This is the best article I have read to
date about the topic of incest, so I had to add it to this site. Please remember this was written in 1992. The
tragedy, by far, is the fact that over the last 17 years, society has refused to make the necessary changes in order
to prevent ANY child from the lifelong pain and effects of incest or sexual abuse. How many millions
of children have been tortured and victimized in the last 17 years? How many millions more will it take until
we all do whatever it takes to educate the public and force society to have a ZERO TOLERANCE toward pedophiles and child molesters?
In the original article, Ms. Vanderbilt included individual case
studies to back up all of her facts and claims. These case studies were brutally honest, tragic and personalized just
how horrific the reality of incest actually is. However, I did not include the personal case studies on this
site due to their graphic nature. As pathetic as it is, sexual perverts/offenders visit sexual abuse/incest sites
looking to find graphic and personal content to read for their own sick and twisted gratification. I absolutely refuse to contribute to their dispicable and inexcusable
perversions. ~Christine, Shattered Souls Webmaster
Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No
euphemisms, evasions, excuses, or intellections? Are
you sure? Then read this. Every
word of it is true. The horror is
unimaginable. But in the end, at least you will
know. Incest can happen to anyone: to rich and to poor; to
whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists. It happens to girls and to boys, to the gifted
and to the disabled. It happens to children whose parents neglect them, and those—like me—whose parents love and
care for them. What exactly is incest? The
definition that I use in this article is: any sexual abuse of a child by a relative or other person in a position of trust
and authority over the child. It is the violation of the child where he or she lives—literally and metaphorically. A
child molested by a stranger can run home for help and comfort. A victim of incest cannot. Versions of this definition are widely used outside the courtroom by therapists
and researchers. In court, incest definitions vary from state to state. In many states, the law requires that for incest to
have taken place, vaginal penetration must be proved. So if a father rapes his child anally or orally he may be guilty
of child sexual abuse but may not, legally, be guilty of incest. I believe that if incest is to be understood and fought effectively, it is imperative that the definition commonly
held among therapists and researchers (the definition I have given here) be generally accepted by the courts and public. I
am not alone in this belief. As therapist E. Sue Bloom, for one, writes in Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its
Aftereffects in Women: "If we are to understand incest, we must look not at the blood bond, but at the emotional
bond between the victim and the perpetrator. . . . The important criterion is whether there is a real relationship in the
experience of the child." "The
crucial psychosocial dynamic is the familial relationship between the incest participants," adds Suzanne M.
Sgroi, M.D., director of the Saint Joseph College's Institute for Child Sexual Abuse Intervention in West Hartford, Connecticut,
writing in the Hand-book of Clinical Intervention in Child Sexual Abuse. "The presence or absence of a blood
relationship between incest participants is of far less significance than the kinship roles they occupy." Incest happens between father and daughter, father and
son, mother and daughter, mother and son. It also happens between stepparents and stepchildren, between grandparents and grandchildren,
between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews. It can also happen by proxy, when live-in help abuses or a parent's
lover is the abuser; though there is no blood or legal relationship, the child is betrayed and violated within the context
of family. No one knows how many incest
victims there are. No definitive random studies on incest involving a cross section of respondents have been undertaken. No
accurate collection systems for gathering information exist. The statistics change depending on a number of variables: the
population surveyed, the bias of the researcher, the sensitivity of the questions, and the definition of incest used. This
is an area "where each question becomes a dispute and every answer an insult," writes Roland Summit, M.D., a professor
of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, in his introduction to Sexual Abuse of Young Children.
"The expert in child sexual abuse today may be an ignoramus tomorrow." As recently as the early '70s, experts in the psychiatric community stated that there were only 1 to 5 cases
of incest per one million people. When I began work on this article, I thought that maybe one person in a hundred was an incest
victim. How wrong I was. Sometimes called "rape by extortion," incest is about betrayal of trust, and it accounts
for most child sexual abuse by far. To be specific: In 1977, Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D., professor emeritus at Mills College
in Oakland, California, and author of The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women and Sexual Exploitation:
Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Workplace Harassment, questioned 930 San Francisco women and found that 38 percent had been
sexually abused by the time they had reached the age of 18. She further found that of those women who were victims, 89 percent
were abused by relatives or family acquaintances. Using Russell's figures as my guide (they are widely cited by other
authorities in the field and have been duplicated in other studies) the estimate of the incidence of incest that I came up
with is one in three; which is to say that incest happens to about one person in three before the age of 18. Incestuous acts range from voyeurism and exhibitionism
to masturbation, to rape and sodomy, to bestiality, to ritualized torture in cults. Incest may or may not include penetration,
may or may not be violent. It may happen only once or continue for decades. It usually exists in secret, but not always. One reason for the imprecise nature of the incest statistics
is that when children try to tell, they aren't believed. Another is that many victims don't recognize certain behaviors
as abusive. My parents would never have let anyone abuse me—if they had known. They didn't know because I
didn't know to tell them. Small children
understand very little about sex. Even kids who use "dirty" words often don't understand what those words mean.
And as little as they know about normal sex, they know less about deviant sex. They simply trust that whatever happens to
them at the hands of those who take care of them is supposed to happen. Children know that adults have absolute power over
them, and even in the face of the most awful abuse, they will obey. The victim who does tell is almost always asked: Why didn't you tell sooner? The
answers are: I didn't know
anything was wrong. I didn't know it
was illegal. I didn't know who to tell. I did tell and no one believed me. I was ashamed. I was scared. The abuser
keeps the incest secret through threats: If you tell, I will kill you. If
you tell, you'll be sent away. If you
tell, I'll kill your little sister. If
you tell, I'll molest your little brother. If
you tell, I'll kill your dog. If you
tell, it will kill your mother. If you tell,
no one will believe you. If you tell, then
you will go to the insane asylum. If you
tell, I'll go to jail and you'll starve. If you tell, they'll give you to someone who will really hurt you. If you tell, you'll go to hell. If
you tell, I won't love you anymore. Many
abusers make good on their threats, but most don't need to. "Small creatures deal with overwhelming threat by freezing,
pretending to be asleep, and playing possum," says Dr. Roland Summit, the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist who,
in a paper titled "The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome," sets forth a widely accepted explanation of how
children behave when molested. The classic
paradigm for an incestuous union is between an older male (father or stepfather or grandfather or uncle) and a younger female.
The male is pictured as seduced by a conniving and sexually precocious child who wants sex, power, and presents. Or he is
seen as a snaggle-toothed tree dweller with an IQ below freezing who rapes his daughter because she is female, his, and nearer
to hand than a cow. Yet Massachusetts therapist Mike Lew, author of Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and
Other Sexual Child Abuse, told me that as many as 50 percent of victims may be boys. As therapist Karin C. Meiselman,
Ph.D., writes in Resolving the Trauma of Incest, "The fact that many males are abused as children and adolescents
is only beginning to receive adequate professional attention." Difficult as it is for girls to talk about their abuse, it is even harder for boys. Boys are taught that they
must be strong and self-reliant. For a boy to report that he was abused, he must admit weakness and victimization. If he was
molested by a male, he will fear that this has made him homosexual. Then, too, many boys simply don't know they have been abused. Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., professor of linguistics
at Georgetown University and author most recently of You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, suggests
that girls and boys are raised in different cultures. The world expects one set of behaviors and attitudes from girls and
another, quite different set from boys. We
teach girls to avoid sex, to wait, and to protect themselves. We teach them that men are not allowed to do certain things
to them. But we teach boys that any sex—any heterosexual sex—is good, the earlier the better. We tell them they
"scored," they "got lucky." But consider the impact when a boy "gets lucky" with his mother. Guilt Abused children assume that they are responsible for the abuse, believing they brought it on themselves. One man
said to his 13-year-old victim, "I'm sorry this had to happen to you, but you're just too beautiful." Some
victims feel guilty because they accepted presents or felt pleasure. Victims who experience orgasms while being molested suffer
excruciating guilt and conflict. While there
have been articles by pedophiles arguing that incest is good and natural and that its prohibition violates the rights of children,
psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., writes in her pioneering book, Father-Daughter Incest, that the actual sexual
encounter, whether brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable, "is always, inevitably, destructive to the child."
And Maryland psychotherapist Christine A. Courtois, Ph.D., author of Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy,
is firm in her belief that incest "poses a serious mental-health risk for a substantial number of victims." Physical Effects In young children who are victims of incest, the vast array of physical
and psychological symptoms suffered include injuries to the mouth, urethra, vagina, and anus; bed-wetting and soiling; fear
of everyone of the perpetrator's gender; nightmares and/or sleep loss; compulsive masturbation, precocious sexual knowledge,
and sexual acting out; running away, suicide attempts, and sexually transmitted diseases. Judge Jeffry H. Gallet of the New
York State Family Court, sitting in Manhattan, perhaps best known as the judge who heard the Lisa Steinberg case, told me
he had once seen a baby with pelvic inflammatory disease so severe that as an adult she will never be able to conceive. And
as is well known to health workers and court officials, not all AIDS babies contract the virus before they are born. Lasting Sexual Problems Some victims become prostitutes. Others believe that incest forced them
into lifelong sexual behaviors that they would not have chosen for themselves, including homosexuality. Victims experience
not only guilt, shame, fear, and a broad range of psychosocial disorders. They are unable to trust. They have severe problems
maintaining intimate relationships, including those with their children. Journalist Betsy Peterson, in Dancing with Daddy: A Childhood Lost and a Life Regained, describes how incest
with her father affected her relationship with her sons. "To know how much I love them is to know what I didn't
give them, what they missed and what I missed," she writes. "I use my hands to stuff the sobs back in, to eat the
terrible grief . . . because I spent their childhood as I spent my own, trying to protect myself." Michigan therapist Kathy Evert, author of the autobiographical When
You're Ready: A Woman Healing from Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse by Her Mother, recently completed a study
of 93 women and 9 men abused by their mothers. She found that almost a fourth of the men and more than 60 percent of the women
had eating disorders. "I can't tell you the number of women I've seen who weigh over five hundred pounds,"
Evert says. One woman told her she ate to get bigger and more powerful than her mother. Another woman in the group weighed
more than 600 pounds. "Food was my weapon against her," she said of her mother. More than 80 percent of the women and all the men in Evert's study had
sexual problems as adults that they attributed to the abuse by their mothers. And almost two thirds of the women said they
rarely or never went to the doctor or dentist because to be examined was too terrifying for them. Thus they are unable to
avail themselves of the diagnostic benefits of modern medicine, such as pelvic exams, PAP smears, breast examinations, and
mammography. Some victims are unable to
feel physical pain. Some self-mutilate—they bum or cut themselves. Mariann told me that the impulse to cut herself is
almost constant and almost uncontrollable. "You get to feeling like your body is full of something rotten," she
says. "If you can make an opening, somehow the pressure will be relieved and everything will come out." PTSD Also prevalent among incest victims is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
which I discussed at length with Mary W. Armsworth FA D., the
author of dozens of articles on incest and its aftermath, as
well as a professor of educational psychology at the University
of Houston who teaches one of the few courses in this country on trauma. In the early '80s, Armsworth noticed that incest patients, who "live in a bath of anxiety," had the same PTSD symptoms demonstrated by some Vietnam War veterans and
most victims of torture. These symptoms include but are not
limited to amnesia, nightmares, and flashbacks. People who
have PTSD may "leave their bodies" during the abuse, and they
may continue to dissociate for decades after the abuse ends. In 1990, The New York Times reported that Dennis Charney, M.D., a Yale psychiatrist and director of clinical neuroscience at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had found that even one experience of overwhelming terror permanently alters the chemistry of the brain. The longer the duration and the more severe the trauma, the more likely it is that a victim will develop PTSD. Most of the dreams told to me by victims of incest involve being chased and stabbed, suffocated, made immobile and voiceless. I myself have a recurring dream of a man who gouges out my eyes and of a woman who rips out my tongue. One woman who has been in long-term therapy owing to years of abuse by her aunt, uncle, and mother told me she dreamed she was at a beautiful, crowded picnic in the woods when she vomited feces. The dream so revolted and shamed her that she had never before told it to anyone, not even her therapist. Children
forced to perform fellatio may grow up to be adults with flashbacks triggered by the smell of Clorox, the feel of melted butter, the sight of toothpaste in their mouth. It is difficult for people who don't have flashbacks to know what one is like. Flashbacks are not memories—memories have distance, are muted and selective. A flashback is a memory without distance. It can bring all the terror of an original event, triggered by something utterly innocuous. A
few months ago I was daydreaming in a friend's kitchen. Her husband, on his way to get the mail, came up quietly behind me, speaking softly to himself. The sensation of being approached (sneaked up on) from the rear by a much larger person who was muttering triggered a flashback—terror so acute that I had to get him away from me with the same urgency I would feel if my shirt were on fire. Flashbacks can be almost continuous and overwhelming. People who experience them without knowing what causes them can feel crazy. An incest survivor's friend, seeing her run to hide for no apparent reason, might agree that she is. When flashbacks come less frequently, they can be handled almost as fast as they happen. The man who accidentally terrified me never knew it, and I was able to check back in with where I really was and what had really happened almost as quickly as I had checked out. At the extreme edge of post-traumatic stress disorder lies multiple personality disorder (MPD). It was once thought to be rare and is still disbelieved entirely by some (one of the more noted skeptics is Paul McHugh, M.D., head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore). But while MPD has been called the UFO of psychiatric disorders, a growing number of cases are being treated. Researchers
believe that children develop multiple personalities as a way of coping with abuse so violent and sadistic that the mind fractures. Each assault is then handled by one or more personalities —"selves," or "alters." Some personalities hold pain, others
grief, others rage. Even happiness may be segregated into a
discrete "self." The personalities often have no
knowledge of one another, so a person with MPD "loses time"
when one personality gives way to another, and can "come to" hours or years later without any way of knowing what had happened in the interim. Brad, a victim of incest who suffers MPD, has learned to recognize a particular feeling that warns him he is about to switch into one of his alters. It happens under stress, he says. "My eyes all of a sudden blur and everything goes to gauze." What a Child Learns from Being Sexually
Abused "The one thing
a child learns from sexual abuse," Dr. Summit told me, "is how to be abused." Sexually abused children teach themselves to endure assault. Instead of learning to protect themselves, they learn that they can't protect themselves. As adults they can be blind to dangers others would find obvious. They may freeze
or go limp when threatened. Someone who has never been abused
can say no, can walk or run away, can scream and fight. The
incest victim often doesn't know what to do except to wait
for the danger to be over. Child incest
victims often become adult rape victims. Almost one quarter of the incest victims Mary W. Armsworth studied went on to be sexually abused by their therapists. Many incest victims as adults choose abusive partners.
Accuracy of Childhood Memories Just how reliable are memories? Can they be manufactured? How reliable,
especially, is the memory of a child? Do leading questions
by parents, therapists, or investigators—or the use of
anatomically detailed dolls in the questioning of children who may have been abused—create false accusations that lead to false convictions? These were the sort of questions addressed by Gail S. Goodman, a psychologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and her colleagues in studies designed to test not only the accuracy of children's recall under stress and over time but also how children respond to leading or strongly suggestive questions devised to bring about false accusations. "If children are indeed as suggestible as some have claimed, then we should be able in our studies to create false reports of abuse," Goodman writes in the chronicle of her studies, published in 1990. Child-abuse charges, after all, have often been dismissed by judges on this ground. The scenes
acted out in one of Goodman's studies were based on actual child-abuse cases. Pairs of four and seven-year-olds were taken into a dilapidated trailer where they encountered a man who talked to them while using hand puppets. Then he put on a mask. While one of the children observed, he played a game of Simon Says with the other child, during which he and the child touched knees. He photographed the children and played a game where one child tickled him while the other child watched. All of this was video-taped through a one-way mirror so that researchers could have a precise record. Ten to 12 days later the
children were asked the kinds of questions that might lead to a charge
of sexual abuse: "He took your clothes off, right?" The seven-year-olds remembered more than the four-year-olds, but whatever both groups remembered they remembered accurately and could not be led into sexualized answers. They became embarrassed by the leading questions, looked surprised, covered their eyes, or—according to Goodman—"asked in disbelief if we would repeat the question." Goodman and her colleagues used anatomically detailed dolls when questioning
the children to see if the dolls would encourage false reports.
The study's conclusion on this point: "Whether or
not the children were interviewed with anatomically detailed dolls, regular dolls, dolls in view, or no dolls did not influence their responses to the specific or misleading abuse questions." Because
some people believe that a child under stress can't remember accurately and may escalate what really happened in order to match the stress felt, Goodman also studied children who had to go for shots at a medical clinic. "We know of no other scientific studies in which the stress levels were as high as they were for our most stressed children," she writes. The children had to sit in the clinic waiting room and listen to other children scream as they got a needle, knowing they would get one, too. "These children's reports were completely accurate," Goodman
writes. "Not a single error in free recall was made."
The most stressed children remembered best and in the greatest
detail. One year later Goodman and her colleagues re-interviewed as many participants as they could find. Even after the children had listened repeatedly to leading questions, most persisted in reporting the incident exactly as it had taken place. "Child abuse involves actions directed against a child's body," Goodman writes. "The violation of trivial expectations would probably not be very memorable. The violation
of one's body is.” The Offenders Bingo Jerry "Bingo" Stevens was born in 1910 in New Orleans. He was
the third of five children and the first and only boy, hence
his nickname. Bingo's father, Joe, was tall, handsome,
redheaded, and smart. A supremely successful real estate developer, Joe believed that men should be strong and that women should smell good, keep the house clean, and serve dinner on time. He smoked a cigar and drank quietly and steadily from the moment he came home from the office until he went to bed. Bingo's mother, Trudy, sometimes took the boy to bed with her to relieve her loneliness. She snuggled him in the dark, trying to block the sounds Joe made on his way into the girls' rooms, and any sounds that came later. Joe died of cirrhosis of the liver when Bingo was 13. "You're the man of the house now," his mother told him. By the time Bingo was 30, he had molested not only his sisters but most of their children. Trained from infancy to keep sexual abuse a secret, they never talked about it, even among themselves. Bingo fell
in love and married. The marriage was, apparently, a happy one. He had three daughters of his own, a son, and, eventually, an infant granddaughter. When his wife died he mourned. Then, after an interval, he married again and had a happy second marriage. He owned and operated a successful real estate business. In addition, he was a champion polo player and a member of the Explorers Club. Bingo died of a heart attack in 1988 while sailing on Lake Pontchartrain with the nine year-old daughter of his best friend. He
was, as anyone who knew Bingo was quick to say, brilliant, funny, charming, gifted, and successful with women. There was nothing about him that would have identified him as an incestuous father, brother, uncle, cousin, and grandfather. I am one of the children he abused. After Bingo's
death I visited his psychiatrist. "Bingo was one of my favorite patients ever," he told me. "He
molested me," I said. "He molested
everyone," his psychiatrist said. "Why not you?" Who Commits Incest? Everyone
reading this article probably knows—whether aware of it or not—more than one incestuous man or woman. "Offenders don't have horns and a tail," says incest survivor Kim Shaffir. "They look like nice guys. They are not strangers. Everyone tells you to say no to strangers. No one tells you to say no to your family." In Broken Boys, Mending Men: Recovery from Childhood Sexual Abuse, incest survivor Stephen D. Grubman-Black points out that "perpetrators who commit sex crimes are rarely the wild-eyed deviants who stalk little boys. They are as familiar and close by as the same room in your home, or next door, or at a family gathering." Offenders come from the ranks of doctors, construction workers, hairdressers, building contractors, teachers, landscapers, philosophers, nuclear physicists, and women and men in the armed forces. David Finkelhor, Ph.D., director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, and his associate, Linda Meyer Williams, Ph.D., had just concluded Characteristics of Incest Offenders, their landmark study of incestuous fathers, when they saw nearly half of their subjects sail off to the Persian Gulf to serve their country. Some
offenders prefer girls, others boys. Some abuse both. Some are interested only in adolescents, or preteens, or toddlers, or new-borns. Some, though not most, molest only when they are drinking or depressed or sexually deprived. Some don't abuse until they are adults, but more than half start during their teens. Abuse Cycle Like Bingo, some victims go on to become abusers. Seventy percent of the incestuous fathers in the Finkelhor study admitted that they were abused during their
own childhood. Judith V. Becker, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry
and psychology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine
who has supervised or been involved in the assessment and/or
treatment of more than 1,000 abusers, reports that some 40
percent said they had been sexually abused as children. Ruth Mathews, a psychologist who practices with Mid-way Family Services—a branch of Family Services of Greater St. Paul—has seen a similar number of adolescent offenders, male and female, and has arrived at a similar conclusion. In an instance of children acting out their own abuse on other children (animals are also frequent targets), one little boy was referred for therapy because he tried to mount most of the children in his kindergarten. His parents told the therapist that they made him ride on his father's back while they had intercourse. They said that this excited them. Although we want to believe
that we can spot evil when we confront it, the truth is that nothing
about a perpetrator would alert us. Offenders are good at hiding what they do. They are master manipulators, accomplished liars. Those few who aren't caught; the others molest dozens or even hundreds of children over many decades. Lack of Empathy Lack of empathy for the victim is typical of offenders. Every therapist
I spoke to commented on this characteristic. All said that
for offenders to be rehabilitated they must take responsibility
for what they did and develop empathy for their victims. With one
possible exception, not one of the offenders I interviewed had done this. Violent and Nonviolent Males who molest children have traditionally been lumped into two broad categories, violent and nonviolent. Included in the latter are offenders who are fixated and regressed. Psychologist A. Nicholas Groth, Ph.D., founder of the Sex Offender Program at the Connecticut Correctional Institution at Somers, describes fixated offenders as adult men who "continue to have an exclusive or nearly exclusive sexual attraction toward children." Regressed offenders are attracted to their peers, but under stress—illness, loss of job or spouse—turn to children as substitutes. To refine these categories, Robert A. Nass, Ph.D., a Pennsylvania therapist who treats sex offenders, suggests a third group: quasi-adult sex offenders—men who yearn for a loving relationship with another adult but, because of their own immaturity, are unable to have one and turn to children instead. Incestuous Father In researching
Characteristics of Incest Offenders, the most detailed study of male perpetrators to date, David Finkelhor and Linda Meyer Williams of the University of New Hampshire questioned 118 incestuous fathers in exacting detail. Based on the men's explanations about why and how the incest started and how the men felt about what they had done, the researchers identified five distinct types of incestuous father: • the sexually preoccupied—men who are obsessed about sex and
tend to sexualize almost every relationship; • adolescent regressives—men who have adolescent-like yearnings
for young girls generally and direct them toward their daughter; • instrumental self-gratifiers—men who molest
their daughter while fantasizing about someone else; • the emotionally dependent—men who turn to
their daughter for emotional support they feel deprived of
from others; • angry retaliators—men
who assault their daughter out of rage at her or someone else. Women Abusers And what of the women who sexually abuse children in their care? What patterns,
if any, are they cut from? Psychologist Ruth Mathews of St.
Paul, in a study of more than 100 female sex offenders—65
adult women and 40 adolescent girls—found that they fall
into four major categories. • Teacher-Lover—usually
made up of older women who have sex with a young adolescent.
This category often goes unnoticed by society as well as by the offender because the behavior is socially sanctioned. For confirmation, one has only to look to films such as The Last Picture Show, Summer of '42, and Le Souffle au Coeur. • Experimenter-Exploiter, which encompasses girls
from rigid families where sex education is proscribed. They
take baby-sitting as an opportunity to explore small children.
Many of these girls don't even know what they are doing, have never heard of or experienced masturbation, and are terrified of sex. One girl who had seen a movie with an orgasm scene said, "I wondered if I could get that 'ah' feeling. I was waiting for the 'ah' to happen, then I got into all this trouble." • Predisposed, meaning women who are predisposed to
offend by their own history of severe physical and/or sexual
abuse. The victims are often their own children or siblings.
As one woman in this category said, "I was always treated as an
animal when I was growing up. I didn't realize my kids were human beings." • Male-Coerced Women—women who abuse children be-cause men force them to. These women were themselves abused as children, though less severely than the predisposed. As teens they were isolated loners but anxious to belong. Many are married to sex offenders who may abuse the kids for a long time without the wife's knowledge. Ultimately, she is brought into it. Witness a typical scenario. He: "Let's
play a game with the kids." She (surprised and delighted): "Great!" He: "Let's
play spin the bottle." She: "No!" (He slaps her face, then beats her head on the floor.
The child tries to stop him.) Kid (yelling): "Mom, do it. He's been doing it
for years." Deeply dependent and vulnerable
to threats, these women are easily manipulated. As one of them
said, "If he would leave me, I would be a nobody." Once such a woman molests a child, however, she may go on to offend on her own. As the mother of a five year-old put it, "Having sex with my son was more enjoyable than with my husband." While more than a third of the survivors I interviewed told me that they
had been molested by women, true female pedophiles, Mathews
says, are relatively rare—about 5 percent of her sample.
Those she interviewed had themselves been abused from approximately
the age of two onward by many family members. They received virtually no other nurturing—most of the nurturing they received was from the offender—and came to link abuse with caring. Like
male offenders, some females molest many, many children, their own and those in their care. But Mathews feels that women may take more responsibility for their acts than men do. Only one girl she worked with blamed her victim. Seventy percent of the females took all the blame if they acted alone. One half took 100 percent of the responsibility if they molested with a man. Where the men minimized what had happened—"We were only horsing around"—the women were "stuck in shame." In Atlanta at a poetry reading, the woman sitting next
to me asks what I write about. When I tell her, she leans
close. "I molested my son," she whispers. I ask if she wants to talk about it. "No," she says. "But I will say that it will take me the rest of my life to even begin to deal with it." Therapist Kathy Evert of Michigan, extrapolating from her 450-question survey of 93 women and 9 men who were abused by their mothers, sees a more general problem. "I believe that no one, including me," she says, "knows the extent of sexual abuse by females, especially mothers. About eighty percent of the women and men reported that the abuse by their mothers was the most hidden aspect of their lives. Only three percent of the women and none of the men told anyone about the abuse during their childhood." Instead they endured their own suicidal and homicidal feelings. A. Nicholas Groth, the Connecticut psychologist, suggests "the incidence of sexual offenses against children perpetrated by adult women is much greater than would be suspected from the rare instances reported in crime statistics." He further suggests that women offenders may not be recognized as such because it is relatively easy to get away with abusive behavior under the guise of child care. It has long been believed that any woman who sexually abuses a child is insane and sexually frustrated but that her abuse is less violent than a man's. None of this is true. Only a third of the women and men in Kathy Evert's study, for example,
said they thought that their mother was mentally ill. (According
to Ruth Mathews, a tiny percentage of abusing mothers are severely
psychotic.) Not only were most of the mothers in the study
sane, but almost all had an adult sexual partner living with them. Furthermore, the mothers in Evert's study abused their daughters violently, beat and terrorized them, and raped them with objects. But they treated their sons like substitute lovers. Evert postulates that the abusing mothers projected self-hate from their own history of sexual abuse onto their daughters. "This causes rage and anger that doesn't go away," she says.
Sibling Abuse Not all incest is intergenerational, committed by adult against child. "There is more sibling incest than parent-child," David Finkelhor told me. And in Sibling Abuse: Hidden Physical, Emotional, and Sexual
Trauma, Vernon R. Wiehe, Ph.D., professor of social work at the University of Kentucky, writes: "There is evidence ...
that brother-sister sexual relationships may be five times
as common as father-daughter incest." There
are problems with numbers and definitions in this area, as in others. How, for example, does one define consensual versus forced sexual contact between siblings? Finkelhor says that an age gap of five years implies coercion. Others feel that a five year gap is too wide. What about children who are dos in age but different in size? What about children who have much more or much less power in the family? What about children: who are more gifted or less gifted physically or intellectually? Coercion aside, "sibling abuse has been ignored in part," writes Vernon Wiehe, "because the abusive behavior of one sibling, toward another is often excused as normal behavior. Sibling rivalry must be distinguished from sibling abuse." Certainly, sibling sexual abuse is no different from other sexual abuse
in that it is selfperpetuating. According to the Finkelhor
study: "The role of physical and emotional abuse in childhood
should no be overlooked. . . . Arousal to very young; children may be
the result of early sexual victimization." Prevention of Father-Daughter Incest? The Finkelhor study has profound implications for the possible prevention of father-daughter incest. Over 50 percent of the men in the study reported that their sexual interest in the daughter developed slowly. Is it possible that prevention programs could have helped them clarify and deal with their feelings about her before sexual contact occurred? According to the researchers, "It is conceivable that men can interrupt the sequence of events which led to the abuse." Cure for Incest? Currently,
the statistics on recidivism are predictably dismal. The rehabilitation of offenders has always been approached as a matter of jail, probation, or court-ordered therapy. Only some few medical institutions in the country—notable among them, Baltimore's Johns Hopkins—offer impressive in-patient treatment involving drugs
and therapy, but treatment is expensive, and not all medical-insurance
plans will cover it. While some non-medical
rehab programs claim up to a 95 percent "cure" rate, they are misleading in their optimism. Jim Breiling of the National Institutes of Mental Health says that the results of many studies are suspect owing to the unreliability of statements by offenders, many of whom lie. According to one study, a 38 percent dropout of participants can be anticipated in any program. Of those who receive the full course of treatment, 13 percent reoffend during the first year. After that, who knows? The rare offender who voluntarily seeks help can get trapped in a bind. Therapists are legally required to inform the local police if they hear about a specific child-abuse crime. Massachusetts therapist Mike Lew cautions his clients at the outset that if they tell him they have offended, he must report them. Even so, the authorities tend to look more favorably on those who turn themselves in than on those who get caught or accused. Ruth Mathews believes that women may be easier to rehabilitate than men
because, as noted, they may feel more empathy for their victims
than male offenders do. But she points out that her opinion
is based on the women she sees, who have come voluntarily for
treatment. A sample of women in prison for sex crimes would probably yield very different results. Child offenders who receive treatment, on the other hand, do much better than adults. They need less long-term help and are less likely to re-offend. Mental-health providers are key to spotting and treating offenders and their
victims. But, says psychologist Mary W. Armsworth, the Houston
trauma specialist, "we don't train mental-health providers
properly." Incest victims who need psychiatric care are often misdiagnosed.
Victims of child sexual abuse who suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been hospitalized for everything from manic depression to schizophrenia and have been subjected to shock treatments, insulin shock, and other inappropriate therapies. Freud
was Wrong Misdiagnosis occurs because
the therapist, psychiatrist, or doctor doesn't know what to look
for, doesn't consider childhood sexual abuse a possibility, or doesn't believe the patient's account of what has occurred. For almost a century, Freud and his followers have led us astray. Vienna, Austria.
April 21, 1896. Sigmund Freud stands before his colleagues at the Society
for Psychiatry and Neurology, reading his paper "The Aetiology of Hysteria." He informs his listeners that mental illness is the result of childhood sexual abuse. The words he uses to describe the abuse are rape, assault, trauma, attack. He has based his findings—which he has used to formulate what he terms
the seduction theory—on the testimony of his patients.
These are both women and men who have told him of their childhood
abuse, often by their fathers. He has listened to them, under-stood
them, and believed them. He has reason to. As he has written to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess, "My own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother . . . and those of several younger sisters." But Freud is soon under attack by his colleagues, many
of whom denounce his argument. He retracts the seduction theory.
The accounts of incest, he now says, were fabricated by hysterical
women who were not assaulted. Like Oedipus, he says, they yearned
for intercourse with one parent and wanted to murder the other, and these yearnings produced such a profundity of guilt and conflict that they caused a lifetime of mental illness. Unlike the seduction
theory, for which Freud was ostracized, the Oedipal theory finds favor
with the great majority of his colleagues. It becomes the cornerstone, the bible, of all psychoanalysis to come. Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson, Ph.D., former project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in Washington, D.C., and a self-described "former psychoanalyst," has written three books detailing first his affection for, then his disaffection from, Freud and his teachings. According to Masson, Freud's reversal of his position represented a monumental loss of moral courage that served to save his professional skin to the detriment of his patients. In Banished
Knowledge: Facing Child-hood Injuries, Alice Miller, Ph.D., like Masson a former Freudian psychoanalyst, argues that Freud suppressed the truth to spare himself and his friends the personal consequences of self-examination. "Freud has firmly locked the doors to our awareness of child abuse and has hidden the keys so carefully that ensuing generations have been unable to find them. Miller goes on to make a startling revelation about Freud's great friend Wilhelm Fliess. She writes that many decades after Freud suppressed his data, Wilhelm's son Robert found out that "at the age of two, [Robert] had been sexually abused by his father and that this incident coincided with Freud's renunciation of the truth." Some scholars have expressed the wish that the seduction theory and the Oedipal theory could work together. But they can't. The seduction theory states that child sexual abuse is the cause of most—or even all—mental illness. The Oedipal theory, on the other hand, states that child sexual abuse almost never happens, that a person's memories are false, and that mental illness and neuroses come from a child's conflicted desires for sex and murder. Ever
since Freud, the Oedipal theory has been used to refute claims of child sexual abuse. In Healing the Incest Wound, Dr. Christine Courtois, the Maryland psychotherapist, writes that "many survivors report that they were medically examined and treated for their various symptoms, but for the most part the symptoms were never attributed to abuse even when the evidence was obvious. Instead, symptoms were most frequently described as psychosomatic or without basis or another diagnosis was given." Some therapists still tell their patients that their memories—no matter how degrading, detailed, or sadistic—are really their wishes. Freud placed the responsibility for the deed and the memory not with the offending adult but with the child victim—and his adherents continue the sham. As Alice Miller writes: "I often hear it said that we owe the discovery of child abuse to psychoanalysis. In fact it is precisely psychoanalysis that has held back and continues to hold back knowledge of child abuse. . . . Given our present knowledge of child abuse, the Freudian theories have become untenable." But most people don't know this. To accept that Freud lied means that
nearly a century of child rearing, analytic training, law enforcement,
and judicial and medical attitudes must be reconsidered. As
the matter rests now, the men and women who should be able
to identify abuse and help prevent and punish it have never even learned the basics. Our doctors, analysts, and judges have been taught to mistake victim for offender. They allow offenders to remain untreated, free to infect the next generation. Alice Miller writes that Freud "wrote volume after volume whose style
was universally admired and whose contents led humanity into
utter confusion." His legacy has been in part to blind
us to the prevalence of incest, to make the offenders in our midst invisible. At the sexual Abuse center of the Family Support Line in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, therapists who work with perpetrators and survivors showed me paintings done by children aged 7 to 12 who had participated in an incest survivors' support group. Monica, 10, had drawn the outline of an adult, six feet tall, on butcher
paper. With the help of her therapist she titled it Diagram
of a Perpetrator. She drew in hair, a brain, eyes, ears,
nose, mouth, shoulders, big hands, a heart, and a penis. Next to each feature, down each finger, and around the penis, she wrote the things her father had said to her: TRUST ME. I'LL PROTECT YOU. I'M NOT GOING TO HURT YOU. IT'LL FEEL GOOD. DON'T
FIGHT ME. DON'T MOVE. THEY'RE SOFT I THINK WITH MY PENIS. I DON'T
CARE WHAT YOU SAY. I NEED SOME. BETTER ME THAN SOMEONE ELSE. IT'LL MAKE YOU A WOMAN. I'M BIG.
The Courts The family court building at 60 Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan looks like a Darth Vader prison—big, black, square, and ugly. Once inside, you have to wait in a line of irritated people to be searched for weapons by armed guards. The interior is depressing, monotonous, and confusing. In the six days I spent there, I never could figure out which floor I was supposed to go to or whether I was already there. All the corridors look the same: flesh-colored walls, orange and blue seats made of molded plastic and bolted to one another and to the floor. Drug addicts slump. Babies scream. Once in a while a fight breaks out. All too often I saw small children with bored, baffled, or frightened faces. Manhattan
family court is blessed with social workers who care passionately about their work and the children, with bright and dedicated Legal Aid Society lawyers for those who need them, and with good judges. Each judge hears thousands of cases every year, more than half of which have to do with child abuse—including child sexual abuse, including incest. But even given the high numbers, fewer than 10 percent of the incest cases ever get to court. One reason is the traumatic nature of the process, which can involve weeks of agonizing testimony. Everyone
from the victim to the judge wants to avoid a trial if at all possible. To many critics, it seems that the system is designed to protect the accused, not the accuser. And this becomes unreasonable, even abusive, when the accuser is a child who must participate and withstand cross-examination as if an adult. New York Family Court Judge Jeffry H. Gallet, for one, does all he can to keep children from having to testify. In his courtroom—or part, as it's known—the child is almost invariably the last witness scheduled in the hope that the case will have resolved itself before that
point. The agencies that intervene to stop
the abuse frequently, if unintentionally, maintain it instead.
And it is the child victims, those most in need of care and consideration, who receive the worst treatment. A child may be questioned 20 different times by as many different people in perhaps as many different places—hospital emergency rooms, attorneys' offices, police stations, courthouses. The children are exposed to drunks, criminals, and their own parents in handcuffs. I knew one terrified little boy who had to wait for hours on a bench in the courthouse hallway, across from his abuser. This happened to him six times over a period of years. From the child's perspective the process is a nightmare, and it is almost as arduous for the child's family. Mothers who report that their children have been incestuously abused are often regarded as unreliable or vindictive, particularly if the accusation comes during a custody dispute. Eight years
ago child-sexual-abuse cases rarely got to court. Today courts across the country brim over with them. In Vulnerable Populations:
Evaluation and Treatment of Sexually Abused Children and Adult
Survivors, Detective Richard L. Cage of the Child Abuse Sexual Offense Unit of the Montgomery County, Maryland, police department, writes: "Many police and social service personnel are finding themselves
bombarded with these cases. Yet there are not enough qualified
personnel to investigate cases adequately and deal sensitively
with the families and particularly the children who are in a
crisis." In all 50 states, incest,
whether specifically called so by statute or covered under other child-sexual-abuse
laws, is a felony offense. But its definition varies from state to state, and so does the punishment. What is consistent is that incest per se is harder to prove. It also carries fewer and lighter penalties than any other form of sexual abuse, due largely to the fact that in many states incest laws were conceived not to protect children but rather to prevent closely related adults from marrying and procreating. In any event, most incest cases, even in states where an incest statute exists, are tried as child sexual abuse or rape, charges that are often easier to prove. Assuming these cases get tried at all. There are problems
from the outset. Many cases never progress beyond the initial complaint, if they even reach that stage. Children refuse to tell, typically out of loyalty to their abuser; they remain silent out of love and fear. Those who do tell usually retract. So do their families. "You find families hiding the abuse, families accepting it, families passing it on," says Philip Caroom, an official in the Maryland judiciary whose docket includes child-sex-abuse cases. Sandra Butler
Smith, a municipal court judge in San Joaquin County, California, and author of Children's Story: Sexually Molested Children in Criminal Court, says that "adults faced with the disclosure of sexual molestation often find reasons for denying belief, but more often, even if the child is believed, have difficulty in perceiving of such a case as a fit subject for a criminal proceeding." Police investigators and social workers not only must deal with the victim's unwillingness to talk about what happened but with their own beliefs. "Unfortunately, extremely competent investigators find allegations of child sexual abuse very difficult to deal with on a personal level," writes Cage. Just because someone is a cop or a social worker doesn't automatically mean that he or she is a sensitive questioner, able to earn and keep the trust of a frightened and abused child or a distraught parent. Nor do these investigators necessarily know what information is needed, how to get it, or how to organize it into a cohesive case. In
Manhattan each of the ten family court judges starts the year with 500 to 600 unresolved cases of every kind that are held over from the previous year. About 3,500 new cases then come in. Generally, more than half of these involve physical or sexual child abuse. "The implications of these figures are profound," Judge Gallet says. "Nobody can look for quality of disposition, only quantity of caseload." Judges are worried, even scared. Their decisions, based only on the testimony and evidence brought before the bench during the presentation of each case, can wrongly convict someone or can free an offender to abuse again. I asked Judge Gallet about false allegations of sexual abuse. He said that while he sees some cases where the charges are trumped up, "a horrifyingly large majority are not." This opinion is echoed by Cynthia Ferris of the state's
attorney's office in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. "There
are very few false claims made," she says, "and those are usually weeded out at the precinct level. By the time they get to us, most of them are true." While in Manhattan's
family court building, I attended a lecture on "The Child Sexual Abuse Backlash," delivered by Howard A. Davidson, director of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Regarding the truth of children's reports, he said, "Generally, what the child says happened is the best indication of what did happen. If the child spontaneously tells a trusted adult, then gives details, you can be almost certain" that the child is speaking the truth. But he pointed out to his audience of judges and defense and prosecution attorneys that although the system is "flooded with reports" of child sexual abuse, its primary preoccupation is with investigation, not with providing services and treatment for the child and the family. Referring to a report from the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, Davidson said: "Just because a kid reports abuse . . . and the offender is brought to court and it is proven that the kid is at risk, there is no guarantee the kid and family will get any services. Most get no treatment at all." Family-Rights Activists This situation has led to complaints from family-rights
activists on the political right and left that child-protection
services are essentially antifamily. And these complaints, in turn,
have fueled the backlash that is responsible for the formation of certain reactionary groups. Take VOCAL (Victims of
Child Abuse Laws), a national organization dedicated to making
it more difficult to prove or even to lodge child-abuse charges. VOCAL's executive director, Graham Jeambey, Ph.D., maintains that only between 1 and 2 percent of child-sexual-abuse allegations are true. The remainder, he told me, are largely the result of claims made by child-protection workers in an effort to get large sums of money—$40,000 per family, he said—from the federal government. Child-welfare agencies work on a quota system, he said by way of elaboration, and must bring in a certain number of child-abuse cases annually or lose federal funding. (I phoned childwelfare agencies in Massachusetts, where I live, and in Colorado, where Jeambey lives, and asked if this were true. I was met with laughter. As one official put it, "Don't I wish!") When I asked Jeambey how many members VOCAL has nationwide,
he told me that the size of the membership was "a closely
guarded secret." When I asked why, he said, "To protect
members from harassment. We are one of two groups you absolutely must not belong to." I asked what the other was. He said it was the John Birch Society. "We're
more American than they are," he said, referring to social services. He read to me from what he claimed was an "FBI law-enforcement paper" that warned against "voyeuristic investigators" in the child-abuse field. VOCAL maintains that children are routinely coached to make false allegations, that they are sent to clinics ("the handmaidens of the system," in Jeambey's words) and brain-washed. Jeambey told me that he has a videotape— "I can't
tell you where I got it or who gave it to me, but it was a
senator," he said—of a child being badgered for more than
three hours by an "inquisitor" into accusing his father of molesting him. "They always coach the kids," Jeambey told me, "before they make the final tape" that gets used as evidence. Describing the tape to me, he played the part of the child,
whining and pleading. Jeambey acted out several other roles as we talked, including that of a German woman who, he said, had called him with the news that "Hitler broke up family ties, put girls in breeding camps and boys into youth camps. The same thing is happening in the United States under the guise of child-abuse protection." Jeambey also spoke of a hysterical female investigator "on a rampage, a wild woman." He blames females for most false claims: "Females are down on males," he lamented. "We have a female judge here and thank goodness she's retiring, and a female prosecuting attorney, and female caseworkers." He said that children are taught in school that "if your parents do anything you don't like, we can get them for you" on child-abuse charges.
INCEST LAWS Criminal Prosecution The
narrow legal definitions of incest, together with the stringent
requirements for proof, the meager punishments generally handed down, and the trauma for victims who must testify, tend to make the criminal prosecution of incest a doubtful and sometimes impossible enterprise. In
most cases criminal prosecution for incest can be undertaken only if the victim is a minor at the time the abuse is discovered. To complicate the issue, however, most incest does not come to light until the victim reaches adulthood and begins to remember what happened. By then, the statute of limitations on criminal offenses has usually long since expired. Incest Statutes:
The states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio,
Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia have no incest statutes.
Incest cases in these states are prosecuted under other sexual-abuse
statutes, which often carry a higher penalty. Blood-Relatedness:
In California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana,
Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico,
New York, and North Dakota, blood relationship is a requisite
to prosecute for incest. In all other states it is not. Vaginal Penetration: The states that deem vaginal penetration necessary in order for incest to have occurred are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia. Independent Corroboration: The corroboration
of an independent party is required only in Alabama, Arkansas
(if the victim consented and is at least 16), California (if the victim
consented and is of legal age), and Illinois (if the testimony is not clear and convincing). Penalties for Incest The penalties for the crime of incest vary from state
to state. • Indiana—imprisonment
of up to 18 months, plus additional time for aggravating circumstances,
or minus time for mitigating circumstances; a fine of less than $1,000. • Delaware—imprisonment of up to 2 years; a fine of not more than $1,000 • Kansas—imprisonment of 2 to 10 years. • Illinois—imprisonment of 4 to 15 years. • Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana (if
uncle-niece or aunt-nephew incest), Missouri, New Mexico, New
York, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming—imprisonment
of up to 5 years. • Alabama, Arkansas,
Colorado, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana
(if other than uncle-niece or aunt-nephew incest), Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin—imprisonment of 5 years and up. •
South Carolina—imprisonment of 10 years and up. Civil Remedies Many victims
don't want to put their abuser in jail. Some want financial restitution for their therapy and for other consequences of the abuse. Others just want a written apology or a court order compelling the abuser to get therapy. Enter civil remedies. Civil remedies give victims a chance to tell their story in court and to be awarded punitive damages for the pain and injury suffered. For many victims, just lodging the complaint gives them a sense of empowerment that helps them heal. Statutes of limitations
generally are reckoned from the date of injury and run for a fixed period,
often three years. But in child-sexual-abuse cases, the statute of limitations is often more flexible. Thanks to the dedicated work of lawyers such as Shari Karney and Mary Williams of California, these statutes in some states begin when the victim remembers the abuse. The phenomenon is called delayed discovery and is based on the fact that someone who has no memory of an act cannot complain about it.
Recovery Procedure—which for many
may include gaining that ability to feel—requires an almost heartbreaking commitment to truths nobody wants to hear,
to things nobody wants to say, to memories nobody wants to have. Victims of incest have lost their innocence, their memories,
their parents, their families, their trust, the opportunity to grow up and develop in the ways and in the time allowed to
children who were not abused. They are consumed with self-hate and doubt: "Why did it happen to me? What's
wrong with me? What's wrong with my family? What's wrong with God? Why didn't I stop it? Why didn't God stop
it? What kind of life can I have now? Am I doomed? Am I crazy? Delusional? Vindictive? Psychotic? Evil?" The initial results of an ongoing study being conducted
by Cheryl Lanktree, Ph.D., a psychologist with Stuart House, to evaluate how children respond to long-term treatment reveal
that after three months, anxiety and depression ease, and that after six months, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress decrease—the
children are no longer phobic in situations or places and are free of nightmares and flashbacks. However, says Lanktree, it
takes much longer for the children's concerns and preoccupation with sex, and sexual acting out, to diminish. How long
depends on the child, the abuse, the therapy. Under stress, child and adult victims may reexperience trauma symptoms and may
need to go back to therapy for additional help. Recovery
for adults may take longer and be more complex than for children, but it, too, has predictable stages. Confronted by memories
and their implications, the victim can swing wildly between denial that the abuse ever happened and acceptance of the fact
that it did. With acceptance comes grief. Then rage. And, finally, self-forgiveness followed by resolution. The hazard is that one can get mired in rage—rage at society, rage
at the family structure that has institutionalized the victimization of children, rage at reruns of The Adventures of
Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best, at family members (who are in turn enraged at the survivor for talking).
There may be rage about the fact that laws seem to support the offender over the victim, that the statute of limitations may
have run out, that the person who did it can't be tried or can be tried only in civil court. There may be rage when an offender is either acquitted or given a frivolous
sentence. And there may be self-rage for having been a victim. For having lived such a problematic life. For having felt pleasure.
For not having told. For not having told in such a way as to be believed. For having told at all. Anger feels so good, so powerful, that it can be mistaken for health. Victims,
who have often long denied their feelings, need to have their anger and to move through it into healing. From anger springs
the energy that propels survivors out of their victimization and into life. But the anger needs to be focused on the offender
in an appropriate way. Fury at everyone who is of the offender's age, gender, or profession is too amorphous to be helpful.
It is all-consuming, all-encompassing. You can drown in it. Anger isn't the last stop, it isn't the goal. To recover from incest, victims must place responsibility
for the act where it belongs—100 percent on the offender. If they fail to lay the blame there, they will remain forever
in emotional paralysis, wracked by guilt andpain and unable to grow. Each victim must develop a renewed perception of self
as someone who has the right to not be mistreated. Victims need to feel safe. And to start to seek contact with others. "Victims
of incest feel that they don't deserve to participate in normal activities," says Eliana Gil, Ph.D., a psychotherapist
in Maryland who has had 20 years of experience treating incest victims and offenders—male and female, adult and child. Mike Lew, the Massachusetts therapist who works with
male incest survivors, de-fines recovery as "the freedom to make choices that are not based on the abuse." There may be some few people who can heal on their own,
without help. For some few, a friend may be able to give enough aid and support. For most of us, though, a therapist—the
right therapist—makes all the difference. " `Uh-huh therapy' won't work," says psychotherapist Arlene
Drake of Encino, California, who specializes in treating incest and child-sexual-abuse survivors both in private and group
therapy. "Survivors need therapists who are active, interactive, and risk-taking themselves." The therapist must be open, must be able to hear what the survivor needs
to say and able to believe it. As Eliana Gil says, "Therapy must be where the victim can speak the unspoken. Therapy
is two-way: The victim volunteers information and the therapist indicates willingness to talk about it." Not all therapists can do that. Some find sex and violence
extremely difficult to talk about. Some are overly invested in what they learned in graduate school and are unwilling to chance
that what they were taught isn't all they need to know. Some, for reasons ranging from silly ("It can't be true,
those things just don't happen") to legitimate (concern for the credibility of certain studies, for impartiality
of certain researchers, for their own col-leagues' conclusions), are not able to be fully present for their clients on
this issue. It usually falls to the client to decide whether a particular therapist can handle the material. Eliana Gil points out that some therapists turn a deaf
ear when they hear about incest. "A certain percentage of them believe that this is total exaggeration or that the impact
is exaggerated," she says. One general-practice therapist I spoke to expressed just such reservations. "Incest is
in vogue now," she said. "And while of course I believe my clients, how can they be sure of things that happened
decades ago? Suddenly my clients are coming in claiming incest, post-traumatic stress, and multiple personalities. Please!" There are also therapists who sexually exploit incest
survivors. Mary W. Armsworth, the trauma specialist at the University of Houston, found that at least 23 percent of all female
survivors have been sexually abused by their therapist. Other estimates, she says, run as high as 30 percent. Anyone who encounters skepticism in a therapist, or adherence
to what was taught and believed 20 or 30 or 50 years ago, or flirtatious behavior (even if the client flirted first) should
look for a different therapist. Anyone who is in classical, "blank-mirror" analysis with a therapist who listens
but doesn't speak (or who makes or takes phone calls during sessions or who falls asleep) should also look for another
therapist. Mike Lew pointed
out to me that incest survivors have lived lives governed by secrecy and the lies they've been told by their abuser. They
are told that what happened didn't happen. They are told that terrible things were good things. They are told that they
are to blame for their abuse. In therapy they need to be able to reality-check. They need human contact, warmth, and engaged
conversation. Eliana Gil adds that survivors
need help dealing with memories: "You can't say good-bye to a memory until you've said hello." Most therapists insist that therapeutic abreaction—reexperiencing
a trauma with the help of the therapist so that the feelings can be reprocessed in a less frightening way—is necessary
to recovery. As Alice Miller says: "As long as feelings can be talked about, they cannot really be felt. And as long
as feelings are not felt, the self-damaging blockages remain." Therapist Karin C. Meiselman, how-ever, disagrees. "Therapists'
insistence on abreaction scares some people into staying away from therapy," she says. "In my experience, it is
sometimes possible to retrieve and work with memories without abreaction." When memories return as uncontrollable flashbacks, says Philadelphia therapist and incest survivor Roz Dutton, a
client has tolearn to "bracket" them—to separate the self from the memory. In order to heal, she says, "survivors
must reexperience the memory with feeling and in a safe environment and then eventually let it go." Neither the number nor the detail of abuse memories, however, makes the
difference in healing. Nor does forgiveness of the abuser. Therapists who specialize in incest and child sexual abuse—and
a growing number of clergy and pastoral counselors, as well—realize that forgiving the abuser is not only irrelevant
to healing but often impossible. More to the point, survivors need to forgive themselves. They must not hold themselves responsible
for what happened. Mike Lew keeps a photograph
in his office of a group of little boys lined up to cross a street. "I have it here," he says, "so people can
look at it and see what a child that age looks like. We forget how small we were." Janice went into therapy because she wanted to kill herself over the breakup of an affair. When her therapist asked
about her past, Janice said, "I don't remember a lot about my childhood. For example, I know my parents and I lived
together in the same house, but I have no memories of my father until after I left home." She reported that both her
parents were alcoholics. Her mother would become so depressed that she'd lock herself in her room for weeks on end. Janice
had to cook for herself, her father, and her mother. Janice told her therapist about the affair that had just ended. It had lasted only three months. The man had abused
her verbally but not physically. Most of Janice's previous lovers—eight in the past two years—had abused her
physically. Janice acknowledged that she
drank too much and smoked dope. The therapist suggested that she join Alcoholics Anonymous, but Janice said she could quit
by herself. For several weeks she abstained from alcohol and drugs. Without the numbing effect of drinks and dope, Janice
began to have troubling memories. She remembered slats of light from the venetian blinds in her bedroom falling on her
pillow. She remembered her father's hand—was it her father's?—lowering the blinds. She remembered pretending
to be asleep. She remembered fear. Janice
complained to her therapist that she was in pain all the time now, sick to her stomach, dizzy, headachy. She had bizarre pains
in her rectum and vagina, and she felt like gagging. The therapist suggested that Janice join an incest survivors' group.
She agreed that she would but insisted that she didn't really belong there. In the group Janice met eight women who had been sexually abused. Two of them had only vague memories, like hers.
One had knowledge of the abuse in the form of physical scars, but no memories. Three women were in the process of regaining
their memories and suffered flashbacks. One was preparing to sue her parents in civil court, and another had already taken
her abuser to court and won a judgment for damages. "I watched people who felt angry and showed it," Janice says now. "I was still too scared to feel
anger. But I learned from them. I saw, too, that there were things, like con-fronting our abusers or going to court, that
we—that I—could do. When I told my mother about the abuse and she screamed at me and asked why I had allowed it
to happen, I went to the group for support. Most of them had had the same experience. But some had been able to work through
it with their moms and now they have good relationships. I modeled myself on them." Because so much of what survivors have experienced is negative and painful, good feelings can feel like abuse. People
who are recovering have to learn to tolerate positive feelings about themselves and others. As author and incest survivor
Laura Davis says: "I thought healing was just another punishment. I thought it was the endless processing of pain. I
thought I was sentenced to healing for the rest of my life." Eventually, for most, there is resolution. It comes at different times to different people—for some it takes
a year or so, for others it takes decades. The talk therapy, group therapy, self-help groups, art therapy, the body therapy—in
time they work. The past recedes until it is in the past. Memories are more often memories than flashbacks. Anger is appropriately
directed at the abuser. Sex and intimacy are possible. Survivors find they have choices, that their actions are not the inevitable result of their abuse. They can talk
about other things. As Alice Miller writes: "The goal of therapy is to allow the once silenced child in us tospeak
and feel. Gradually the banishment of our knowledge is revoked ... we discover our history, ourself, and our buried capacity
for love." " `Incest' does
not tell the awful things you did to me," writes incest survivor Louise M. Wisechild in The Obsidian Mirror. "But
I will name them out loud, in public." "Use
my name," pleads a woman talking to me on the phone. "All my life I've been thought of as crazy. I want even
one person to know what happened and that I am not crazy." I had offered anonymity to every survivor I interviewed. I
was astonished that so few wanted it. "Use my name," they said. "Use my name." Ten years ago my therapist advised me not to tell. "There is a real
danger that you will be irrevocably labeled a victim," he said. He was right. For then. But now survivors are breaking
the silence. For some that means telling their therapist and their survivors' group. For others it means whispering it
to the bubbles in the bathtub. I have written the truth in my journals late at night, then tom it up. Some mail a letter to
the abuser or to their family. Laura Davis, who eulogized her grandfather at his death and then remembered his abuse of her,
rewrote the eulogy. "There are a few things I forgot to say," she began. Then she wrote them down. Brad, whose days as a victim led to multiple personality
disorder, returned home during the holidays last year and confronted his family. Louise Wisechild invited her step-father
to a meeting and told him how he'd hurt her. Kim Shaffir took her stepfather to court. She confronted him, publicly exposed
him, and was believed. When Michael and
Lisa Smith took their parents to court, they withheld their names from the media. But at the end of the trial they felt that
they had no reason to hide and that by hiding they were perpetuating the aura of secrecy that surrounded their abuse.
They gave permission to the newspapers to publish their names, and they appeared on TV to talk about incest and what had happened
to them. "We have to wake up and smarten
up," says therapist Arlene Drake. "If the family as we've idealized it were really so wonderful, this wouldn't
have happened. We've already gone overboard on the wrong side, protecting aggressors and blaming victims. Let's really
be kinder and gentler. Let's err on the side of caution and the children. Let's give child sexual abuse time and attention. Let's `listen to the whispers so we don't have
to hear the screams.' " Healing
from incest is possible: Victims become survivors. Those of us who were kidnapped in our childhood and carried into darkness
have the opportunity to transcend and transform that experience, to know love in its most sinister forms as well as in its
finest, and to have the power of that knowledge. But while it is possible to survive and even to triumph over incest, it is
a destructive and infectious crime for which we all pay emotionally, financially, and spiritually. It affects more of us than
cancer, more of us than heart disease, more of us than AIDS. We
must look at incest for what it really is, not what we fear it might be or wish it were. Incest is a crime committed by adults
against children, by the strong against the weak. Incest is not a crime determined by gender. To really understand incest
and to help end it, we must allow ourselves to see that women as well as men abuse. That women probably abuse as often as
men and for the same reasons—because as children they were sexually abused themselves. We must acknowledge women as
the sexual equals of men—down to the darkest impulse and act. Men must learn to recognize their own victimization—equal,
in this instance, to women's. We must learn that the consequences of child sexual abuse damage everyone, male and female,
adult and child. We need to do more than survive incest. We need to stop it.
CHECKLIST • If a child tells you that he or she has been abused, believe it. • If a child tells you the abuse occurred a long time ago, don't assume that it isn't still going on. • If a child says something vague, such as
"My bottom hurts," or is strangely silent or aggressive, ask questions. Don't
get hysterical in front of the child. Just ask and listen. Ask why and how and where and what do you mean and show me. Remember that a child's vocabulary is limited. • Don't try to gloss over the subject. Don't
say "It's no big deal." Get help for the child. • Do not wash the child. •
Save the child's clothes so that they can be examined for physical evidence. • Take the child to a hospital emergency room. • Call the local police and the local child-welfare department. If you live in an area so remote that you have no local agencies, call the National Child Abuse Hot Line. • If you remember being abused yourself as a child, or think you might have been, call your local rape-treatment center or mental-health clinic. • Take whatever time you need to find the right therapist. Therapy is often included under health plans.
Heidi Vanderbilt is an award-winning writer who lives in New England. This article was published in February, 1992 and is now 17 years old.
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