The God who stands with victims: responding to the news about Russell Brand and David Walliams

Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual abuse and covers sensitive themes. It may not be suitable for all readers. Please read with caution.

“Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no and to demand justice from the criminal courts when sexual predators like you, Russell Brand, act without their consent.”

Those were the words from the Judge at the sentencing of Russell Brand earlier this week. Brand, who was found guilty of one charge of rape and three charges of sexual assault, is now scheduled to spend 10 years and 6 months in prison. Survivors told stories of Brand grabbing their breasts, being pinned against the wall, and even of anal rape. Brand claims to have found Christian faith in the last couple of years. Over the next decade, it will be put to the test.

The following day, David Walliams was finally exposed as the unnamed celebrity who had taken out an injunction to try and block stories which accused him of preying on girls as young as 15 and grooming them for sex. Mr Walliams had said that it was likely that he would kill himself if the stories were published. He denies all the allegations.

On Wednesday, the journalist Justine Smith alleged on the Private Eye Podcast that there was another well-known celebrity who has “many, many victims”, and is currently being protected by an injunction.

That’s this week. On Friday last week, Thomas Markle was arrested and charged with possessing images of child sex abuse. On the Thursday, Channel 4 announced that their show ‘Married at First Sight’ would not return following a Panorama investigation revealing rape allegations from two female cast members. And the headlines are not just exclusively outside the church: a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that Steve Timmis, the former CEO of church planting network Acts 29, and his wife Janet, had been charged by the police with eight counts of rape.

When I was reflecting with a colleague on this blog, we noted how sad it was that we had both written multiple articles about similar subjects in recent years: on Huw Edwards, on Mohammed Al-Fayed and on John Smyth, amongst others. And for every case of celebrity - in the church or outside it - which hits the headlines, there are so many more which not just go unreported, but unconvicted: the general consensus is that only between 1% and 3% of sexual crimes result in a conviction.

The statistics are damning: 790,000 women are raped or sexually assaulted every single year: that is 1 in 30. 1 in 4 women will experience it during their adult lifetimes (and 1 in 18 men). According to Rape Crisis, 1 in 6 children experience sexual abuse.

It truly is an evil world we live in.

Amidst it all, we try to process our emotions: horror at how blithely humans can treat one another, and then cover it up. Anger or even rage at the arrogance of men (for 98% of adults who are prosecuted or arrested for sexual assault crimes are indeed men) who so brazenly violate other people’s dignity. A deep sadness for those who are victims, and yet a sense of helplessness, for we know cannot undo what has been done.

I was struck this week by an article in ‘The Times’ by Morwenna Loughman, who wrote: “There were many moments throughout Russell Brand’s trial that will have hit harrowingly close to home for too many of us: the monstrous entitlement, the laughing, the callous swagger, the shark eyes that suddenly flash before you as though a switch has been flicked. And then after reliving these horrors in front of a room full of strangers with your life — and countless others — literally depending on it, to be asked, “Why didn’t you scream?”

For so many, these headlines will bring back to the forefront their own dark memories: spectres of a trauma they try to forget, or recollections of a time when they were not believed. I’ve had several friends - both male and female - confide in me about their own experiences of rape. I have no doubt many more have experienced it who I don’t know about. When we speak to friends or colleagues about stories like these, it’s important to remember: we so often do not understand what someone has been through.

The Bible never shies away from the grim reality of life. It describes human nature both at its best and its horrific worst; it tells stories of real people who experienced intense suffering of almost every description; it includes graphic tales of women who survived sexual violence, and some who did not. One of the darkest incidents in Israel’s history is the story of an unnamed woman who was raped by the men at Gibeah; they continued to assault her until dawn the following day. “When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, “Get up; let’s go.” But there was no answer.” (Judges 19:27-28).

At CARE, we hold a deep love for all who are abused or assaulted; we have worked on behalf of the women trapped in prostitution and those who have been trafficked, and we continue to campaign for the Nordic Model to be rolled out across the UK, which would criminalise the purchase of sex while providing legal protections for those who have been abused. Sexual assault is often a crime where people can feel like they are without a voice: disbelieved, doubted, or unable to prove it. 5 in 6 women who are raped don’t report it to the police: 39% say they do not think the police could help, 25% that the police would not do anything about it, and 24% that the police would not believe them. And yet our God commands us to be “a voice for the voiceless” (Proverbs 31:8).

For Christians, this is rooted in who God is Himself. When we read about stories of deep evil, like those in recent weeks, we might want to ask, why did God let this happen? That question is not new, and Jewish and Christian believers have been asking it for thousands of years. We say that God must know what He’s doing - and no doubt, He does - but it sure isn’t obvious to us now. There are some questions which only He can answer, in His time, and in His way.

We can’t answer the question ‘why’. But we can, perhaps, answer the question ‘where’. We believe in a God who stands alongside the victims, not the perpetrators. And perhaps, when we are in the dark night of the soul, that is what we truly need: the God who draws alongside us and tells us we’re not alone…

“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, 'The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.' Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.”

(Genesis 16:1-4)

The theologian Elaine Storkey tells a story about a student who was conducting a research project on the lives of marginalised women in Ethiopia. The group had not had much exposure to Christianity, so she asked someone to read Bible stories which prominently feature women to them, to see whether they could identify with the woman in the stories. They almost unanimously said they identified with the character Hagar.

God had promised Abram that he would become a father of many nations, but when his wife Sarai had not borne Abram any children, and both were past the age for bearing children, she told him to sleep with her servant-girl Hagar instead. It would be a slight anachronism to talk in terms of consent in this context, but in such a world, Hagar would essentially have had no choice in the matter. But when Hagar became pregnant, Sarai came to mistreat her, to the point where Hagar ran away (Genesis 16:6).

Hagar might have wondered where God was in the midst of what she was going through. But an Angel of the Lord found her, and promised that her descendants would increase so much that they would be impossible to count. We read in Genesis 16:11:

“The angel of the Lord also said to her: ‘You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery.’”

The name Ishmael means, ‘God hears’. God had heard Hagar’s cry. Even when it felt like she was alone, there was still one who knew what she was going through. Hagar’s response is deeply moving: “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’”

Jesus tells us that not a hair will drop from our head without our heavenly Father knowing about it, just as not one sparrow drops to the ground without God seeing. We read in Psalm 56:8: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”

Sexual exploitation often happens behind closed doors; in the shadows, where the perpetrators believe they will be undetected. When celebrities are involved, more people may be aware, only to turn a blind eye, whether because they are seduced by their influence or afraid of their power.

Either way, the victims (normally women) are often isolated, feeling like they are alone and there is no one who can help; some might even feel that there is no one who even cares.

But God hears. And God sees.

“But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. The victims commit themselves to you; you are the helper of the fatherless…

You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.”

(Psalm 10:14, 17-18)

It is one thing to say that God sees us in our pain; it is another to say that he will do something about it. A God who hears people’s cries and moves on would be no comfort at all.

In Hagar’s story, when Hagar was later sent away by Abraham into the desert, after they had used all their water, she “went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, ‘I cannot watch the boy die’. And as she sat there, she began to sob.” But God heard their cries, opened her eyes, and showed her a well filled with water, and promised that He would turn her son Ishamel into a great nation. He did not abandon her or her son: instead, we read, “God was with the boy as he grew up” (Genesis 21:20).

God is on the side of the poor and the downtrodden, not the powerful and the corrupt. He is the God who “has brought down the mighty from their seat, but has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich empty away.” (Luke 1:52-53). Psalm 10 describes Him as “the helper of the fatherless”, and talks about him “defending the fatherless and the oppressed.” He is on the side of the victim, not on the side of the perpetrator.

This does not mean He will always intervene directly himself. He has delegated authority here on earth to humans, and particularly to governments, who “bear the sword” (Romans 13:4) and punish those who do wrong, as has happened with Russell Brand. Governments do not just have the illusion of responsibility: they are called to promote good and to restrain evil. That is why it is so important that we work to create a culture where women feel empowered to speak up, allegations are taken seriously, and powerful celebrities know they will be held to account, rather than being protected by endless injunctions. And it’s also why it’s so important that we speak up through the right channels if we are aware that abuse is happening.

Sometimes God might intervene directly; on other occasions he might work through us. And even if he does not act now, we know that one day in the future, he will. There will be a day on which wrongs will be put right, on which evil will be judged and on which God will say: ‘No more’.

The Bible has - thankfully - very strong words about the reality of judgement for those who have done evil, including those who have committed sexual sins or abused other image-bearers: they will not escape justice in the future for what they have done, even if they are able to evade it in the present. All those celebrities who seem so powerful now are no match for the power of the Living God.

Let every perpetrator of abuse beware: you can hide away your sins, con human courts, flee from governments, but nothing escapes the eye of the God who judges all things.

And even if it seems impossible to imagine now, the Bible holds forth a promise of hope and restoration for those who are suffering, grounded in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. In Revelation 21, we read about how God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying, or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

God sometimes intervenes now, and sometimes he doesn’t. But one day, he will say: no more. No more evil. No more abuse. No more pain. And the agony and the tears that for now feel so inescapable, will one day be washed away like raindrops in a mighty river.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”

(Psalm 22:1-2)

To read the Psalms is to be confronted by the raw reality of human experience. They express a confidence in God’s future, but they implore him to bring it forward into the present. The theologian Tom Wright explains: “The Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet.”

For the woman who has been sexually abused, words like Psalm 22 may express familiar sentiments: “My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.” God will one day act, but He isn’t doing so now. God may care about me, but He’s not delivering me from my pain.

But the remarkable reality of the Christian story is not simply that God is on the side of the powerless, but that he actually identifies with them. For the words of Psalm 22 are words which God himself - in the person of Jesus - once prayed, from an old rugged cross on Golgotha’s Hill. Christians do not believe in a God who lives on high, removed and detached from the pain of human experience; they believe in a God who got his hands dirty, who came down into all the muck and brokenness of a hurting and damaged world.

The pastor and theologian John Stott once wrote: “In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness.”

Jesus knew what it was to feel alone, abandoned by friends and family. He knew what it was to be mocked by his captors, as the crowds, the Jewish authorities, and even those being crucified next to him hurled abuse at him. Jesus knew what it was to be treated with shame and scorn, what it meant to be beaten and whipped and exposed. And he knew what it meant to feel abandoned by God: the sky turned black, as a sign of God’s judgement. He did not wash his hands of human evil; he let evil do its worst.

Where is Jesus? You can see him in every woman, man or child who is broken and bears the scars of physical abuse. You can see him in each one who has been told they are worthless, that they have no dignity and no value but thirty pieces of silver. You can see him in each and every one whose body has been handed over for the corrupt and powerful to make sport of. In every victim, abandoned, abused and alone.

Their sorrow became his sorrow; their story became his story.

Where is Jesus? He is there, identifying with each and every victim, still bearing the scars from the day He himself was the sacrificial lamb.

This article has been adapted from an essay Peter wrote in November 2025, entitled ‘Where is God in the brothel?’