Should We Legalize Incest?

In June 2007, the Associated Press reported that international surveillance techniques used to fight terror have rescued 31 infants and children in England and Canada from "horrific sexual abuse" that was being broadcast in real-time over the Internet. Authorities identified over 700 suspects, with more expected in the U.S. Officers investigating these crimes reported the emotional toll of watching and listening to videos gathered as evidence of infants and children screaming in terror and pain during sexual assaults.

Pedophiles not content with watching sexual terror on their computers go wherever there are vulnerable children.

It took decades of painful denials and reminders for us to admit how many vulnerable children were being molested and raped by priests while bishops gave sanctuary to known pedophiles among the clergy and sent them into unsuspecting parishes.

Similar rules of confidentiality and professional privilege have tolerated the abuse of children by state agencies. Michael D'Antonio revealed appalling details at the Fernald State School in Massachusetts, The State Boys Rebellion (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Programs that continued into the 1970's in nearly every state removed more than 250,000 children, tens of thousands of them fraudulently, from their families and subjected them to unconscionable abuse.



Texas, where hundreds of children were removed on one day last month from a Fundamentalist Mormon compound, is "grappling with the fallout from reports of long-term sexual abuse at its facilities, where, since 2000, more than 90 Texas Youth Commission employees — roughly one a month — have been sanctioned or fired for sexual misconduct with adolescents…."

With the failure of adequate oversight in Rhode Island, the risk to vulnerable children may increase when well-meaning, law-abiding adults report suspected abuse to the DCYF hotline as all are legally mandated to do. DCYF lawyers too readily team up with defense lawyers and guardians ad litem in overturning findings of sexual molestation, delaying cases and preventing crucial evidence from reaching judges. On their recommendation, children are sent for unsupervised visits and placed with the very people they identify as their abusers.

As a pastor and former director of a shelter for battered women, I have been astonished by the extent of incest in both rural and urban communities, by the duress suffered before victims gather the strength to protest, and the lifelong damage of keeping silent about such personally invasive forms of coercion and assault.

In the early 1970s Warren Farrell and I were active in the National Organization for Women (NOW). Flying back to New York from a conference, he told me his research suggested that incest might be beneficial.

Long after Farrell left NOW and joined the vanguard of Fathers' Rights, I found his December 1977 Penthouse interview online where he worried that "millions" of parents who are not "genitally caressing" their children "are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves." He saw such contact as "part of the family's open, sensual style of life. . . ." In the "most glowing positive cases," Farrell said, mothers "know and approve" and even "join in."

By then I had seen the harm done to children—like a boy and girl whose father woke them in the middle of the night to show them pornography and made them act it out. When their mother protested, he ridiculed her, saying she was "old-fashioned," from the "old country."

"We’re in America now," he said. "They do this in America."

Their mother brought the children to a shelter where they thrived for several weeks until their father, a man of means, subpoenaed his wife to Family Court. He brought a psychologist and lawyer, who said: "If you divorce him, he will get the children."

She packed their bags and went back to him, knowing she must not risk being separated from her children.

My husband and I have pleaded for decades with a convicted pedophile in our own family who complains about the "hysteria" of mothers intent on protecting their children from sexual abuse. For years, he insisted that he loved children better than their own parents did. As he grew older, he was drawn to ever younger children and travels to countries where they are easily procured.

His arguments ignore the scourge of HIV, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases. Pedophilia would not harm children, he insists, if society did not turn them against loving adults.

Contrary evidence rushes at us with heart-stopping regularity. The news has been full of reminders that undetected pedophilia claims a high price.

Charles Roberts, an obscure Pennsylvania milk-truck driver, hauled guns, chains, and genital lubricant into an Amish schoolhouse in October 2006. His final phone call and note told of being haunted by dreams of sexually attacking young girls.

The embittered silence of Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 victims at Virginia Tech, then shot himself, in April 2007, gave way to a videotaped diatribe against those he accused of "raping my soul." His two short plays focus on pedophilia--by a stepfather in one and a teacher in the other.

While many Americans applaud international efforts to track down pedophiles, we may have been too trusting of professionals, including clergy, teachers, and others who organize their lives around being in close proximity to children for reasons kept secret.

State officials with primary responsibility for protecting children may discount credible evidence of molestation by parents, because they fear law suits that could jeopardize their own careers. Official negligence gives tacit permission to sex abusers and puts children at greater risk.

Shrouded in secrecy, child protection agencies sometimes become magnets for pedophiles with professional credentials. When legislators fail to establish agency standards, accountability, and oversight, our child protective systems facilitate sex crimes against children.

The most common legal strategy in these cases in Rhode Island is "parental alienation," developed by psychiatrist Richard Gardner in 1985. He said that children who complain about sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers are typically lying.



Gardner accused mothers of turning the children against their fathers by "alienating," "brainwashing," and "coaching" them, allegations we now call the "Batterer's ABCs." He recommended removing these children from their mothers, forcing them to recant, and placing them with their fathers. This protocol has been practiced by DCYF and Family Court, eviscerating families in order to "reunify" children and fathers.

Gardner's strategy proved profitable. He served as expert witness for hundreds of fathers in custody cases before committing suicide in 2003. As for child sex abuse, he had sent mixed messages.



Gardner's views are fundamentally the same as the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), but he sometimes tried to moderate those views. In Sex Abuse Hysteria: Salem Witch Trials Revisited (1991), Gardner wrote (pages 117-118):

It would be an error for the reader to conclude that I personally support pedophilia. I do not. I personally believe that such behavior is an exploitation of children and introduces them prematurely into a level of sexual activity that they are not cognitively capable of dealing with appropriately. What I am against is the excessively moralistic and punitive reactions that many members of our society have toward pedophiles. The Draconian punishments meted out to pedophiles go far beyond what I consider to be the gravity of the crime.

…I still believe that those who are subjected to [adult-child sexual encounters] in our society are likely to develop psychiatric problems. It is a form of exploitation of an innocent and defenseless child. . . . It can result in premature involvement in sexual behavior . . . . It can create a pathological tie with the abuser that may then make it difficult for the abused individual to relate in healthier ways to age-appropriate peers. However, we have to develop much more pity than scorn for the pedophile.

. . . The greatest likelihood of success will occur in the situations in which all pertinent family members are involved, that is, the victim, the perpetrator, the spouse of the pedophile, and even other family members.

In other words, he wanted the pedophile to remain in the family, which compounds the trauma to children. But the federal policy of "family reunification," as practiced by the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families, becomes even more extreme than Gardner's position when it has the effect of removing the protective parent altogether.

This happens in Family Court when defense attorneys hire psychologists to testify that an accused pedophile does not "fit the profile" of a sex offender.

These reports are meaningless. Everyone would have agreed that Charles Roberts was exemplary until his premeditated slaughter of Amish schoolgirls. If not for his own admission and supply of genital lubricant, we might never have known the extent of his sexual preoccupation in planning his attack.

Custody courts must stop compromising children's safety with meaningless psychological "profiles." In April 2007, Rhode Island and fourteen other states earned an "F" from the national children’s advocacy organization, First Star, for our failure to provide abused children with genuine legal representation. In June, the state's Child Advocate filed a class action suit against DCYF for failure to protect the children in its care.

Three organizations working to end systemic child abuse are Justice for Children, the Leadership Council, and Stop Family Violence. Their websites provide basic resources for communities and professional associations to educate ourselves on these issues:
http://www.jfcadvocacy.org/
http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/
http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org/


Confidential comments may be sent to Anne Grant at parentingproject@cox.net

Freud Knew About It But Protected His Career

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson stumbled onto secrets that Anna Freud urged him to forget. She had given the young psychoanalyst and researcher free run of her father’s final home. There he found letters and notes showing that Sigmund Freud, father of modern psychoanalysis, harbored misgivings about some of his most famous conclusions. In 1984, Masson documented this history in his ground-breaking book, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

In 1895 and 1896 Freud, listening to his women patients, learned that something dreadful lay in their past. Doctors who had heard these stories before had called their patients "hysterical" and had dismissed their memories as mere fantasy. Freud was the first psychiatrist who publicly admitted that he believed his patients were telling the truth: These women were sick because something terrible and secret had been done to them as children.

Freud disclosed this to his colleagues when he delivered his lecture on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" before the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna on April 21, 1896. He theorized that significant mental illness in adults comes from sexual abuse and violence perpetrated on them as children, often by their own fathers. Freud called it the "seduction theory."

The gentlemen who sat before him belonged to the same upper middle class as his patients. Freud frequently encountered those patients at parties, theatres, and exhibitions; he sometimes knew their fathers. His theory elicited icy silence. He felt himself instantly frozen out of that society.

Masson obtained a letter Freud wrote to the one friend and colleague who stood by him: "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me."

Recoiling from the isolation, Freud realized a change was needed. By 1899, perhaps influenced by his friend's emerging views of infantile sexuality, Freud propounded a new theory, the "Oedipal complex." Instead of parents seducing and violating their children, as his patients had described to him, he now hypothesized that children merely imagine this seduction and then respond to their own fantasies with aggressive impulses against their parents. This leads to hysterical neurosis.

The psychoanalytic community breathed a sigh of relief, announced that Freud had recanted, and became heavily invested in ignoring his earlier findings.

Ironically, Freud and the friend he kept writing to--ear, nose, and throat physician Wilhelm Fliess—shared their own guilty secret of horribly botched surgery testing theories of female sexuality. Furthermore, Fliess' son, Robert, born in 1895, would devote his career to describing "ambulatory psychosis," whereby highly regarded professionals, including scientists, could be nonetheless psychotic. He left no doubt that he had suffered at the hands of his own father. For him, it was no fantasy:

"…the child of such a parent becomes the object of defused aggression (maltreated and beaten almost within an inch of his life), and of a perverse sexuality that hardly knows an incest barrier (is seduced in the most bizarre ways by the parents, and, at his or her instigation, by others)" (Assault on Truth, p. 142).

Masson blames Freud for a failure of moral courage and has no qualms about accusing this "father" of harming his "child"--the entire field of psychoanalysis. When Freud abandoned his original insight, writes Masson, he "began a trend away from the real world that, it seems to me, is at the root of the present-day sterility of psychoanalysis and psychiatry throughout the world."

This turning away from the real world is exactly what happens when family courts seek out mental health "experts" to deal with children who complain of abuse and with those parents who try to protect them. Like victims of abuse who sought healing from psychoanalysis, those who seek justice in the courts often discover too late that they made a tragic mistake in doing so.

Masson writes that Freud appears to have gained some of his original insights from lectures at the morgue in Paris describing horrific evidence of abuse committed by parents and teachers against children that was discovered in the autopsy of their corpses.

Repulsed by the harshness of the real world, some mental health "experts" today settle into leather chairs for 50-minute sessions that allow violent batterers to chemically balance their moods and appear stable. In the serenity of their offices, they may deduce their hypotheses and produce their reports ignoring the raw terror of children's lives. Few clinicians spend any time in the homes they are supposed to examine. Some court evaluators never meet the children, whose "best interests" they claim to understand. They may recommend that the court award custody to whichever parent pays their bill.

As Masson discovered, Freud learned his lesson. Once shunned for raising the subject of parents sexually abusing their children, Freud steadfastly avoided the subject. Masson reveals the complete absence of this topic from later volumes that Freud edited and from the cumulative index of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association through 1974. In 1988, The New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry included only one reference to "incest"—under "delusional disorders" (Assault on Truth, 2003, p. 341).

Asked to report his findings in 1981, Masson, like Freud in 1896, felt the disdain of his colleagues in the psychoanalytic community for raising this uncomfortable subject. A series about his work in the New York Times led to his dismissal as director of the Freud Archives.

One colleague pleaded for just one more psychiatrist who would concur that Masson was mentally ill so they could commit him to a psychiatric hospital.



Eventually Masson left the profession altogether. In his book, Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1990), he writes: "while I admire much of what Freud taught us, I do not admire the fact that he turned astute observations about human nature into elements of a vast and profitable profession with all the trappings of a jealously protected guild. The price for joining this fraternity is silence. . . . Corruption is incorporated, not exposed; prejudice and bias have been accepted, even embraced" (Final Analysis, p. 4).

Masson condemns the lack of professional ethics, noting it is well known that some analysts even have sex with their patients. He expresses dismay that "sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women's lives, yet there was total silence about it. There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest" (Final Analysis, p. 176).

In contrast to his own colleagues, many outside the psychoanalytic profession welcome the work of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. A year after The Assault on Truth appeared, his second edition credits "the feminist literature of the 1970s that finally broke the silence about the incidence and prevalence of incest."

In 1992 Masson writes:

Few now deny that [child sexual abuse] happens frequently . . . across all lines of class, income, and education. Ten years ago this was not the case. Then there was a lonely contingent of courageous feminist researchers--among them Louise Armstrong, Florence Rush, Judith Herman, and Diana Russell--whose works were ignored, by and large, by the mainstream media and especially by psychiatry, the very profession women who were abused as children often turned to in their tragically mistaken belief that they could find help. Psychiatry was largely responsible for the climate of disbelief that surrounded those women who braved the scorn of male professionals and spoke up about their own experience of abuse. ("Postscript to the 1992 Edition," Assault on Truth, 2003, p. 311).

"How has psychiatry reacted?" Masson asks in 1992, "As if all along these professionals were the ones fighting to have an unwelcomed truth recognized. And now they were prepared to accept their reward in the form of being called upon as experts" (Assault on Truth,p. 312).

Early in his career, psychiatrist Richard Gardner may have made a genuine attempt to discern the truth. But like Freud and Fliess, he found far greater acceptance and reward when he argued that children only imagine being abused or simply lie about it. He built his career testifying that these children have been brainwashed and programmed by vindictive mothers, who "alienate" them from their fathers.

Gardner's tolerance for incest and pedophilia was documented long before his 2003 suicide.

The last lawyer to cross-examine him in court was Louisiana lawyer Richard Ducote, who currently represents a Rhode Island mother accused of "parental alienation." In 2003, under Ducote's questioning in Paterson, New Jersey, Gardner admitted that he had not spoken to the Dean of Columbia University's medical school for over fifteen years. Gardner had no hospital admitting privileges for over twenty-five years. He had not been court-appointed to do anything for decades. He lacked the professional standing he had been claiming as an expert witness.

But Gardner's "parental alienation syndrome" (PAS) has been a windfall for many. A 2007 graduate in computer science from the University of Alabama, advertises online as a forensic expert offering to analyze custody cases for PAS at $75 an hour.

On July 3, 2007, authorities arrested Seattle, Washington, psychologist Stuart Greenberg, a nationally renowned expert on child sexual abuse and former president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology, for videotaping women colleagues and clients in his office restroom. Police charged that Greenberg would later masturbate to these images.

Greenberg confessed to the secret taping and committed suicide on July 25. He had worked as a consultant to the Archdiocese of Seattle in their defense against sexual abuse by priests.

His arrest and death have raised questions about a huge volume of child custody cases in which Greenberg served as a "parenting evaluator" to assess claims of abuse. Judges often rely uncritically on evaluations and recommendations provided by contract clinicians.

Many of those now building their careers in PAS are women attorneys and clinicians, who are actively recruited to produce reports condemning mothers--as if their gender makes them more credible in their attacks on other women.


Confidential comments may be sent to Anne Grant at parentingproject@cox.net