BREAKING THE INCEST TABOO

...Incest advocates are promoting the term "consensual incest," soft and blameless, but no matter how enthusiastically the child says "yes" again and again, the term cannot apply to a twelve-year-old girl and her father...

...This is a peculiarly American problem—the withdrawal of all touching contact...

...Freud had put it this way: "It was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general...

...Ramey enumerates acceptable forms of behavior that scientific authorities once "proved" ruinous to those who indulged...

...More than 1.5 million children under the age of sixteen are said to be involved in prostitution or pornography...

...The damage already inflicted by violation of the incest taboo is immense...

...The singers hope, if they strike the right dulcet tones, to lull the incest taboo to sleep...

...she's been through it...

...Although children may or may not understand what they are asked to perform or endure, they do generally know that they cannot, realistically, refuse...

...James Ramey's voice is brash and provocative as he flings out headstrong challenges from his soapbox, the black-and-white pages of the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S...

...Usually they just settled into silent, powerless acquiescence...

...An investigator reported: "Some parents appeared in the movie with their children...

...they ought not be loaded down with the guilt that accompanies the breaking of a taboo...

...In addition, both child pornography and child prostitution are increasing at a phenomenal pace...

...Alstrom, a Swedish researcher, gives Freud's skepticism a sinister twist: "Almost one-half of the relationships lasted for three years or more and 5 per cent longer than ten years...

...Objections to incest are ill-informed, he claims, mainly squeamish...

...If she wishes to terminate the relationship later, she will be dependent on the benevolence of the adult...

...When I was young, my girl friends and I used to chant that to one another, with a giggle...

...C.-H...

...An anthropologist at the University of Utah, Parker surveys possible functions of the incest taboo— to prevent the genetic damage of inbreeding, to protect the cohesion of the family, and to safeguard children from psychological harm—and argues that in a highly mobile population with access to birth control, where the family is no longer the central unit of society and the main agent of socialization, these dangers are minimal...

...Although age and coercion are relevant, he writes, there are no longer good reasons to censure the incestuous aspect of a relationship...

...We need the money.' And of course the little girl did...

...But with self-styled experts now stating that "non-coercive father-daughter incest can in fact produce competent and notably erotic young women," and that "childhood is the best time to learn," people interested in the welfare of children should rush to check the safeguards...

...Of the $2.5 billion pornography industry, about $1 billion comes from child pornography...

...It is as if one could prove that rape is a benign phenomenon with statistics that show most rapists and a few rape victims enjoy it...

...If they made it to a psychiatrist, they would be coaxed to acknowledge their unconscious incestuous wishes, to admit they were not innocent victims...

...There is a distinction between incest and sexual abuse...

...We owe it to the many children already getting a raw deal from their families to quash the incest promotion...

...When one hears these voices try to sell incest as a "positive experience," the best retort is to ask "positive for whom...

...It would be a vicious affront to keep singing incest's praises in the face of their pain...

...dozens of parents responded...

...One little girl, age eleven, who ran crying from the bedroom after being told to have sex with a man of forty, protested, 'Mommy, I can't do- it.' 'You have to do it,' her mother answered...

...Those swayed by the arguments for incest need to be reminded that children are under the legal, social, physical, and often psychological control of their adult guardians...

...These hawkers, though, must talk loud and fast to hide the fact that incest between adults and children cannot be an equal transaction...

...But in the fine print: 85 per cent of the daughters involved in father-daughter incest felt it was a negative experience, while 60 per cent of the fathers regarded it positively...

...Whose voices are these...

...Even while she is happy, she is still in the position of a slave...

...Florence Rush, author of The Best Kept Secret: The Sexual Abuse of Children, argues further that children, unlike adults, are not practiced in saying "no": "Unless we recognize that the fully grown hold all the power and therefore all the responsibility (which includes the responsibility to say 'no,' no matter how persuasive a child may be), children's liberation is meaningless," she writes...

...In these circumstances, a "yes" or a "no" that gets swept away when a relationship fulfills a child beyond her wildest dreams, as Joan Nelsen says was her case, does not erase the inequity...

...we simply don't have the facts...

...In one such research report, Warren Farrell claims the overwhelming majority of incest cases in his sample of 200 had positive or beneficial effects...

...Ought we listen to them and allow their arguments to persuade us...

...We liked it, mainly for the euphony and the harmless tinge of naughtiness in the rhymed words...

...This results either in complete and total abandonment of all parent-child physical contact at puberty, just when the child needs its reassurance most, or in seductive behavior that never culminates in any manifest sexual activity, which James Leslie McCary believed affects the child more negatively than does actual incest...

...In such cases these individuals and their families often appear happy and well-adjusted despite the incest— which was usually brought to the attention of the authorities by a third party...

...Indeed, defenders of incest are so determined to ignore power dynamics within the family, and so eager to reach a verdict on incest on the basis of "happiness," that they can jumble everyone's reactions to incest together, regardless of who felt what...

...who can be against children's rights...

...Nelsen joins Ramey in claiming that the guilt inflicted by the taboo often damages participants more than the actual relationship or incident...

...But the difference between incest and abuse is not as great as the pro-incest camp would have us believe...

...a question uncomfortable for them to answer...

...Not that incest is best, exactly, but that it can be good clean fun, as legitimate as masturbation and homosexuality, other forms of sexual expression rescued from taboo status...

...His thesis is set squarely within the liberal tradition, and cannot fail to impress some listeners: Incest is solely a matter of personal morality...

...Or they might be sent home to a beating and heightened sexual exploitation, because of the professional conviction that the family, bad as it was, had to remain together...

...Unless we understand that children, though not easily duped, lack the capacity to resist adult pressure, granting a child the so-called 'right' to freely choose an adult sex partner is much like liberating the chicken from its coop for the delectation of the fox...

...Many of them are runaways who have no other means of survival, but some work under pressure from their parents...

...Finally, such groups as the Sexual Freedom League Childhood Sexuality Circle picket with placards and slogans: "Every child has the right to loving relationships including sexual, with a parent, sibling, other responsible adult, or child...

...Their options were few...

...Studies of incest use either criminal or clinical cases, and even there, he writes, "we often ignore those instances in which incest victims flatly refuse to cooperate against a love partner...

...They were trapped in a nightmare world of maybe-always, in which an older male relative—father, brother, stepfather, uncle—exploited them sexually, and regularly, over a period of years...

...If they reported the incidents to their mother, a teacher, or another trusted adult, they were usually met with furious disbelief and fierce denial...

...A brother-sister relationship when both are in their twenties, or a father-daughter relationship when the daughter is an adult, may be incestuous without being abusive, and perhaps such behavior should be decriminalized...

...Hers is the voice of experience, drawing nods of sympathy: She must know...

...Incest can Marcia Yudkin has taught women's studies and philosophy at Smith College and is now working on a novel, "Without Measures...

...There was love and healthy self-actualization in what I perceived to be a safe environment...

...others merely allowed their children to have sex...

...James Ramey protests someone else's statistics, for instance: "It is hard to believe that uniformly horrendous things have happened to so many people without anyone's awareness that something was amiss...

...When I was a child, I experienced an ongoing incestuous relationship which seemed to me to be caring and beneficial in nature," she said...

...According to a 1979 study by the department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 360,000 cases of sexual abuse are reported annually...

...Ramey and Nelsen could appease the skeptical with the work of Seymour Parker, whose academic credentials are impeccable...

...It is hardly credible that a majority of the relationships could have been maintained for such a long time with gross ill treatment by the father...

...One small point can be conceded to the crusaders...

...in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, disbelieve the testimony of the powerless...

...be a positive experience...

...All of these voices claim to speak for children, for modernity, for rationality...

...Good liberals take up the cry...

...I won't chant the ditty any more, even in jest...

...Had I known of these girls' situation as a child, I would have abandoned our chant, as I threw away other jingles when I learned that their contents were racist...

...Yes, writes Ramey, in fact, those who do not participate may suffer the greater loss: "American families have been so imbued with prohibitions against incest that they bend over backward to avoid any possibility of incestuous involvement or the possible accusation that they might become involved," he writes...

...Lurking very close by is the principle that where there is no sign of coercion there must be consent, plausible only to someone oblivious to discrepancies in power...

...children ought not be deprived of affectionate, caring sex within the family...

...Incest between adults and children is a violation, because the conditions for choice and consent are not present...

...The next logical assertion seems to be that children are individuals too—merely individuals, in no special positipn—and that the only appropriate measure of concern for them is their happiness...

...Vice is nice but incest is best" should not be an item of pedagogy any child has to accept on faith and act out at a relative's behest...

...She startled the American Psychiatric Association in 1979 by announcing research findings that "there is a significant amount of consensual incest activity reported as positive and beneficial...

...And consequently, whether those involved are happy about the incest cannot be the touchstone for the fairness of the deal...

...Couldn't it be that among all the unreported incidents of incest are many where the participants are not marked for life, and may even regard the episode positively...

...Other girls, I have since learned, were not so sheltered...

...In 1977 Screw magazine offered $200 for girl models...

...Adults do not need further permission to take advantage of the children under their control...

...SIECUS) Report...

...Yet versions of that chant have recently been heard, publicly, seriously, belted loud without remorse and without a snicker...

...If they are "happy and well-adjusted," who are we to disapprove...

...To Ramey's challenge, Joan Nelsen adds her voice, trembling but determined to confess a cherished secret for the sake of science...

...Estimates of the number of unreported cases range from two to ten times as many...

...Aside from "those few instances in which violence, extreme coercion, and rape occur"— Ramey's righteous qualification— incest is not in itself a form of violation...

...If they went to the police or to a social worker, they might have to bear the blame for breaking up their family and suffer the insecurity of foster care...

...Responsible voices need to state clearly that what is wrong with incest between adults and children is not that it violates a sacred, time-honored prohibition, but that it violates the powerless—vulnerable wards who are not yet in a position to consent or refuse...

...As long as children live in families the way they now do, a sexual encounter with an adult relative will have overtones of coercion...

...one of her "positive" cases involved herself...

...In our never-never land of childhood, we had at best a shadowy understanding of sex, and if we had put that together with the word "incest," we would have pictured something vaguely undignified, an unreal possibility...

...some 40 per cent of the abusers are parents, step-parents, or surrogate parents...

...I remember it as perhaps the happiest period in my life...

...A more quiet and devastating disregard for facts is found among researchers who...