This piece attempts to look at the theory and the reality of incestuous assault; they are not the same. I am going to juxtapose the experience against the words of the theorist so that we can, as feminists, begin to understand woman blaming, misogyny and excuses at the foundation of the writing about incest.
The legal definitions and consequences of incest vary widely Form State to state. The laws are inconsistent and rarely used to prosecute. In California, the penalty for incest is sixteen months to two or three years in state prison. In other states, the penalties range from a small fine to twenty and thirty year’s imprisonment.
Because of inconsistencies in the law, I have formulated the following definitions to encompass a range of abuses: Incestuous assault is manual, oral or genital sexual contact or other explicitly sexual behavior that an adult family member imposes on a child by exploiting the child’s vulnerability and powerlessness. The vulnerability of the child stems from specific lack of information about the unacceptability of the behavior because of her early state of psychological and psychosexual developments. Her powerlessness stems from the inability to say “no” to and adult member of her family.
Incestuous assault is a reality in the lives of children of all races and classes. The only constant is that aggressors are overwhelmingly male and the victims are nearly always female.
Incestuous assault is like rape in that is still viewed as a “sex” crime, most offenders are male and victims experience similar feelings of humiliation, fear, powerlessness and self-blame. But it is difference that augments the suffering causes by this form of assault. One difference is that in incestuous assault, there is only a close if not primary relationship between the offender and the victim. Second, the incestuous assault is not one-time “only” but continues for a long period during which it increases in sexual specificity. Third, the child is less likely to report the violation since her family is at stake and is more likely to be disbelieved if she does.
These differences point out the importance of understanding the family as a system in which incestuous assault occurs. At the same time, it is important to remember that families do not sexually abuse children, men do.
There is and urgent need for feminist analysis of families and particularly families in which sexual violence occurs. We need to look closely at power in the family, who has it and why. Power can be translated through choice and we need to look at how choices are exercised. Do women and children have power to say “yes” when they do not have equal power to say “no”?
The issue of men’s power in the family is rarely integrated in a non-feminist analysis of incest. Men have, at least in their homes if nowhere else, the power and the options that power affords them. Men who have little or no prestige or status in the larger world still have the ability to control the events and the people in their “castles”. When prevailing social theory on incest begins to approach this aspect of power, it turns away.
Non-feminists theorists do not move to look at male power in the family, but instead study sexual violence within the context of the family as a psychological unit. These analyses began during the 1960’s when incest was first defined as a “transaction, which protects and maintains family from disintegration. It is a symptom of family disjunction and unitized as a tension-reducing device.” According to Dr. Graves, “It’s easier for the man to admit the problem if it’s presented in terms of family dynamics. He’s the one on the defensive and seeing it as a family problem will help him open up.” Incest is no longer seen as something, which happens to a victim, but rather a sophisticated interplay between two victims within the context of the family.
Typically, the description of the family in which incestuous assault occurs is as follows: father rarely has a criminal record, has a good and steady work history, tends to be domineering and tyrannical and unable to deal well with adult women. He views his wife as rejecting and threatening. His wife is described as needy, insecure both in her own sense of self-worth and her ¨femininity,¨ less interested in sex than her husband, immature and in need of approval. Is that family to any of us?
The theory that incestuous assaults occur when families become dysfunctional serves to excuse the offender. To assign to each family member a role in causing the incestuous assault to imply that whatever happens to women and children in our homes can be traced back to something that is our fault. The promise held out to us by family systems theorists is that once we figure out as mothers and as children what we have done wrong, our victimization will stop. Men will simply stop hunting our flash for reassurance of their power over us and their need for reminders of their sexual strength.
I suggest that incestuous assault is not an unnatural acting out of a particular configuration of family interaction or personality types but is simply further along on the continuum of societal condoned male behaviors. We must recognize incestuous assault as culturally and politically sanctioned violence against women and children.
Although it is necessary to look at individual psychopathology and psychosexual development as well as at ways in which the family system provides a context for sexual violence, we must also see incestuous assault as part of and established social structure built with stones engraved:
...children are the property of their parents and families
...blood is thicker than water
...men are kings in their castle
...a sexually successful man is a ¨lady-killer¨
...the little woman stands loyal and firmly behind her man.
This conclusion is strenuously avoided throughout the literature on incest. In its place are psychological interpretations, which bear little resemblance to reality and which serve to justify the abusers actions and further maintain women’s powerlessness.
The child
One of the earliest canons in the writhing on incestuous assault is the assertion that children are not to be believed. To this day, this is the premise from which most non-feminist professional begin. The most frequent model of training in mental health agencies is that of disbelief and assumed manipulation. Staff has been repeatedly trained with a variation on the following: ¨Don’t believe them. Always try to think about why they are telling you what they are saying. What’s in it for them and what do they expect to get from you as a result? ¨
The need to disbelieve has its origins in Freud’s need to deny what he was hearing about his male associated from their daughters who were clients of his. Freud preferred to turn things around and focus his attention of the child’s fantasies rather than on the adult’s predatory behavior. Many clinicians still are taught that children want genital specific contact with the adult in their immediate environment, fantasize it, and when angry may even make it up to punish the male figure.
In reality, from reports I’ve gathered, children go to great lengths to lie in order to assure us that incestuous assaults did not happen. I have never known a child who said she was assaulted who ¨made it up, ¨ but I do know of many who do not tell anyone until early adolescence or when they have a feeling of enough power to survive outside the protection of the family. By the time they tell us, either directly or more often by ¨acting out¨ behaviors such as running away, drug addiction, alcoholism, or suicide attempts, we find it easier to scrutinize the symptomatic behaviors than to believe the underlying reality that caused enough pain and rage to precipitate such extreme behavior.
Besides accusing children of making up stories, many who have written about incestuous assault begin with the view that it is the child who is the source of blame responsibility and seduction of the adult. In some instances, she is the ¨active seducer rather than the one innocently seduced.¨ Some children are ¨passive participants who seldom complain or resists¨ and yet others ¨avoid guilty feelings by denying their enjoyment in the sexual experience.¨ These children not only instigated the incest, according the writers, but even if they didn’t, it was seen as proof that they were seductive by ¨their acquiescence and albeit masked pleasure.¨
These assumptions are based on the observations that incestuous assault rarely begins with threats of physical harm or corporal abuse. Overlooked is the more subtle coercion of bribes, gifts or misrepresentation of moral standards. The child has no reason to feel threatened by and adult in her family and will assume that what the adult is telling her to do is all right. That is, after all, the training we give our children. They respond to an adult whose love is important to them by denying their own reality and perceptions. Women remembering such experiences thirty years later, still remember it felt ¨funny.¨ One woman told me, ¨What your Daddy tells you to do can’t be wrong. So you start to think that it’s you that’s wrong for feeling funny about it.¨
The fondling and touching, often gentle and non-threatening, gradually progress to specific genital contact and intercourse during a period of years. As sexual activity escalates, the child makes an adaptive response in order to survive in her family environment. Her response is to endure her own victimization in silence, to keep the family intact.
Some youngster’s feel further torn because they may be enjoying the only form of love and attention that is offered in their family and the special position it offers them. The child is caught in the knot of being hugely powerful – the one who holds the key to the secret- and yet completely powerless to do anything. In a few instances where women felt some closeness and enjoyment during the incestuous assault, remembering back, they consistently said it ¨their fault¨ for letting it happen, their responsibility and badness. It becomes a double betrayal. One at the hands of their assailant and the other at the response of their bodies.
Most youngsters fail to report the abuse to other due to he fear that they will be blamed, or that no one believe them. They are sure they will be punished, rejected, and even abandoned for bringing shame upon the family. It is, after all, the only family they have and assailants often warn repeatedly of the “trouble” that will result from their telling. The trouble is often vague and amorphous with intimations of dissolution of the family, jail for the man, beating for the woman. In other instances, the threats are more specific. Many women remembered being threatened with brutal violence against them, their, mothers, their friends, anyone they might choose to confide in the hope of ending the relationship. There is an endless parade of horrifying possibilities marched before the child, who most often responds with silence and repression.
How, then, can one researcher claim that, in his sample of 54 girls who were involved in incestuous relationship between the ages of 9-14, 45 of them had made “acceptable adaptations.” No definition of acceptable is noted.
This conclusion is repeated by other studies, which state that incest prior to puberty causes no “long term damage to child.” The terms “acceptable” and “damage” are most often defined (if at all) in terms of the adult’s women’s sexual response in a monogamous heterosexual model. If an adult woman who was sexually victimized as a child is “frigid,” “promiscuous,” or lesbian, -all seen as sexual maladaptions - the incestuous assault is seen to have had a deleterious effect on her natural development as a woman. When these young girls grow into women who marry and, as wives, remain silent, such behavior is seen as an appropriate model for women’s mental health and no “damage” is believed to have resulted.
The effects of incestuous assault are multiple and not measurable by these crude and disrespectful indicators. They are lasting, though they need not be permanent. They are, however, a consistent source of pain because there are few interventions that are successful, caring, believing and healing. Most of our responses still compound the trauma and pain of the child and the rest of the family as well.
We are learning that women who were assaulted as children find it extremely difficult to enter a relationship based on trust and intimacy. There is often a fearful expectation of repeated rejection, fears of vulnerability and openness, and inability to acknowledge their own power.
One woman I spoke with was married to a man she values and with whom she was struggling to create a relationship based on friendship, trust, and caring. She told me, “Sometimes when he wants to do certain things sexually I just can’t. They are the same things my father forced me to do when I was small. I know it’s not the same and I know he loves me, but when I say “no,” part of me feels like that little girl finally grown strong who is able to say the “no” word, that I couldn’t say all those years ago. The other part of me feels guilty that I’ am saying “no” to the wrong person and I really love my husband and I’ am making him suffer for my own history.”
This woman and many other I spoke with have little self-esteem, self-worth, and perspective on how arduous and lonely their struggle is and how sadly unnecessary it is to hold themselves responsible.
Besides the many professionals who respond with disbelief or blame, there are also those who tell us that the trauma may come not from the experience itself but from an uptight and puritanical society that cannot allow uninterrupted a tender and loving rite of passage without causing trouble and interfering.
Dr. Wardell Pomery writes in Forum magazine that he has known many cases of father-daughter incest, which illustrate that this kind of relationship can be positive as well as negative. He reports “incest between adults and younger children can also prove to be a satisfying and enriching experience.” James Ramey, Professor of Psychiatry, writes in the “SIECUS” newsletter that incest is a matter of “personal morality” and that the laws concerning it are” overly harsh.”
The male interpretation appears to suggest that incest doesn’t happen at all and we make it up. Or, if it does happen, however rarely and to lower class people, then it was because we were seductive and wanted it and we are to blame. And finally, that even if it does happen frequently and we were not seductive and encouraging, it is something that is a pleasurable experience and an enriching part of our growth into womanhood.
The Mother
Most researchers view both the mother and the child as similarly responsible. The mother’s assumed culpability is based on the following question, “How can the incest continue without her knowledge? Why doesn’t she do something about it?” These questions the expert proceed to answer as follows:
Mother defined as the “cornerstone in the pathological family system.” Father is aided and abetted in his daughter and by his wife’s collusion.” She is “frigid, hostile and unloving.” Even when she does not sexually deny her husband, she is unable to respond and frustrates him.”
Another scholar suggests that incest begins when the “father and daughter felt abandoned because of the birth of a baby or the wife’s developing some outside interests.” Additionally, mothers promote incest by “frustrating their husbands sexually or symbolically deserting them and encouraging their daughters to assume mothering functions.”
These interpretations are grounded in the premise that mothers are responsible for maintaining the family unit in a state of balance and equilibrium. This logic suggests that if she withdraws from that role by choice or necessity, then all that happens within the family unit is her fault. If she decides to get a job to augment the family income; if she is giving birth to another, often unplanned child; if she returns to school or develops outside interests; if she masks pain of her life with too much alcohol; if she is invalidated emotionally or physically; her daughters, usually the eldest will assume her function in the family. That includes cooking, cleaning and caring for the younger children and providing the attention the ¨head of the family¨ requires.
If incestuous assault should occur as an outgrowth of any of these alterations of ¨appropriate¨ family roles, the mother is held responsible. Why does the father not assume the wife’s maternal role when she withdraws or is incapacitated seems to be ignored by theorist? Instead, the man feels his ¨first right is to receive the services which his wife formerly provided, sometimes including sexual services.¨
In contrast to these approaches, feminist scholar D. Judith Herman encapsulates the mothers’ painful message to their daughters: ¨your father first, you second. It is dangerous to fight back, for if I lose him, I lose everything. For my own survival I must leave you to your own devices. I cannot defend you and if necessary I will sacrifice you to your father.¨
In a forthcoming book, Dr. Herman compassionately describes many mothers in incest families as ¨disabled.¨ Untreated depression, alcoholism, psychosis, and repeated involuntary childbearing are cited by Dr. Herman. Fear, loss, isolation, and danger at being abandoned and powerless are the underpinning of most of these women’s lives and those dimensions are rarely, if at all mentioned in the literature.
After the secret has been disclosed, children feel more betrayed by their mother’s inability to protect them than form their father’s assault. Although feelings of disappointment and even contempt for fathers are reported, it is still easier to be angry at one who does not have power rather than at the legal and actual perpetrator.
It is important for us to understand that by viewing incestuous dynamics in this way, that is, holding the woman responsible for her husband’s assault on her child, we are doubly punishing a woman for her pain, her powerlessness, and her passivity and, furthermore, intimating that none of this would have happened had she fulfilled her responsibilities.
Let us suppose that the mother is withdrawn, disabled, and cannot provide good role modeling for her daughter. Can we not conclude that her behavior is symptomatic of the oppression of women in this culture? If women are so robbed of power and strength that a mother feels she is unable to prevent her husband’s assault on her daughter, then we need to look at women’s oppression as a direct cause of incestuous assault. In some cases, a woman who was an incest victim herself may feel as powerless to stop her husband’s assault on her daughter, as she was to stop her father’s assault on herself years before.
The Father
I have reviewed how the children and the mothers are portrayed. Now let us look at the aggressors. They were described during the 1940’s and 1950’s as uniquely pathological, culturally different and rare, when they were mentioned at all. They were the men caught in the criminal justice process, whose lives were studied by the agencies that provided services for them and their families. These were therefore men in poor fragmented families. These were therefore men in poor fragmented families ghettos of our cities. Or they were tyrannical men heading isolated rural families. The picture of these men and the extrapolations drawn from their lives remain in much of the literature today. ¨These men wee seen against a backdrop of deprivation and a need to appear as a strong patriarch while uncertain of their masculine identity.¨
Nowadays, the incestuous male is described in more sympathetic psychological language. One factor often taking into account is the ¨sexual maladjustment and estrangement between the husband and the wife¨ coupled with the male’s ¨poor impulse control.¨ Since these males were of normal intelligence and acceptable occupational and social adjustment, and incarcerated men who were studied were described as ¨fully exploiting their position as the authoritarian head of the home, also acting in many ways like a caricature of an adolescent.¨
Incestuous males are often describes as being overwhelmed by a maelstrom of unmet needs: emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual. They are experiencing stress from one or a combination of job-related, mid-life related, economically related or sexually related pressures. These stresses are considered to be exacerbated by their wives’ collusion and their children’s compliance and inability to protect themselves. The man is a ¨psychological child in the physical guise of and adult.¨ Men who receive very little love and nurturing from their mothers¨...become symbiotic personalities and want someone to satisfy their needs as adults¨ and are presumably motivated because they have had ¨mothers who were overly seductive or overly attentive.¨
In a startling new piece of analysis, emphasis is placed on going beyond the need to ¨blame¨ and urging renewed application of ¨compassion,¨ undoubtedly to be applied directly to the male offender. We are not to understand that these men are emotionally troubled and incest is not something that happens to a victim but rather something that happens between two victims, circling back to the suggestion that these men have been victimized by poor parenting (read ¨mothering¨).
The researcher whose analysis this is points out that incarcerating the abuser may ¨leave the family destitute.¨ Additionally there are suggestions in the recent literature that incest should be decriminalized: ¨Incarceration causes both economic and psychological hardship to the family.¨
Lucy Berlliner, a victim advocate experienced in sexual abuse cases, observed, ¨When was the last time we heard anyone voice those concerns about a bank robber or a car thief? Why are we concerned about the economic hardships when it involves incestuous assault?¨ Why, indeed?
Once again, our work, our images as women, our reality is being defined by males and male-defined clinicians, scholars, and theorists. There is a ¨conspiracy of silence¨ and as feminists, we must break our part of the silence by speaking the truth of our lives and experiences so that the theory, the funding, the clinicians, and the criminal justice personnel will be made to respond to us with clarity, respect, and immediacy.
Fear, isolation, and secrecy are the underpinnings of powerlessness. We need to speak, to break the silence between our lives, to listen and to provide compassionate alternatives for the women and children brave and strong enough to speak out. Listening, believing, caring are the first steps for us to take to hear sounds and shapes of each other’s lives, each other’ pain. Then we can begin to develop our theory, our analysis, our interventions in a way that reflects our lives and validates our analysis, our interventions in a way that reflects our lives and validates our experiences as women.
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