide supplementary data analysis. Authors 1 and 2 cowrote the article.

Interviews

Part one of the study involved in-depth semistructured interviews with 42 members of the public, with the only inclusion criteria being that participants were aged 18 or over and resided in the United Kingdom. The open remit of the study meant a diverse sample was recruited via a combination of social media adverts and snowballing. Participant age ranged from 19 to 77. The sample was comprised of 25 women and 17 men. Thirty-four interviewees (81%) identified as heterosexual, with eight (19%) identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, queer, or pansexual. Twenty-five identified as White British, with a further nine identifying as White of a different nationality. Eight (19%) identified as being of Black, Asian, or minority ethnicity. Twenty-four worked in white-collar/professional jobs, seven were students, four retired, and seven worked in blue-collar jobs. Interview length averaged 59 min. Interviews were conducted online or face-to-face by Author 1, depending on interviewee preference. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Mass Observation Project

Part two involved a specially commissioned Mass Observation Project (MOP) Directive. In its current form, the MOP has been running continually in the United Kingdom since 1981 (The Mass Observation Archive, n.d.). The MOP seeks to sustain a living archive of everyday life in Britain. It does so by maintaining a panel of roughly 500 volunteers, who are invited to respond to “directives” about general topics (e.g., climate change, dating, ageism) or current events (e.g., Brexit, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, vaping). Directives provide three to five prompts about a topic. Volunteers are asked to respond in detailed, long-form written responses. Directives are sent out 3 times per year, giving volunteers 4 months to respond. Typically, more than 100 responses are returned. The MOP thus provides a unique resource that has been widely utilized in social sciences research projects (Balmer et al., 2025). This includes multiple uses of the MOP to explore sensitive experiences in personal relationships, including the impact of family secrets (Smart, 2011), experiences of dementia (Olsen et al., 2020), perceptions of race and belonging (Kushner, 2017; May, 2016), and death, grief, and funerals (Walter & Bailey, 2020). Additionally, van Emmerik (2024) explored disclosures of IPV in MOP responses.

Author 1 commissioned a directive about forgiving and not forgiving in personal relationships, providing prompts asking for reflections on forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, and not being forgiven. This yielded 117 responses. Twenty-one of these responses were handwritten, with the remainder typed into Microsoft Word documents. The average length of response was 2.3 A4 pages (once handwritten responses were transcribed to Word documents). While the data is rich, the method does have limitations. Unlike with interviews, there is no opportunity to ask follow-up questions or probe for further details. Additionally, the volunteer-based nature of the MOP, wherein participants write for the MOP often for years or even decades, means the sample is skewed toward older, middle-class people, with more women than men participating (May, 2016). This is reflected in the present study's respondents. While the responses are anonymized, participants are invited to state their age, gender, and occupation with their response. In this study, 77 MOP respondents identified as women, 30 as men, one as nonbinary, and 11 did not state. The average age was 60 years, although 11 did not state their age. Most worked in or were retired from professional jobs. Interestingly, the MOP responses did produce comparatively more discussions of not forgiving than the interviews. This likely reflects how the face-to-face nature of interviews means participants are less inclined to discuss stigmatized behaviors, like not forgiving. This difference is reflected in the analysis below, where MOP responses feature more heavily in discussions of not forgiving.

Data Analysis and Subsample

Interviews and MOP responses produced a combined sample of 156. Both the interview and MOP data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis (following standard frameworks for thematic analysis; Braun & Clarke, 2021) and using qualitative coding software NVivo. A first round of analysis conducted by Author 1 focused on familiarization with the data and organizing data into broad category codes: types of relationships (e.g., friendship), transgressions (e.g., infidelity), and forgiveness experiences discussed (forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, not being forgiven, wanting to forgive, and wanting to be forgiven).

Types of forgiveness experience (and what these entail) constituted anchor codes: a selection of preestablished “relevant theory-driven (deductive) codes from the theoretical elements that framed the study” (Oliveira, 2023, p. 305). Researchers naturally undertake studies informed by some preestablished conceptions, drawn from existing literature, that guide methods and analysis (Oliveira, 2023). Anchor codes were formed with reference to forgiveness literature that distinguishes forgiving and not forgiving from associated concepts like apology, ignoring, or forgetting (Waldron & Kelley, 2008). Forgiveness literature commonly defines forgiveness as involving recognition and remembrance of a harm done (usually of some significance), and a willingness (or not) to move on from the transgression in a more positive light. Forgiving and not forgiving are generally not considered to occur in cases where the victim did not care greatly about the transgression, for example, a minor disagreement that is easily dismissed or forgotten (Waldron & Kelley, 2008). While participants’ attributions of forgiving and not forgiving were mostly taken at face value, such conceptualizations were used as anchoring guides in analysis.

A second round of analysis then sought to identify more specific codes to capture the kind of experiences and accounts participants described (e.g., “practices associated with forgiving,” “forgiveness attempted but not achieved,” “regretting forgiving”). The allocation of specific codes enabled the development of themes that reflected common patterns in the data (Braun & Clarke, 2019, 2021), such as “forgiving and sense-making.” This theme was identified as participants utilizing languages of forgiveness to make sense of relationship experiences. As will be seen, this became a central theme for thinking about how forgiveness is conceptualized in relation to our qualitative data.

This process of thematic analysis then facilitated the kind of theory-building developed in this paper. This is indicative of the reflexive thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2021), wherein consistency and rigor are situated alongside recognition of the interpretive and analytic role of the researcher in theme development. In this approach, themes are recognized as emerging through analysis abductively rather than through an improbable purely inductive process: themes are “produced at the intersection of the researcher's theoretical assumptions, their analytic resources and skill, and the data themselves” (Braun & Clarke, 2019, p. 594; Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). Recognizing themes as interpretive endeavors of knowledgeable social scientists does not, however, mean rigor is deprioritized: on the contrary, reflexive thematic analysis emphasizes the necessity of careful documentation of coding processes and questioning of assumptions involved in interpretations and themes (Braun & Clarke, 2019). In this project, following the second round of coding, Author 1 reviewed codes seeking to identify codes that overlapped significantly, were ambiguous, or which were insufficiently supported in data. Memos were written in NVivo throughout the analysis process, allowing interpretative decisions made in the construction of themes to be documented (Herzog et al., 2019). Memos were used to record the insights that led to themes in the data emerging, to ask how data relates to and challenges existing forgiveness conceptualizations, and to critically question the applicability of themes to passages of data (therefore honing themes). Reflexive awareness of the assumptions and biases that are brought to knowledge production is a crucial component of thematic analysis of this kind (Nixon & Quinlan, 2022). As an expert in sociologies of personal lives, Author 1 sought to use memos to mitigate “reading in” common frames from personal lives sociology to the data. Memos, codes, and themes were then reviewed by a project mentor, who provided critical feedback on the appropriateness of analytic decisions.

A prominent categorical code identified in the first round of coding was experiences of domestic and sexual abuse. In the interviews, of the 25 women interviewed, eight discussed experiences of domestic and sexual abuse and focused their interview narratives on their experiences of abuse perpetrated by men (either partners or family members). Of 117 MOP Directive responses, 14 women discussed some form of domestic or sexual abuse. Two men—one in the interview sample and one in the MOP sample—also discussed experiences of witnessing domestic abuse committed by their fathers against their mothers. While providing insight into how forgiveness is discussed from the perspectives of closely related witnesses, the analysis in this article focuses only on the experiences of direct victims/survivors of domestic or sexual abuse, meaning the data from these two accounts are not included. This thematic selection reflects the article's intention of responding to existing literature on forgiving among direct victims/survivors.

This article therefore draws on a subsample of 22 people (all of whom are women) who discussed forgiveness in relation to direct experiences of being a victim/survivor of domestic or sexual abuse. This sample size aligns with many qualitative studies of experiences of abusive relationships (e.g., Chung, 2007; Lim et al., 2015), and aligns with or exceeds the sample size of current qualitative research into victims/survivors’ experiences of forgiveness in contexts of abusive relationships (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011; Kerlin & Sosin, 2017; Schneider & Feltey, 2009; Tener & Eisikovits, 2017; Wu et al., 2021).

Given the centrality of domestic and sexual abuse in the data, Author 1 invited Author 2, who has expertise in domestic and sexual abuse, to provide supplementary data analysis. A subsequent round of reflexive thematic analysis was conducted on the subsample by Author 1, with Author 2 reviewing and contributing codes, memos, and themes in relation to the data. Author 2's expertise facilitated the generation of new codes (e.g., perpetrator seeking to minimize culpability) and themes (e.g., reflections on “problematic” forgiveness of perpetrators; Rowlands, 2021). Codes and themes that were found to be insufficiently supported in the subsample were disregarded.

That a sizable portion of women volunteered to discuss experiences of forgiving and not forgiving in relation to experiences of domestic and sexual abuse in both the interviews and MOP responses is perhaps not surprising, given the prevalence of such abuse (see ONS, 2023, for statistics on prevalence in the United Kingdom). Nevertheless, the prevalence of discussions of abuse in a general study of forgiving and not forgiving also suggests that questions of forgiving and not forgiving are particularly pertinent to victims/survivors, a point affirmed in existing research (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011; Wu et al., 2021). It should be noted, however, that the women-only sample drawn in this article naturally restricts the applicability of these findings to female victims/survivors of domestic or sexual abuse.

Ethics

Ethical approval was provided by Author 1's university ethics committee (Cardiff University School of Social Science Research Ethics Committee). The open remit of both parts of the study meant that it was not known in advance the kind of experiences that participants would discuss in relation to forgiving and not forgiving. Nevertheless, it was assumed that the nature of the topic would lead to participants discussing sensitive topics.

For the interviews, training on researching sensitive topics was undertaken prior to data collection, leading to the researcher adopting the position that sensitive discussions would be allowed to unfold, rather than being pried for in the interview. Interviewees were reminded of their right to withdraw their data from the study or refuse to answer any questions they did not wish to and were offered opportunities for breaks. Debriefing documents were distributed to all interviewees, which included details of counselors and organizations that support those who have experienced abuse. Interviewees who disclosed sensitive/distressing information were followed up with after the interview by Author 1 to check their well-being. Pseudonyms were allocated to all interviewees, with identifiable information stored separately and linked to anonymized transcripts via an identification number (also stored separately).

The MOP is administered by research professionals at the University of Sussex (with the MOP being the data owners). They have extensive protocols in place to protect the data and anonymity of their volunteers. Responses are anonymized prior to being sent to the researcher who commissions the directive. Names given here are pseudonyms. Volunteers are informed of how their responses may be used and are required to complete a consent form prior to participation. As has recently been noted by van Emmerik (2024), MOP presents some particular ethical challenges when experiences of abuse are disclosed, especially when risks of ongoing harm are alluded to in responses. This is ameliorated by MOP staff, who check over responses, exercising a duty of care toward their volunteers where cases of risk are highlighted (van Emmerik, 2024).

Findings

The data reported on here highlights important themes in victims/survivors’ experiences that are not well covered in existing research in this domain. We present our findings around four themes (accounts of forgiving; reflections on “problematic” forgivingness; forgiveness in process; and not forgiving), each of which shows different ways in which languages of forgiveness are used in processes of sense-making by victims/survivors.

Accounts of Forgiving

Affirming existing research on the potential significance of forgiving for some victims/survivors, several participants centered their discussions around forgiving their abusers and the role this played in allowing them to make sense of and move on from the abuse they experienced. Lina (30, interview participant) had experienced psychologically abusive behavior from her ex-partner, which resulted in her moving herself and her daughter to a different country. Lina focused her interview on her attempts to understand the sources of his abusive behavior after they had broken up. Her separation from her ex-partner, combined with the additional distance engendered by COVID-19 lockdowns, led Lina to seek to understand some of his behaviors:

We split up just before the pandemic so during the pandemic I spent a lot of time trying to understand […] Because before that whole issue I didn't know anything about mental health […] So it took a long time, but it took an actual active process as well, like active engagement in trying to understand. […] I think forgiveness was sort of when I started to feel a little bit less angry and confused.

Forgiveness here was not accounted for as a clear experience in itself. Rather, the language of forgiveness is used to give expression to changes of affect Lina experienced in relation to her endeavors to understand her ex-partner's behaviors.

Forgiveness literature often stipulates the “reframing” of offenders and their behavior as important steps in forgiveness processes. Reed and Enright (2006, p. 923) describe forgiving spousal abuse as involving “reframing the former partner (personal history, fallibility, and culpability, yet inherent human worth), with the purpose of relinquishing debilitating resentment.” In Lina's case, she reframed her partner's abusive behavior in relation to a new understanding of mental health, situated by Lina's knowledge of his “very difficult childhood.” Importantly, Lina's reframing of her ex-partner in relation to childhood trauma and mental health difficulties also coheres with evidence that attributions of poor mental health can obscure ascriptions of responsibility for abuse (Cavanagh et al., 2001; Kelly & Westmarland, 2016). Nonetheless, Lina was clear that this process of reframing and the feeling of forgivingness it engendered was important in allowing her to make sense of the abuse she experienced, while also allowing her to express her feelings of wanting to move forward with the relationship in a new form.

This is also true of Suki's (50, interview participant) account of forgiving her ex-partner for violence so extreme that he almost killed Suki and their child. Despite his actions, Suki was unequivocal that she had forgiven her ex-partner:

before bed me and my son pray, even though my son doesn't know what I am praying for, but I will pray for people that have hurt him in the past. I ask for their forgiveness and we pray they will live well, and we pray for people who hurt us and we forgive them.

Like Lina, Suki's forgiveness reflects her reframing of her ex-partner's actions in relation to the personal histories that she saw as incubating his abusive behaviors: “I think I feel sorry for him and that he has very bad experience […] no one loved him, and a very bad childhood.” It is also evident that Suki's Christian faith was integral to her pursuing forgiveness and the practices through which she did so. Just as reframing perpetrators’ conduct in relation to trauma and deteriorated mental health can obscure attributions of responsibility, so too has faith been shown to enable the continuation of abuse (Yuvarajan & Stanford, 2016). Yet faith can also act as a resource for overcoming abuse among victims/survivors (Schneider & Feltey, 2009). For Suki, the experience of forgiveness was clearly felt to be positive, allowing her to live her life without the weight of what she experienced crushing her spirit:

I think this hatred, if you don't forgive, you put yourself in this box, you just make yourself a distance with the reality [sic], and you always stay in that unhappy place. That is actually making yourself suffer.

Research that identifies forgiveness as a significant variable in rates of return to abusive relationships is of clear value (Gilbert & Gordon, 2017; Gordon et al., 2004). Yet, interpreting forgiveness according to a quantification of risks elides how, for several victims/survivors in this study, forgiveness was used as a crucial means to make sense of and move on from the abuse they experienced, often oriented around attempts to make sense of perpetrators’ behavior in terms of mental health issues or childhood trauma.

But neither is this to suggest that the potential benefits of forgiving abusive partners imply that forgiveness is a path that should be undertaken. For both Suki and Lina, forgiveness occurred when they were “out of harm's way,” an important qualification that aligns with Ysseldyk et al.'s (2019, p. 2017) research into when positive effects of forgiveness for victims/survivors are possible. Furthermore, although Lina and Suki's narratives are reminiscent of existing qualitative research into the significance of forgiving experiences to victims/survivors of abuse (Kerlin & Sosin, 2017; Schneider & Feltey, 2009; Wu et al., 2021), the current focus on positive aspects of forgiveness for victims/survivors within this literature sidelines significant issues associated with forgivingness within abusive contexts. Other participant narratives, discussed next, illustrate how such reframing of perpetrators’ behaviors during abusive relationships was often a barrier to victims/survivors feeling able to leave abusive relationships, leading to forms of forgiveness that were subsequently reflected on negatively by participants.

Victim/Survivor Reflections on Problematic Forgiveness

Attending to the breadth of victims/survivors’ experience is crucial to understanding the multidimensionality of how forgiveness operates in these contexts. While Lina and Suki illustrate how forgiveness can be integrated into narratives that support moving forward from abuse in a positive light, several victims/survivors’ accounts yielded examples of what is referred to as “problematic” forgiveness, wherein offering forgiveness enables the “maintenance of morally dubious relationships” (MacLachlan, 2009, p. 200). Drawing on MacLachlan's conceptualization, problematic forgiveness was attributed where previous instances of forgiveness were recognized by participants as facilitating the continuation of an abusive relationship. This builds on existing literature that recognizes how seeking forgiveness (e.g., through minimizing actions or culpability) is used by perpetrators as a prominent means to maintain coercive control (Cavanagh et al., 2001).

Notable in this respect was Louise (36, interview participant), whose abusive partner was currently subject to a substantial custodial sentence. In addition to abuse toward Louise, the perpetrator had also committed violence against other women, including an extreme act of violence for which he had been convicted. Despite his prison sentence, Louise remained in a relationship with the perpetrator. She described how she forgave him with ease: “I've forgiven him, I forgave him quickly, which a lot of people find quite hard to understand.” Indeed, Louise described how “the thing I found hardest to forgive” was his decision to plead guilty for the crime he was sent to prison for, rather than plead diminished responsibility. Nonetheless, Louise was reflective of the issues associated with her forgiving so readily:

I do get frustrated at myself sometimes for forgiving too easily. […] I don't express my needs or my boundaries, and I let people kind of repeatedly step all over me. And then because I've forgiven them, it happens again.

Reflections on her own forgivingness and the consequences of this were central to Louise's interview and how she made sense of being involved in several abusive relationships. She recognized how her willingness to forgive was linked to her sense of self-worth within relationships: “it's good for the other person if I just forgive them, so it doesn't matter.” Reflecting on the multitude of damages her partner had inflicted, she added, “I think with my partner, forgiveness is just the cost of entry to the relationship. If I want the relationship to continue, I have to forgive him.”

This is indicative of a common theme in victims/survivors’ accounts, wherein it was not just specific examples of forgiving and not forgiving that were discussed, but also reflections on their own forgivingness, where this forgivingness stemmed from, and what role this forgivingness was felt to have played in the abusive relationships as a tool for the maintenance of coercive control (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Downes et al., 2019). For several participants, then, reflections on forgivingness became a medium through which abusive experiences were made sense of. For example, Farah (45, interview participant) described how she “tended to forgive extremely easily” throughout her relationship with her abusive husband (from whom she was now separated). As with Louise, Farah had become keenly aware of where her forgivingness had come from. For her, social expectations of women's place in relationships meant: “We’ve been taught from a very young age just say you're sorry or forgive them and move on […] I was basically conditioned to turn the other cheek, to forgive, to make up.”

For Farah, this resulted in an embodied sense of the need to empathize and to reframe current abuses in biographic histories of the abuser. Although the kind of reframing espoused by forgiveness therapy literature was articulated by Lina and Suki as allowing them to move on from the abuse they had experienced, Farah's experience was the reverse. At the time of the interview, over a year had passed since Farah had escaped an abusive relationship. She reflected with regret on her then willingness to forgive abusive behaviors by attributing them to the perpetrator's personal history and poor mental health during the relationship. Farah recounted how she used to remind herself that her husband “had a very traumatic upbringing.” Thus, even when Farah considered not forgiving his abuse, his appeals to his upbringing combined with her empathetic disposition meant she “could see right down to how he was as a child and how he became the man he became. And it became so much easier to forgive.”

This is indicative of Donovan and Hester's (2014, p. 207) argument that loving practices can underpin abusive relationship dynamics because they establish and enforce relationship rules that prioritize the needs and wishes of the perpetrator while making the victim feel compassionate and “responsible for looking after their abusive partner.” Indeed, this reflects findings about how abusive partners seek forgiveness by minimizing culpability in relation to personal histories of victimhood (Cavanagh et al., 2001; Kelly & Westmarland, 2016). Farah recounted how her reframings would be explicitly pushed by her husband: “my husband would always say to me ‘it's not about you’, whenever he would lash out or say hurtful things he would often add ‘it's not about you.’”

For Farah, her forgivingness—and the role of her gendered upbringing and her empathetic nature played in molding her forgiving disposition—became objects of sense-making in themselves, which facilitated how she interpreted the abuse she experienced. Jessica (38, interview participant) also regretted, with hindsight, her willingness to forgive the abusive behavior of her ex-husband, from whom she had been separated for 18 months at the time of the interview. Her interview centered on her ongoing attempts to move past some of the pain that he caused her on account of his sex and gambling addictions, including financial abuse (e.g., hiding and withholding finances and money almost entirely from Jessica). Jessica described how during the relationship, she “really tried very hard to forgive and move on” after her husband's abusive behaviors intensified while Jessica was pregnant with their child (itself a recognized risk factor; Adhikari et al., 2025). Highlighting the emotional labor involved in coping with abusive behaviors (Tarzia, 2020), Jessica also reflected how her forgivingness toward her ex-husband was itself a product of her attempts to contextualize and reframe his behavior: “he was in the grip of mental health stuff that he wasn't in control of,” after which “he was so upset, so sorry, and I just felt sorry for him. I just felt compassion in a way. Because he was so direct about it, I did feel like I could forgive him.” Yet, she now reflects on this forgiveness as being both problematic and instrumentalized by the perpetrator, because while Jessica “tried to forgive him […] he was just carrying on” with his abusive behavior in a way that she now fears has had profoundly detrimental effects on their daughter (discussed below).

Louise, Farah, and Jessica's accounts lend experiential weight to Gordon et al.'s (2004) quantitative finding that forgiveness is a particularly salient predictor of the likelihood of victims remaining in relationships with abusive partners. However, what emerges in these narratives is not a lack of awareness of problematic dimensions of forgiving. Rather, participants reflected on aspects of their own forgivingness that they constructed as problematic. This reflection became a key vehicle for their interpretations of themselves in relation to the abuse they had experienced, illuminating a different way in which notions of forgiveness are utilized in processes of sense-making by victims/survivors. As will be seen next, the regret and contemplation woven through these narratives are indicative of how, for Jessica, Farah, and other victims/survivors, experiences of forgiveness and their beliefs about forgiveness were not static but rather continued to emerge in relation to changing circumstances (including their own safety).

Forgiving and Not Forgiving in Process

Current literature about forgiveness in contexts of abuse frequently presents forgiving as an end point that, once achieved, engenders a range of potential risky or beneficial outcomes. The qualitative approach of the present study, combined with its remit not being focused only on forgiving, allowed the emergent nature of victims/survivors’ experiences of forgiveness to be centered in ways not well captured in current literature. In exploring a wider range of victims/survivors’ experiences, forgiveness was discussed less as a definitive event and more often as a fluctuating and evolving process that unfolds over time in relation to shifting circumstances, perspectives, interactions, and relationship dynamics (Abbott et al., 2023).

Continuing with the examples of Jessica and Farah, in similar ways, each described how circumstances, interactions, and evolving relationship dynamics led them to re-evaluate their forgivingness after escaping abusive relationships. Farah recounted how she began to rethink her attempts to understand and forgive as a result of calling a specialist domestic abuse service:

I called an abuse line […] because I'd seen a poster on coercion. […] And the man held me to account and he said in the nicest possible way something like, it almost doesn't matter what that person's experiences are […] it is unforgivable to be treated in that way. […] That was a real ‘aha’ moment for me because there I was being this all-forgiving look-the-other-way, turn-the-cheek kind of person. But actually what that was really doing was perpetuating and enabling really bad behaviour from my husband.

Re-evaluating decisions after escaping abusive relationships, including self-blaming for not leaving sooner, is of course not unusual (McKenzie et al., 2021). But what is significant here, and indeed what Farah recounted as a key moment in her leaving the relationship, was the re-evaluation of her forgivingness that this phone call brought about. The language of unforgivability in the call recast how Farah interpreted her forgivingness, with her repudiation of her forgivingness becoming part of how she made sense of her decisions to escape.

Jessica's re-evaluation of her earlier attempts to forgive followed a second intensification of her ex-partner's controlling and financially abusive behavior. This culminated in him having a further mental breakdown and an admission that he had regularly been using sex workers based on his self-declared sex addiction (which Jessica took to be at least a partial explanation of why they had lost their money). It was then her ex-partner's expectation that he would be forgiven that led Jessica to re-evaluate what she thought was forgiveness. She recounted: “his expectation was okay I told you now, you forgive me now, we have our marriage counselling, we move on.” This led her to realize that “forgiveness at that time [of the first breakdown] was, I thought I had forgiven him, but […] I was just kind of papering over the cracks. […] I thought I'd forgiven him but […] I was still angry with him.” So, when the behaviors repeated themselves, “his expectations of forgiveness” meant she “could see this stuff […] and I can't forgive it.” As with Farah, forgiving pasts were reinterpreted, with reinterpretations of forgiving used to make sense of crucial turning points in escaping abusive relationships.

Thus, in similar ways, Jessica and Farah described re-evaluating their earlier forgivingness—Farah as a result of a call with an abuse hotline and Jessica as a result of her husband's expectation for forgiveness to be given a second time. Such instances are indicative of Gabb and Fink's (2015, p. 970) argument that “telling moments” in relationships carry a particular salience for the construction of meaning. For both Farah and Jessica, at these telling moments, reinterpreting notions of forgiving and not forgiving became a means of making sense of transformations in their experiences of abusive relationships, demonstrating how forgiveness is not a singular event but rather a relationally emergent sense-making process. Indeed, participants often described forgiveness as an ongoing or incomplete process. Gemma (40, MOP), for example, describes how in her adult life, she has used therapy to work through her father's behavior toward her as a teenager:

I’m working to process my feelings here and that may, in time, lead to forgiveness, but I am definitely not there yet […] Maybe I have forgiven him intellectually but I don’t think I have forgiven him emotionally […] I don’t know whether I will be able to do that yet.

The fluctuating nature of forgiving and not forgiving over time emerged in other contexts too. Several interview and MOP participants discussed forgiving and not forgiving in relation to experiences of childhood sexual abuse, where the focus of discussion was not the perpetrator but rather family members who were perceived as enabling the abuse. As noted above, some literature has explored forgiveness in relation to childhood sexual abuse. Ashley's (no age given) MOP response directly reflects Tener and Eisikovit'’s (2017) findings of the animosity harbored by many victims/survivors of childhood sexual abuse toward family members who expect them to forgive their abusers. Yet it also illustrates the processual and relationally emergent nature of forgiving and not forgiving in such contexts. The MOP response discusses Ashley's experience of being raped as a child by a relative, and how she “find[s] [her] mum's attitude much harder to forgive than the crime itself”:

When I was a young teenager she told me that it was “about time I forgot about this business”. That my rapist should be “welcomed back into the family”. This had a profound effect upon me, almost every bit as major as the effect of the sexual abuse itself. I was frozen with fear. Her attitude comes from one where the church says forgive, so she expected blind obedience regardless of how I felt. […] I did once think that the rift between us was in part healed, or at least improving. Twenty years ago I explained how these things had made me feel and she apologised, both in person and in writing. Since then she has reversed her position and says that she didn’t say any of the things that she previously apologised for. So how can there be any real forgiveness now?

The quantification of forgiveness, either as a state to be achieved or a metric to be measured according to a therapy inventory, cannot fully capture the processual flow of forgiving and not forgiving recounted by victims/survivors in the preceding narratives. When victims/survivors’ experiences are centered, a perspective is generated wherein forgiveness is not depicted as something that is achieved and is thereby risky or beneficial, but rather as a means through which experiences are interpreted, with interpretation of experience via languages of forgiveness (including not forgiving) continuing to unfold alongside ongoing relational experiences. Rather than being a specific event, for many of these women, languages of forgiving and not forgiving instead provided a vocabulary for making sense of abuse, abusers, and enablers (and indeed their own former beliefs and attitudes) in an ongoing manner in relation to unfolding circumstances and interactions.

Not Forgiving

Arguments about the emergent nature of forgiveness are present in existing qualitative literature about forgiveness (Goman, 2017; Waldron & Kelley, 2008), as well as some of the qualitative literature regarding forgiveness in contexts of abuse (Band-Winterstein et al., 2011; Kerlin & Sosin, 2017; Tener & Eisikovits, 2017). However, the predominant focus on forgiving in existing qualitative literature means that experiences of not forgiving—and their significance to processes of sense-making in contexts of abuse—are underexplored.

The profound significance of not forgiving in contexts of abuse is evident in Ashley's MOP response above, wherein the impossibility of forgiving is expressed as the regrettably apposite means through which her mother's conduct can be interpreted. Similar sentiments arise in Glenda's (92, MOP) discussion of unforgiveness, focused on the sexual abuse inflicted on her niece by her niece's grandfather (who is unrelated to Glenda). In contrast to the assumptions woven into applications of forgiveness therapies to survivors of childhood sexual abuse (Freedman & Enright, 1996; Rahman et al., 2018), Glenda describes that from this experience she has “learned that some sins are never forgiven.” Yet it was not just the perpetrator whom the niece could not forgive:

When she knew that her mother had also been molested by her Father and knew that he was doing the same to her Daughter, but took no action. My niece could not forgive her Mother ever. Maybe this sin is too great to forgive. (Glenda)

This is indicative of how multiple participant discussions of abuse centered on what they had not forgiven. Verity (MOP, no age given), for example, describes how, although she has reached some sort of acceptance since her father's death, she “was never able to forgive [her] father” for his violence toward her as a child.

Indeed, although Jessica did discuss her ongoing attempts to forgive some aspects of her ex-partner's behavior, more revealing of Jessica's position toward the abuse she experienced is her description of what she has not forgiven and what she finds unforgivable:

I remember a time when we were so skint that there was a dress for a pound in [a charity shop] and it took me a week to decide whether to buy that dress […] [W]hat I really find unforgivable is that he did all that stuff to me, but he also did it to [our daughter]. He took money out of our bank accounts that could have been spent on her […] So that's what I can't forgive, because I think that that's going to have a legacy in her life, and I feel awful about that.

Jessica uses the language of unforgivability first to contrast the behaviors she has been able to move past with those she cannot, and second to articulate her residing enmity toward her ex-partner's behavior and the effects it has had on their daughter.

Aisha (27, interview participant) similarly recounts how she has not forgiven her brother for his violent behavior toward her. After an intensification of his violence, she told him, “I will never forgive you for what you did” and so did not speak to the brother for 4 years. Their contact is now occasional since Aisha moved to the United Kingdom from her home country. Following a degree of civility when they saw each other at a family event, the brother asked Aisha if things were now mended between them: “I was like no, obviously it's not okay I'm just saying that […] I do not want to live in this grief” that the estrangement was causing. Aisha continues, “I tell this to him to his face, I'm like there was shit that you did that's not forgivable.” Her unforgiveness reflects not just his lack of repentance, but also how Aisha feels her brother's behavior should be interpreted in contrast to her family's interpretation of his behavior, who have pressed Aisha to see his violence as a phase that should be forgotten.

Lamb (2002) argues that a particular issue with the notion of forgiveness therapies is that they often present forgiveness as a virtue that people should undertake. In so doing, this risks misrepresenting the very good reasons why people should not forgive—both normatively and in terms of risks associated with forgiving (Gilbert & Gordon, 2017). To this, we add that the centering of experiences of not forgiving from victims/survivors illuminates a further point that studies of virtues of forgiveness in contexts of abuse elide: namely, there is an agency and a resolution in not forgiving that is powerful in its own right. Referring to her ex-husband, Genevieve (80, MOP) recounts how she

asked him once why he had abused me. Without hesitation, he answered “I wanted to destroy you”. Well he did not succeed, of course I cannot forgive him for the hell he put me through.

Here, and in the above extracts, not forgiving becomes a powerful mechanism through which perpetrators and their abuse are made sense of and through which ongoing anger is expressed. As is explicit in the narratives of Aisha, Glenda, and Ashley, the interpretation of a person and their action as not forgiven (or indeed unforgivable) is consequential for how relationships proceed. This aligns with existing studies of not forgiving in relationships, in which not forgiving is frequently identified with the termination of a relationship, or a relationship remaining estranged or distant (Hall & Fincham, 2006). That participants in this study regularly and forcefully centered their discussions on how they had not forgiven abuse they had experienced, perhaps should not be surprising. Yet literature on the relationship between forgiveness in contexts of abuse is so heavily focused on forgiving that the meaningfulness of not forgiving to the narratives of victims/survivors has been overlooked. This in turn overlooks the way in which not forgiving is used as an ultimate means of apportioning blame, designating harm, and expressing irremediability.

Conclusion

Most existing research into forgiveness and domestic and sexual abuse entails quantitative studies that either advocate the benefits of forgiveness therapies, or show why forgiving abuse (and therapeutic encouragements thereof) is risky. A smaller body of qualitative literature gives voice to women's experiences of forgiveness in the wake of abuse. As a whole, this literature focuses on the impact of forgiving, meaning important aspects of women's experiences and interpretations of not forgiving in relation to domestic and sexual abuse are overlooked. Additionally, in focusing on forgiving, current research tends to position forgiveness as an achieved event or occurrence that produces a range of potential benefits, risks, or forms of experience.

Our contribution here is to show that forgiveness in this context should be conceptualized not simply as a significant experience or the outcome of psychological processes, but also as a social vernacular deployed in multifarious ways to make sense of experiences of abuse, perpetrators, and self. This reflects how notions of forgiveness constitute important interpretive vocabularies in relationships, wherein forgiving is often valorized as an integral dimension of romantic and familial relationships, while not forgiving often signals what cannot be abided in a relationship (Abbott, 2025). Furthermore, we build on existing qualitative literature by highlighting the underresearched significance of not forgiving as a sense-making process. In our findings, there were clear instances of genuine forgiveness. Yet, more prominent were reflections on regretting forgiving abusers and potent assertions of why abuse could not be forgiven. These accounts were woven together with reflections on what victims/survivors had forgiven (or tried to forgive) in the past and ruminations on the causes of what some came to frame as a problematically forgiving disposition (albeit often in situations where expectations of forgiveness were mobilized by a perpetrator and which also need to be understood within a gendered social context). Findings such as these underline the importance—in policy and practice—of recognizing why victims/survivors may feel compelled to forgive abusive behaviors and also how they might come to stop forgiving (and often escape abusive relationships) if such behaviors become reframed as unforgivable.

Conceptually, positioning forgiving and not forgiving in terms of sense-making after abuse brings to the fore how forgiving and not forgiving are often intermingled and emergent processes that continue to unfold processually. It allows us to see that forgiveness in relation to abuse is often far from linear because circumstances unfold, relationship dynamics change, and previous interpretations and attitudes are reconsidered in light of current events and standpoints. Importantly, these findings underline the importance of ensuring a focus on victim/survivors’ experiences in research inquiries in ways that are sufficiently expansive to account for the breadth of these experiences (Westmarland & Bows, 2018).

Overall, this article extends literature that engages with victims/survivors’ own experiences of forgiveness, and our findings extend recent critiques that highlight the limitations of current dominant forgiveness conceptualizations (e.g., Abbott, 2025; Goman, 2017). However, the findings presented here are drawn from a wider study into experiences of forgiving, not forgiving, being forgiven, and not being forgiven in personal relationships. Thus, the findings are limited by the fact that the study was neither designed to specifically explore these issues in the context of domestic and sexual abuse, nor was a specific sample of victims/survivors recruited. In particular, participant discussions of not forgiving in the study reflected a broad range of relationships. Not forgiving may well be complicated by the nature of the relationship, including whether the domestic or sexual abuse is by a family member or intimate partner, or whether family members are perceived as enabling abuse.

Nevertheless, the way forgiving and not forgiving was discussed in relation to experiences of domestic and sexual abuse in this broader project about forgiveness first illustrates the significance of forgiving and not forgiving in this context, and second raises important themes in victims/survivors’ experiences that are not well covered in existing research in this domain. This research therefore shows the need for further specific qualitative research into victims/survivors’ experiences of forgiving and not forgiving in relation to abuse, while also informing directions of subsequent research in this area.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Owen Abbott

James Rowlands

Ethical Considerations

Ethical approval for the research described in this article was granted on April 4th, 2022 by Cardiff University's School of Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee (SREC Reference Number: 97).

Consent to Participate

All participants provided written informed consent to participate in the research.

Consent for Publication

All participants provided written consent that the data they produced could be used in research publications. Mass Observation Project data has been checked by Mass Observation Project staff to ensure that all participants had provided signed declarations that their contributions to the project could be used in publications. This was confirmed on June 2nd, 2025. Data has been anonymized and pseudonyms are used in the article. Data has been stored on a university-managed, password-protected, two-factor authenticated OneDrive.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research described in this article was supported through Author 1 by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number ECF-2021-300).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability

Data for the research described in this project is not currently publicly available, in line with funder protocols.

Author Biographies

Dr. Owen Abbott is a lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University, UK. He has published extensively in sociologies of morality, including his recent book Social Theorists of Morality (2025). His empirical work explores the moral dynamics of personal lives. He conducted a Leverhulme Trust-funded fellowship (at Cardiff University) on forgiving and not forgiving in personal relationships.

Dr. James Rowlands is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. James’ research focuses on domestic abuse, specifically domestic homicide and domestic abuse-related deaths, as well as femicide. His first book The Potential and Peril of Reviewing Domestic Abuse-Related Deaths was published in 2025.

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