The Many Innocent Victims of Incest

by Dr. Michelle Golland

Susan Smith placed her young children in a car and let it roll into a lake in 1994. She hid the facts, blamed someone else and was later found guilty and is currently serving a prison sentence. Casey Anthony is currently on trial for the disappearance and subsequent death of her two -year old daughter Caylee. Immediately after her daughter’s disappearance, Casey hid the facts and blamed someone else. Both women claim to have been incested by their fathers for several years of their childhoods and into their adulthoods, and it is this connection and the similarities of their alleged crimes that I want to think about.

Incestuous relationships create a confusing and traumatic situation with the child in all cases. The bond with the incestuous parent becomes confused between the normal attachment that a child feels for a parent as caregiver and the additional sexual attachment. There is no such thing as mutually consensual incest and there is no outcome to such situations other than trauma.

One of the major psychological findings about children involved in incestuous relationships with their parents is what’s called an insecure attachment style. Okay, quick primer on attachment. Attachment is the word we use to describe the bond between parent and child in childhood, which later translates to how well the individual is able to bond in adult relationships. The Attachment Bond Theory was created by an English Psychiatrist named John Bowlby and an American Psychologist named Mary Ainsworth in the 1960’s.

Ideally, a child will be securely attached and able to create meaningful relationships and feel empathy for others as they mature. Secure attachment is the result of parenting that is child focused with an awareness of the child’s emotional world. Everything else falls under a large umbrella called insecure attachment and includes avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized and reactive attachment styles. Avoidant attachment is the result of unavailable or rejecting parents and leads to adults who are avoidant of intimate relationships, rigid and critical. Ambivalent attachment occurs when parenting is inconsistent and even sometimes intrusive. Ambivalently attached children grow up to be anxious and insecure adults who can be controlling, blaming, and erratic. Disorganized attachment is the result of parents who ignore their children and even can behave in frightening or traumatizing ways. Children raised this way can become chaotic, insensitive abusive adults, who in spite of their behavior, desperately crave security. Finally, reactive attachment is the result of extremely unattached or malfunctional parenting and often results in adults who are incapable of forming relationships. Okay, primer done.

So, as I mentioned, ideally we raise our children to be securely attached individuals who will later pursue and nurture healthy adult relationships. Where incest is involved, as alleged in the Casey Anthony case, there is no chance for secure attachment. The very act of molestation discounts awareness of the child’s emotional needs. As we have seen in the case of Susan Smith and other women who have committed similar crimes, the sad reality of attachment dysfunction is that it trickles down to the person’s own relationship with her children, or in other words, the inability to attach includes the inability to attach to biological offspring. 

In both the Casey Anthony and the Susan Smith cases the immediate reaction of the women seemed to be detachment and dissociation from the reality of the loss of their child. They seemed emotionless when talking about their missing children and appeared to be cold and callous. Additionally they resorted to primary defenses of blaming others and perhaps hoping that they could get away with, well literally murder, if they simply pretended the crime didn’t happen. It’s a very childlike way of reacting, like deflecting responsibility for a broken lamp. This immaturity can also be the result of insecure attachment as their primary focus in growing up might have been survival in a chaotic home, a home that allowed incest for example, instead of being nurtured through maturity in a healthy way.

Is insecure attachment an excuse for killing your children? No. emphatically, no. However, knowing that there is an explanation that can serve to clarify why such a nightmare can and does happen, can help us to feel like the world is a bit more organized, and can remind us as parents how important it is to be good and attentive caregivers. Our children require us to see them, to acknowledge and respond to their emotional worlds in nurturing ways, to hold reasonable and steady boundaries within which they will push and eventually become their own person. Unfortunately, it is way to easy to create children and much, much more difficult to create highly functioning people.

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National Crime Victims' Rights Week - Part II

by Lucy Puryear, M.D.

As evidenced by our readers' comments in Part I, my patient Elizabeth is not unique. There are many women who have been victims of incest, and other sexual assaults. As I see primarily women in my practice, I know their stories very well; but men are also victims of incest as well as victims of rape. Unfortunately their stories are often never heard due to shame and skepticism. It's been recently that we've come to know the darkness of priests assaulting young boys, revealing more about the impact of sexual abuse on men.

When I first began to see Elizabeth she was very anxious and depressed. Her depression was the primary problem and was potentially life-threatening. She was unable to eat and had lost a great deal of weight in a short period of time. She was tired all the time, felt guilty about all the trouble she was causing her mother, and believed that she had been a problem to her family for a long time. She thought that maybe they'd be better off without her around.

At the least, she said, "If I'm dead, the pain will stop. I'm so tired of trying so hard to be good enough, and always screwing up. I just don't want to be here anymore."

My first job in treating Elizabeth was to make sure that she was safe to be on her own and didn't need to be hospitalized for her own safety. I asked her, "Do you think about ways you might hurt yourself?" Fortunately, she said, "No. I just think about not being here anymore. Like if I could just go to sleep and not wake up, that would be great. But I couldn't do that to my mother. I think it would kill her."

Many people with depression have thoughts of death but no plans to actively hurt themselves. This is critical information in order to continue to treat someone as an outpatient. I started Elizabeth on antidepressant medication and recommended she see me once a week for therapy. I also referred her to the rape crisis center in Houston for support, and possible group therapy.

There are themes common to all incest victims and victims of sexual assault that I often hear in therapy. For Elizabeth, she had to deal with the shame and responsibility she felt for the abuse by her stepfather. She wondered, "Why didn't I tell him no, or run out of the room? Why didn't I tell my mom? She would have believed me and it would have stopped. He was mean to her too. Maybe there was part of me that wanted that? Is that possible? I always took the ice cream or candy afterwards."

As an adult looking back, a survivor of sexual abuse might find it hard to understand why s/he didn't say no . . . why s/he didn't run away . . . why s/he didn't tell someone . . . anyone. But a child's mind does not function like an adult's.

A child assumes that adults are there to protect them from harm. It's confusing when the stepfather you are told to love and trust hurts you. You want attention, but the attention is confusing. You are young and he is old; you do what you're told. And it doesn't stop because the person who tells you that he will kill your mother if you tell is more powerful than you and you believe him. You are small and he is big. And you're afraid that if you tell you might be taken away from your mother. So you pretend that there's no problem and you try to be really, really good. But as an adult you feel ashamed and guilty for your participation. You've forgotten how helpless you felt as a five year old. Elizabeth must learn to forgive herself for being five and doing the best she could at the time.

Women who are victims of sexual abuse often grow up feeling dirty and damaged. There is something broken in them that will color how others see them and treat them. It's why often women who have been abused will tolerate being partnered with another abuser. They believe that they are somehow worthless and when someone gets in close they will know how awful they truly are. The abuse, whether verbal or physical, makes sense.

Some women who are abused go on to lead ruined, damaged lives. Elizabeth was walking down this path with her promiscuity and drug and alcohol abuse. The unconscious belief is, If I treat myself this way I am making that choice, I am not powerless, what happened to me was not that big of a deal, I am in control.

If this behavior doesn't stop, lives become more and more desperate and sad. Many women though, like Elizabeth, tell themselves that they will not let the abuse ruin their lives, they will be successful and prove that they have value. But without therapy or some type of working through the abuse the feelings I have described remain. These feelings can have long-term effects on future relationships with friends and loved ones. They remain vulnerable and hurting.

Once someone has been through a traumatic event another traumatic event is much harder to process. It's as if the brain has been primed to respond to trauma. Elizabeth processed the rape in much the same way she internalized the sexual abuse. She believed that the rape was somehow her fault. That there was some flaw in her that made the rapist chose her. That if she hadn't been so stupid as to be walking alone at night, it wouldn't have happened. She had a hard time blaming the rapist for his actions; she was more responsible than he. The rape confirmed her fears that she was damaged and dirty. She didn't report the assault to the police because she was ashamed of herself.

Elizabeth and I spent many months together talking about how a child is not responsible for an adult's abuse. She didn't run away because she was confused and scared and didn't have the maturity to process other choices. She was a child, she was blameless. We talked about the sexual assault on campus being similar to what happened to her as a child. A man bigger and more powerful than she took control and abused her. At the time she was helpless to stop him. We talked about her allowing herself to be angry at her stepfather and the rapist for hurting her. She even allowed herself to express anger at her mother for not realizing what was happening to her as a young child and stopping it.

I am still seeing Elizabeth. She is no longer depressed and has graduated from law school. She is employed and volunteers as a child advocate at the court. We are working on her acknowledging her worth and value and allowing her to have a close relationship with a man who respects and cherishes her. That is still hard for her.

All stories are different and people react differently depending on earlier life experiences. But victims of sexual crimes are left with a particular set of feelings about themselves and their worth as women. There is healing for those feelings and women can recover and lead healthy and productive lives. It is an honor to work with these women and to help them to heal.

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Fifteen Years for Twenty-Four: Fritzl Wins

by Pat Brown

Yesterday and today I did hits for CTV Newsnet on the "Dungeon Dad," Joseph Fritzl. Both times, I was asked the traditional questions: "What was going on in the mind of this man? What is wrong with him?" I answered those but I couldn't resist making commentary on what I think is a lot more important. The bigger issue is "What is wrong with us?"

Josef Fritzl committed crime after crime because we, society, have let him. After imprisoning his daughter, Elisabeth, in a bunker for twenty-four years, raping her repeatedly, fathering her children, and killing one of them, the Austrian father-from-hell Fritzl got a slap on the wrist. The only time before this that he saw the inside of a courtroom and got penalized for his behavior (if one can call his sentence much of a penalty) was when he viciously raped a stranger. He spent all of a year in jail (even though he had convictions of indecent exposure and attempted rape on his record).

Apparently, society feels rape isn't such a bad crime and people weren't much concerned that Fritzl, a repeat sexual offender, was a danger to women; they essentially condoned the action. Then the crime was actually expunged and his name cleared. Society seemed to feel the victim should have to suffer the rest of her life, but this man should not have to have his future ruined. And society must have determined that women in Austria, and elsewhere, deserved to live with the threat of this man raping and possibly murdering them.

Think this is a stretch? Fritzl is now being looked at in the sexual homicides of four teenage girls in his country and in other possible crimes outside Austria, including Thailand where he went for sex tourism. And a number of women have come forward to identify Fritzl as the man who raped them.

Fritzl's wife, Roseanne, clearly agreed with society. She went ahead and let her husband return home in spite of the fact that he brutally raped a woman while he was married to her. When her daughter went missing, she didn't alert the authorities to the possibility her husband might have done something to her.

Year after year, Roseanne's husband acted in a manner that could not have failed to raise red flags. Did she not question why there were "no access" areas of the property and why her three grandchildren suddenly showed up from out of the blue with only her husband's word that Elisabeth dumped them on the doorstep? Fritzl's wife undoubtedly looked the other way and, in spite of that, society did not charge her as an accomplice.

Even the lodgers in the house and the neighbors saw suspicious behaviors on the part of Joseph Fritzl. They actually knew, at a point before she disappeared for two decades, that Elizabeth was being sexually abused; they just didn't think it was their duty to report it to the police. Society again gave Fritzl the green light for his hideous and evil actions.

Finally, part of society caught up with Joseph Fritzl and took him to court. The verdict? An unbelievable fifteen-year sentence for 3,000 rapes, kidnapping, imprisonment, and murder of an infant. Society must think all of this isn't much more of an offense than passing bad checks.

Now, in a continuation of this abomination, Fritzl doesn't have to go to prison where other criminals go, but instead he gets to pick the senior citizen home of his choice—a psychiatric facility (pictured right) that has the most desirable amenities—where he can live out his declining years in comfort and safety.

But, wait, society isn't finished with Fritzl yet! They still have the right to free the man before his "sentence" is up! If this sweet old man makes enough nice art projects and finds "recognition of his behaviors through his personal and group therapy," society might decide to let the poor fellow live out his final years in the community.

Looking at this case, I am not sure Joseph Fritzl deserves to be found guilty if society so supported each and every one of his sick behaviors. How can society blame him when society did next to nothing to prevent, stop, or condemn his actions until Fritzl reached age seventy-three and had decades of enabling by his fellow citizens?

Joseph Fritzl has "confessed" and "expressed remorse" at what he has done. When will society do the same?

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