INCEST: Two victim's search as to why

The greatest love between human beings in the early years of childhood is between parents and their children. The cohesion that keeps parents and their children so close to one another is the end result of the recognition by the parents that their children are an extension of themselves and the recognition by the children that they exist because of their parent's love for each other.

The generally accepted definition of a family is that which has ties of blood but it can also exist by virtue of people living in the same household. For example, if a woman lives common-law with a widower who in turn cares for the child of his deceased's wife's first marriage, there are no ties of blood bonding the three of them together but the fact that they share the same household virtually classifies them as a family.

The idealic family is not destined for everyone of course. There are parents who neglect and emotionally, sexually and physically abuse their children. There are also children, who are rotten to the core and care little or nothing towards the feelings or welfare of their parents.

Included in this piece are the brief histories of two women who were incestuously assaulted as children. The assaults were not so dramatic as some but they were sufficient enough to destroy the lives of both women.

Elsie Marlowe* is 24 years old and she lives with Linda Roberston* a woman who is 43. Both are lesbians and they both believe that they are lesbians because as small children, they were each incestuously assaulted by their father and surrogate father respectively.

I doubt that these men really understood the potential psychic damage they were doing to both women when they were small children or for that matter even cared, but as both of the incestuous relationships intensified, the girls knew that something evil was happening to them.

Elsie describes her first experience as thus; "I was first thrown into that insidious world of incest at the age of eight. My mother was in the hospital a great deal so my father was forced to care for me and my brother and sister. During the summer of my eighth year, I wore shorts most days and when my father would ask me to sit on his lap, I thought nothing of it. But one day, he began groping in my genital area and I felt uneasy about it. When I tried to break free, he hit me at the side of the head and knocked me unconscious."

Now comes a part in her story that is most crucial when studying the subject of incest. "I wanted to tell someone what had happened to me but I was afraid that our family might be split apart and I would be sent to a foster home so I kept the secret to myself. That was a mistake I have regretted ever since. When my father realized that I wasn't going to tell anyone what he had done to me, he continued grabbing me and groping around my genital area."

Eventually sexually abusive fathers realize that they can proceed further into incestuous relationships with their daughters if their daughters haven't complained to their other parent or some other adult. This is how Elsie tells it;

"When six months had passed, he tried intercourse with me. I screamed and made such a commotion that he never tried that again. He did however continue groping around my genital area until I was 12 years of age."

By the time Elsie was 12, she realized why she was being sexually assaulted by her father. "He made me his miniature surrogate wife because it was easier for him to satisfy himself with me rather than seek extramarital sex outside the home."

It was beginning to effect her thinking and attitudes towards life. As she tells it; "At the age of 13, I began drinking to blot out the memories of what my father had done to me but that didn't work. As the years went on, I was even beginning to think of suicide. From the first time he attacked me to this day, I have never worn shorts again.

It's an interesting anamoly that when children see other children sexually playing with one another, they will often run home and tell their mothers. But when they are sexually assaulted by their fathers, it is more often than not kept as a dark secret. As Elsie explains; "It takes an enormous amount of courage for a young girl to tell anyone that she is being sexually assaulted by her father. There is that nagging belief that she won't be believed and if she's not believed, there will be hell to pay."

But sometimes, the secret is eventually shared with the mother but as Elsie explains it--with disasterous results. "After I moved out of the house in my late teens, I finally had the courage to tell my mother because I had less to lose if the disclosure backfired. She confronted my father with my accusation and he denied it fully. My mother accepted his word and that finished whatever love I had for her. I am now permanently and forever alienated from them both."

At first, Elsie didn't understand why her mother wouldn't believe her but as she grew older, it began to dawn on her.

"It's easy to see how my mother accepted my father's word over mine. My mother is passive, and she is financially and emotionally dependent on my father and for her to accept the fact that her husband sexually abused their daughter is something that she would rather put out of her mind. She couldn't face the reality that she might have indirectly caused her sexually unsatisfied husband to seek his sexual release from his daughter rather than seek it from her."

The sexual abuse and more importantly, the loss of trust that is so important to children when they are in their early years, had a devastating effect on Elsie and her relationships with men.

"I have no interest in men. Every time I'm asked to go out with them, I feel sick because I can't erase the memories of my father groping his way into my genital area. After my first encounter with my father, I felt that I, like my father, was unlovable and disgusting."

Her thoughts were no different than the 33-year-old native woman who spoke at a Manitoba native justice inquiry in February 1989 and said after explaining how she was sexually assaulted by her family when she was a child; "I thought I was dirty and bad. I saw myself as a sex object"

Abusing fathers don't recognize the long term damage they can do to their daughters by sexually abusing them. Small children may not know that what is happening to them is considered bad in the eyes of society. But eventually they learn. Then they begin experiencing guilt. The guilt is there because they know that initially, they may have not done enough to stop the incestuous relationship. If the father is sent to prison or if the family breaks up as a result of her disclosing the facts to her mother or to others, the guilt is even greater and prolonged.

Further, a victim of incest often feels that she is unique because she doesn't hear anyone else talking about it. She then feels as if only she is depraved and bad.

Elsie is a lesbian and she may never know for sure if it is because of her disgust she feels for her father or if it is because she suspects that every man, like her father, only wants to exploit her. But she believes that if her father had kept his hands away from her genital area when she was a child, she might have enjoyed having a normal sexual relationship with a man. As she says it; "I feel that if my own father could do this to me, so could other men. I realize that other men are not necessarily like my father but whenever I fantasize as to what it would be like having sex with a man my own age, my father's groping hands come in between me and my fantasy. I can never forgive my father for what he did. What he did was to trash my childhood and destroy whatever future I had for a family of my own."

Elsie is an unhappy young woman. She suffers from loss of identity. She believes that she will probably never have a normal sexual relationship with a man and yet her greatest wish is to have a child of her own, one that she can love and bring up the way a child should be brought up. At 24 years of age, she may not be permanently fixed in her beliefs but the damage is severe enough that probably no amount of damage control will correct the terrible wrong that was committed against her by her own father.

Linda Robertson's* adoptive mother operated a nursing home in Toronto and one of the men in the home began molesting Linda when she was five-years-old. This molestation began when she stood at a window and he sat behind her and began fondling her around the area of her buttocks. As Linda tells it; "I wanted to tell my mother what the man had done to me but was afraid to do so. The man was a friend of one of the other men in the home who was closer to my mother than the others. I didn't say anything because I wasn't sure if my mother would believe me so I kept the secret from my mother all through the years and to the day my mother died."

Linda is 43 years old and still remembers the years of sexual abuse from a man who acted as one of her surrogate fathers. Linda tells it thusly;

"For years, the man would brush up against me and fondle me or masturbate in front of me and on one occasion attempted to penetrate me. When I turned 12, I realized that the man was willing to pay for what he had been getting for free the previous seven years. And pay he did but when I turned 15, I had had enough and moved out of my home."

By this time however, the damage to Linda's psychic had been done. She had grown up surrounded by men and after being sexually abused by a man who could, for the most part, get sexual relief from her whenever he wanted, she subconsciously concluded that only men could get what they wanted. She began dressing as a man and had her hair cut like a man. She had no interest in having a loving or sexual relationship with a man although she prostituted herself for many years with the very gender she despised.

By the time she was eighteen, her life had reached the point where there was no turning back. As she says it; "At first, I was moving in with women who were older than I and yet, I played the dominant role in the relationship. This was probably because I was subconsciously trying to avoid being manipulated by anyone any longer. Later, I began having affairs with women who were my own age and eventually I began letting women considerably younger than myself move in with me. And as before, at all times, I played the masculine role."

Her life went downhill by the time she reached her teens. In her late teens and her twenties, she was a prostitute and went to prison for prostitution and when she got out, she took drugs to escape her torment. In her thirties and early forties, she began drinking and gradually became an alcoholic. She lost a very good job she had worked hard at and became violent on the slightest pretext. On a number of occasions, she seriously cut her lover, Elsie Marlowe* with knives, necessitating trips to the hospital emergency wards. Then one day, after being informed by her doctor that the damage she was doing to her liver would kill her within a year or so, she stopped drinking cold turkey and hasn't had a drop since.

To this day, Linda hates men and anything that is of the male gender, be it human or animal and sometimes she fantasizes castrating men just to get back at the man (now deceased) who took her innocence from her. She realizes, too late of course, that had she told her mother about the sexual assaults by one of the men in her home, her mother would have believed her and chased the man out of the home forever. If she had told her mother, her life would have gone in a different direction.

Incest is not restricted to sexual encounters between a father and her daughter. It also includes sexual relationships between mothers and their sons and daughters; between fathers and their daughters and sons; between step parents and the offspring of their spouses; between grandparents and their grandchildren; between uncles and aunts and their nephews and nieces; and between siblings. In other words, every child is a potential victim of an incestuous relationship between any member of the family, no matter how remote the blood ties are.

Incest has been with mankind since time immemorial and although is considered taboo in most societies, there are still some societies today that consider it normal. The practice of parents masturbating their children can be found among some Arab, Moslem and Islamic families in Central Asia. In the hollows and ridges of the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains, there are some islolated families still practicing incest. There have been some disturbing studies on Canadian Indians up north which have shown that many Indian girls are forced to undergo incestuous relationships with members of their own family.

It would appear however, that most cases of incest involve stepfathers sexually abusing their step daughters, (two-thirds of all cases) followed by fathers abusing their daughters.

It is rare that we read about mothers abusing their sons and rarer yet, mothers abusing their daughters. There is a case however about a mother subjecting her daughter to sexual abuse that bears retelling. It involved a 20-year-old mother in Bronx,

New York who in October and November of 1987, held her six-year old daughter over a toilet so that two crack dealers could rape her in exchange for cash and drugs. She did this in her home and at three other locations.

Some mothers sexually abuse their sons but that is fairly rare also. Some women feel rejected by their husbands and they need someone to love them and stroke them. From the caressing and kissing, the relationships with their sons get out of hand
and the mothers and sons eventually fall into a full incestuous
relationship.

On occasion, the son, who may very well be the 'man' in the house, may initiate the incestuous relationship with his own mother. The mother accepts this relationship because her husband is deceased or in jail or has deserted the family.

There are mothers who are aware that their husbands are molesting their daughters, and many actually condone it. Such mothers have various motives for turning a blind eye. Either they prefer to have their daughters take their place in bed because they, as sexual playthings for their husbands, have had enough, or they know that if they file charges and their husbands go to jail, their families will end up on welfare. One affluent husband threatened that if his wife didn't withdraw the charges he would kill himself. She didn't and he did. As to be expected, she and her children invariably ended up on welfare.

And on the very rare occasion, we actually hear of cases where the abusing fathers truly believe that they have the God-given right to sexually abuse their children. One such father, a 47-year-old man (in 1981) living in Etobicoke, was arrested and convicted with forcibly having sex with his 15-year-old daughter. The sexual assaults had gone on for a three-year period, sometimes twice daily. When asked by the police as to why sexually molested his daughter, he replied, "I have no wife so I use my daughter." He said that it was "natural".

One such abuser, James Bruce Batchelor, (no relation to this writer) who lived in Toronto, actually told the court during his trial,"I wanted to be the first one to have intercourse with my daughter because I made her." The girl he made was 3 years old when he sexually abused her.

The aforementioned incestuous abusers are just a few of the millions of parents in North America who sexually abuse their children every year.

Years ago, I presented a paper before the justice policy committee of the Ontariuo Legislature in which I stated that one in four children are sexually abused by a parent or close relative. No one has proved me wrong.

The names, Elsie and Linda are fictionalized to protect the real identities of the two women I interviewed. The above was written by me and published in the Ontario Police News in 1990.

I was mistaken with reference to the prognosis of Elsie. Several years after my interview with her, she found a man she could trust and love and they were married. With respect to Linda, I was correct in her prognosis. She lived alone and later died from liver disease a few years after my interview with her.