One evening in her parents’ home in New Zealand in 1993, Shirley Jülich told her father something she had kept secret from him for her whole life.
Jülich revealed to her father that she had been a victim of sexual assault by a man known to the family. Decades before. Her brother revealed the same. Their father, a police officer, did not waste any time.
“My father just said, ‘OK we’ll have a meeting tomorrow morning’,” she recalls. He called on people in the family network to gather the next day. He called the man who had allegedly hurt his children. He said, Jülich remembers, “‘I will ring him up and I will tell him to be here at 10.15.’”
