cw: incest, csa, rape, multiple perpetrators, detailed
“A content analysis of these fourteen interviews identified three distinct, yet interrelated, themes. First, both family members and others, including friends and authorities, were perceived as responding with denial/minimization/normalization of CSA. A second theme was noted when participants spoke about other methods family members used to ensure their cooperation and/or silence about polyincest. Characterized by implicit and explicit threats, this was labeled fear/reprisal. The third theme to emerge related to the reactions of friends and authorities outside the family. Common patterns of response were characterized as inadequate/negative.
In 13 of 14 there are narrative examples of denial/minimization/normalization from both family members and others. These accounts revealed the ways in which participants thought the reality of their abuse was hidden or overlooked. Insofar as denial/minimization/normalization served to protect the abusers from exposure, while simultaneously leaving the child unprotected, both family members and others demonstrated collusion with sexual abuse.
Fannie was raised in a white, nuclear family with strong connections to extended family members. Based on her account, there appeared to be a pattern of sexual abuse among male relatives (i.e., both grandfathers, father and brother). As an adult, her efforts to confront her father with his incest were met with simple denial, “This never happened.” Other family members seemed intent on colluding with the sexual abuse when they refused to react to disclosures of it. For instance, when Fannie sought support in the face of her father’s denial, an aunt who had earlier disclosed to Fannie that she had been a victim of sibling incest by her older brother (Fannie’s father), didn’t want to discuss it further. According to Fannie, her aunt “wished she had never disclosed that … she would take that validation away if she could to protect herself.” In another account of how her family knew about the history and potential for incest, yet failed to act, Fannie talked about efforts by an aunt and uncle to disclose the sexual abuse of their own children by the same grandfather.
They made a trip to my house for the express purpose of sitting my parents down and… they did actually say it. And my father said he would handle it. And a couple of weeks went by and my aunt got the message back … and it was clear that nothing was going to be done or prevented.
Linda was a young, white woman who had been raised by a single mother for most of her childhood. She reported being exposed to multiple abusers because of her mother’s active social life which included numerous boyfriends, parties, and heavy alcohol use. She identified her abusers as her mother, a male cousin, and two male family friends. Normalization of sexual abuse was evident in her statement, “I can remember … umm … them being drunk and touching and fondling and how uncomfortable I felt.” When Linda was eight, she tried to tell her mother that she had been raped by a teenaged cousin. Denial and reprisal were both evident in her account of her mother’s response, “I told her when it happened and she slapped me across the face. Told me I was lying. It never happened, yeah.” Years later, as an adult, Linda reminded her mother of this incident. Minimization was evident in her account of her mother’s reply, “ ‘Oh, that. I knew about that years ago. You had a wonderful childhood. We don’t need to talk about those …’ She said it was no big deal too, I guess.”
Letitia, a young African American woman, had been raised in urban poverty by a drug addicted mother and stepfather. She reported abuse by 3 family members, including her mother, stepfather, and stepgrandfather, as well as several other, nonfamily members. Her childhood and early adolescence were spent in a large step-family. She also had contact with her maternal grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins in an extended kinship network. In another example of collusion with sexual abuse, she noted:
Later on, I found out a lot of my family did know about what was happening when we were little, but they didn’t want to interfere. Like it was just not done, you don’t talk about it, you don’t interfere.
Growing up in a white, rural, working-class area, Celia and her siblings were frequently shunted back and forth between extended and stepfamilies. She was multiply sexually abused by her father, stepfather, uncles, and others throughout childhood. Incest and violence were norms for her. When explaining how she knew that her sisters also had been sexually abused, Celia stated,
Because you could hear him go from room to room. You know, you could hear him, like you know that you are going to be next. And you know. I think that was the worst, knowing that he was coming.
As adults, even former victims were prepared to collude with the intrafamilial, intergenerational pattern of incest. Based on one sister’s comments, urging her to ignore the past, minimization and normalization of polyincest appeared to continue in Celia’s family,
And my sister defends him … his father was like this and his father’s father before that and … it was like ‘big deal.’ And he knew he could get away with it. More or less, he did.
Outside of their dysfunctional families, participants also reported numerous examples of denial/minimization/normalization. In fact, reactions by both significant others and authorities seemed to mirror the same collusive responses found within polyincestuous families. Linda commented,
Some of my friends that I have told, because it was so extensive, they don’t want to believe it either. They would close their eyes and think that it doesn’t happen in this world.
Donna and Kate, white women from extended and nuclear families respectively, discussed reactions within their Christian communities of faith. In similar ways both encountered resistance to the disclosure or discussion of incest. Donna, who reported a network of related and unrelated perpetrators, noted, “They accepted … in the beginning. And then it’s like, ‘ok, that’s it. Go on.’” Kate felt even less acceptance, “They are not open to it.” She struggled with tears while saying,
As much as I have wanted to trust people, … it has hurt me because the people that you really want, that are supposed to be close to God, can’t quite say ‘I don’t understand what you are going through, but I back you up.’
Jane, a white woman raised in a chaotic, nuclear family, reported long term sexual abuse by a violent, alcoholic father, as well as a male cousin and unrelated men. She was convinced that people inside and outside her family knew or suspected sexual abuse, but did nothing, “because my family was so loud and messy about their abusiveness and … and it was just so loud and messy and there were so many people that knew it.”
Reflecting a similar view, Letitia believed that people, inside and outside the family, often did know or at least suspected when she was being sexually abused, “I don’t know. I think stuff like that (e.g., incest and rape) happens a lot more and people just don’t say anything about it because they are embarrassed.” Later in the interview, she connected people’s reluctance to take action with what she considered a kind of normative sexism in the larger society. Giving examples from music lyrics, a comedian’s joke about “a fat woman wearing a rape whistle,” and sex/rape simulations in music videos, she remarked,
The media and everything I see really affects me a lot because it just makes me see the mind set of society at large. I’m just inundated with things that make me think, ‘God, now I can understand why my parents are this way.’
Although denial/normalization/minimization seemed aimed at discouraging victim/survivors from bringing attention to their plights, it was sometimes not enough. Eleven of the 14 interviews contained examples of fear/reprisal, in the form of threats, blame, and/or shaming. Celia’s experience may have been the most severe.
Celia: He [father] told us horror stories. He was good at twisting things and brainwashing, very good.
Interviewer: How did he do that? Can you say more about that?
Celia: He would um … put it in the sense like, ‘If you don’t love me and you don’t show me that you love me, God isn’t going to accept you.’
Later she remarked, “My stepfather did that too. If you told, bad things were going to happen to you, you know.”
Eudora was raised in a rural, white, nuclear family that was strictly religious. In addition to incest by two brothers and an uncle, she described alcoholism and physical abuse by both parents. When she was in her early teens, Eudora experienced a different form of silencing through reprisal when a youth leader in her church was discovered molesting her, “… then I got locked in my room for three days because it was also my fault.”
Finally, Letitia explained that fear of the consequences of disclosure seemed to be a major factor in her grandmother’s silence about her sexual abuse in childhood.
… like my grandmother was really afraid that… that we … she said that she was afraid that my mother would take us away and we would never see her. But I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me.
When directly confronted with the disclosure of incest and/or sexual abuse, various confidants and authority figures were seen as inadequate/negative in their responses by 9 of the 14 polyincest survivors. For instance, at the age of thirteen Letitia had been raped by her stepfather. He received a four year prison sentence, while she was placed in foster care throughout her adolescence. During that time, she was assigned to a caseworker whom she grew to despise, “A lot of times she would say, you know, ‘are you sure some of the things that happened to you weren’t just them being affectionate?’”
At another point in her adolescence Letitia was raped by the star football player at her high school. She only revealed the rape to a trusted foster-brother because she saw little reason to report it as a crime. Perseverating on the idea that many different people in authority were aware of this young man’s actions, she claimed,
And it was just … like everybody knew about it. But…I don’t know. Everybody knew. And the teachers knew, I mean everybody knew. It was a totally different set of reasons for not doing anything about it [comparing family’s nonresponse with authorities’ nonresponse], you know. And he was really a big man on campus. Sports and just kind of like prestige are such a big thing in high school and college.
Later she added, “And he did it to other girls, too.”
Celia’s account was equally disturbing. Like Letitia, she had been raped by her stepfather in early adolescence after years of other sexual and physical abuse. She got into trouble at school for violent behavior and, when questioned about the reasons for her behavior, revealed the rape.
Celia: He admitted to doing everything. And so, because he was a working man, he got a 90 day jail sentence, which he only had to attend on weekends, and a year’s probation. You know, …
Interviewer: When did you take him to court?
Celia: When they put me in foster care. I had no choice actually. You know, they make you feel like shit. They treated him better than they treated me.
As each of them entered puberty, Kate and her two sisters were sexually abused by their father. Subsequently, she was also raped by her stepfather, sister, and a male neighbor. In her mid-twenties she had what was described as a “nervous breakdown” and entered a psychiatric hospital for treatment of a variety of symptoms related to her history of incest. While hospitalized, she was assigned a doctor who interpreted her incest this way.
And he … he said he wanted … he tried to get me to talk about it. And when he told me um … He said, ‘well you must have loved your father very much.’ And I … he didn’t say why he said that. I just absolutely wanted to run out of there.
Like other survivors of polyincest, Kate had little confidence that friends or authorities would be helpful to her ongoing recovery from a long history of incest and rape. She relied instead on the emotional support of a local self-help group for sex abuse survivors.
These 14 narratives represented perhaps the most severe forms of incest that a child can suffer and survive. Yet, the themes that emerged from them revealed a consistent lack of any adequate response by other adults, thus insuring that their sexual abuse would be effectively ignored. Within both nuclear and extended families, relatives failed to respond to either their suspicions or to outright disclosure of polyincest in ways that would confront the perpetrator or protect the victim from further assaults. Outside the family, caseworkers, physicians, judges, church members, and friends often failed to adequately support the victim in childhood or the survivor in adulthood.”
M. Sue Crowley & Brenda L. Seery, Exploring the Multiplicity of Childhood Sexual Abuse with a Focus on Polyincestuous Contexts of Abuse
