Some pages of the Bible are very hard to read aloud. A Levite pushes a woman out of a house to a mob and finds her at the threshold in the morning. A king takes another man's wife and arranges the man's death. A law in Deuteronomy seems to hand a young woman to the man who seized her. Many churches never read these chapters, and many readers are grateful for that. For some readers, though, these pages are not abstract. They come close to something that happened to them, or to someone they love, and the silence around them has felt like its own answer.
Before anything else, some things should not be made smaller than they are. These passages describe real kinds of harm: rape, abandonment, men sacrificing the women they should have protected. Explaining a passage's ancient setting does not undo what it describes. A survivor's anger is not a theological mistake that needs correcting. The question a hurting person brings, where God was, is not a debating move. A study of these texts that leaves any of that behind has failed, however clever its readings are.
With that said plainly, there is an answer, and Scripture gives it more clearly than many churches do. The Bible records these things without blessing them. It gives the verdict to God, not to the powerful man. After the worst scene in Judges, the people who saw what was done say: "consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds" (Judges 19:30). The movements that follow move slowly, in that same spirit. They begin by noticing whose story a passage tells. They read one terrible chapter closely enough to see what it condemns. They test the hardest laws without excusing them. They end with the question of where God was, brought into the open, in lament and in honest conversation. You may step away from any part of it at any time.