![]() ![]() 9” Furthermore, although not all perpetrators have been victims, many have themselves been mistreated, and avoiding the study and treatment of incest, especially for male victims, bypasses an opportunity to reduce the pool of future sexual offenders.ĬHECKPOINTS ? By 1986, some form of father-daughter incestuous activity, ranging from minimal to brutal and aggressive, was found in approximately 1 in 20 families that included daughters and their natural fathers, and 1 in 7 families in which daughters resided with a stepfather. This avoidance, Courtois 6(p19) notes, “flies in the face of the fact that research has consistently found that the majority of sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to or related to the child, and thus constitutes incest or is incestuous. The contemporary study of incest and the contemporary treatment of incest victims proceed in the face of profound pressures to dissociate them from the mainstream of psychiatric concern. ![]() That data and knowledge strongly affirm that abusive incest is common, that its consequences are detrimental, and that it usually leaves its victims with considerable psychiatric damage and distress. I will proceed on the basis of what, in my view, are the best data and knowledge now available. This is not the format in which to review 2 decades of acrimonious and polarized debate. 7,8 However, a careful examination of the literature demonstrates that the arguments that childhood sexual mistreatment is not damaging are seriously flawed. 6 Even now, researchers rush to deny the frequency of incestuous abuse and to minimize its reality and the damage it can cause. Between the overall power of the incest taboo and scholars’ wish to avoid provoking acrimonious reactions to their work, the term “incest” has been receding from the literature. Scholars have backed away from even using the word, to the point that it has become difficult to research unless one searches under more bland and innocuous terms. Certain books and media were accused of encouraging false reports.Īs a result, for over a decade and a half the study and treatment of incest has been under a cloud of suspicion that has impeded the advancement of knowledge about this devastating form of abuse. Clinicians were accused of suggesting abuse that had never occurred and of causing their patients’ memories to be contaminated with information and/or ideas that had planted erroneous ideas in their minds. The rising number of incest accusations was attributed to faulty practices on the part of therapists who worked with patients who recalled incest, especially if the recollections had been absent from memory for some time and emerged either in the context of therapy or with the patient’s exposure to certain media, books, and practices. However, during this time, there emerged a trend of calling into question the recollections of those who reported incestuous abuse, mounting militant defenses of accused perpetrators. ![]() By the early 1990s, feminists, traumatologists, and contributors from the emerging study of dissociative disorders were engaged in a vigorous study of incest and the treatment of incest victims. 2-4 By 1986, Russell 5 wrote that some form of father-daughter incestuous activity, ranging from minimal to brutal and aggressive, was found in approximately 1 in 20 families that included daughters and their natural fathers, and 1 in 7 families in which daughters resided with a stepfather. 1 Crucial contributions by feminist authors and traumatologists rapidly sensitized the profession to the frequency and importance of incest and its association with psychopathology. In 1975, an authoritative text proclaimed that the incidence of father-daughter incest in the United States was 1 in a million families. The study of incest as an actual phenomenon rather than as a fantasy is a relatively recent event. Furthermore, few circumstances confront the psychiatrist with more complex, painful, and potentially problematic clinical dilemmas and challenges than the treatment of the incest victim and/or the management of situations in which incest has been suspected or alleged by one member of a family, and denied, often with both pain and outrage, by the accused and/or other members of that family. Few subjects in psychiatry elicit more profound, visceral, and polarized reactions than incest-the occurrence of sexual behaviors between closely related individuals-behaviors that violate society’s most sacred and guarded taboos. ![]()
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