Father-daughter Incest Research Articles

Psychomotor developmental delay and epilepsy in an offspring of father–daughter incest: quantification of the causality probability

A 20-year-old offspring of father-daughter incest, who has been suffering from serious psychomotoric health problems since early childhood, is seeking financial compensation under the German federal act of victim indemnification. For her appeal to be valid, the probability X that the incest was causal for her disorder must exceed 50%. Based upon the available medical records, we show that this is indeed the case and that X is even likely to exceed 65%, thereby rendering the victim's claim scientifically and legally justified.

Girlhood, Sexual Violence, and Agency in Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf”

This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block’s contemporary fairy tale collection The Rose and The Beast. Focusing specifically on the tale “Wolf,” the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce repressed material about father–daughter incest and sexual violence within the family. This theoretical analysis is augmented by a discussion of how 25 students enrolled in an undergraduate young adult literature course for pre-service English education students read Block’s “Wolf.” The author concludes that despite Block’s revisionist attempts to attend to the rapacious father figure, evidence from student readings reveals that they interpret “Wolf” in ways that fit broader cultural pedagogies of femininity that position the girl as a victim who must learn to defend her body. The author concludes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of how gender, sexual violence, and agency can be represented, read, and taught in a contemporary context amidst conflicting cultural scripts of girlhood vulnerability and empowerment.

Violence and Desire in Beijing

In Mainland China, there is a lack of public awareness of and systematic research on dating violence and incest. This article fills a gap in the research in this area by examining a woman's lived experience of father-daughter incest and dating violence. The article adopts the standpoint of third-wave feminists and highlights women's agency and resistance to abuse. Meng Xi, the subject of the case study in this article, is regarded as a "survivor" rather than a "victim," and her various strategies of resistance--in particular, how she talks about her body and linghun (intelligence soul), and uses the two as sites of resistance--are examined. The article sheds light on the desire and sexuality of women in contemporary China, and especially the struggle between spiritual and material pursuits.

College Students' Attribution of Blame in Father–Daughter Incest

Incest is one of the most repugnant things that can occur. If the educational programs have been effective, it would appear that individuals would not blame the victim. The Jackson Incest Blame Scale was administered to students in marriage and family classes at a midwestern university. Female students strongly supported the concept that women being treated as sex objects and sex and violence in the media influence offenders to commit incest. Discussion raises questions about the potential incongruent treatment of women in university family and consumer sciences departmental curricula.

L'Art et l'inceste : Sarabande d'Ingmar Bergman

Bergman's final film, Sarabande, allows us to define the question of father-daughter incest, a problem that is present in his work throughout his long career and which has never found a satisfactory resolution. The comparison of this last screenplay by one of the major authors of the twentieth century, with the additional information that the translation into images contributes, permits us to uncover several elements of the familial structure, especially that of the pervert father, which are difficult to clarify in a clinical setting. This study confronts Bergman's texts, both autobiographical and literary, with psychoanalytic theory and case studies. This paper hopes to propose a contribution to our understanding of incest in the general framework of perversion. Bergman suggests that the failure of the parent-child relationship can have disastrous consequences for the child, on the model of autism, as well as provoking anxiety in the adult. The deficit in the elaboration of a self image will be seen to be a determining factor in the relationship to the Law for the perverse structure.

Negotiating Incest and Exogamy in La fiyla del rey d'ungría

One of the most widely circulating stories of medieval Europe is set in motion by the threat of father-daughter incest. This threat, leveled at a virtuous, beautiful, and long-suffering heroine, unleashes a series ofmarital adventures that dramatize the advantages and perils of exogamy. The basic structure ofthe tale is as follows: A king eidier promises his dying wife or vows after her death diat he will remarry only ifhe can find someone as beautiful as his beloved wife. The only viable candidate who closely resembles the deceased wife is their only child, a daughter. To avoid the incestuous union the princess cuts off one or both ofher hands (in the case ofbodi hands, she has a servant perform the maiming). The king orders her to be killed, but, instead, she is abandoned in a forest or set adrift at sea. She is found by anodier nobleman who marries her despite her mutilation and the objections of his mother. The heroine gives birth to a son when her husband is absent and the modier-in-law forges letters to and from the absent husband, first announcing the birth of a monster or a black child insinuating that she is an adulteress and then ordering the execution ofmother and child. The handless princess is once again abandoned or set adrift. The husband returns, punishes his mother, and, after a long search, finds his wife, whose hands have been miraculously reattached. Throughout the Middle Ages, many variants of the Flight from the Incestuous Father/Handless Maiden story circulated in different genres and languages, transmitted through oral folktale, hagiographie legend, verse romance, and prose fiction. The first known written version, the English Vitae Duorum Offarum, appeared in the diirteenth century. The story often converged widi other widespread tale-types,

Maternal Response to Father-Daughter Incest: Experiences of Mothers Following Disclosure

This study explored the impact of the disclosure of sexual abuse of the daughter by the father or father figure on the mother. Data were collected from seven mothers aged between 31 and 48 years whose daughters had a history of sexual abuse by the biological father, stepfather or live-in boyfriend. The children's ages ranged between 5 and 11 years with disclosure having taken place in the last two years before data collection. Data were collected using an interview schedule. The results obtained from the thematic content analysis indicate that the mothers were traumatized by the disclosure of the sexual abuse. The most prevalent symptoms were anger, anxiety, guilty, depression, insomnia, headache and fatigue. It is recommended that mothers be provided with psychological intervention in order to assist them deal with the trauma associated with the disclosure of the father-daughter incest.

Newfangled Readers in Gower’s “Apollonius of Tyre”

Newfangled Readers in Gower’s ‘‘Apollonius of Tyre’’ Elizabeth Allen University of California, Irvine John Gower’s tale of ‘‘Apollonius of Tyre’’ begins with a strikingly explicit act of father-daughter incest perpetrated by a king. For Gower, however, ‘‘Apollonius’’ thematizes incest in order to meditate on audience reception: incestuous desire, repeatedly encountered and avoided throughout the narrative, necessitates a series of interpretive acts that figure the relation between king and subject as a relation of mutual audience. The interpretive effort that bolsters monarchy while attending to the needs of its subjects requires imagination on the part of both monarch and subjects. I argue in this essay that incest in ‘‘Apollonius ’’ stages an exploration of such imaginative activity: a series of kings’ daughters are figured as new audiences who reinterpret in order to reaffirm monarchical power. Far from the injunctive exemplary moralism with which Gower used to be associated, the interpretive process hypothesized in ‘‘Apollonius of Tyre’’ urges that readers invent, not just imitate, virtuous conduct. At the same time, moreover, Amans’s reception in the framework of the Confessio complicates Gower’s otherwise affirmative picture of active new audiences because he misunderstands the ways in which the story could apply to his life. Thus despite Book 8’s embrace of imaginative fiction, in particular romance, the final action of the poem also points to severe constraints upon narrative’s real-world applicability, as Amans is reconciled to John Gower and finally renounces love, ‘‘mak[ing] an ende’’ (8.2902) of stories. For what purposes does a poem that concludes with such renunciation generate eight books’ worth of examples, in all their copiousness, applicability, and narrative variety? For what purposes does this poem end with the most frankly fictive of stories, the ‘‘Tale of Apollonius’’? How does Gower PAGE 419 419 ................. 16596$ CH12 11-01-10 14:07:56 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER make this tale, and narrative generally, morally applicable?1 Despite the accomplishments of recent scholarship, the poem’s construction of moral influence remains problematic because, to my mind, our most recent and searching accounts of the poem’s moral complexity tend to underplay the Confessio’s methods of anticipating, and even setting free, its own audience. The Confessio’s conclusion seems particularly perverse because Book 8 already announces an explicit generic shift from exemplum to romance, as though abandoning the former and authorizing the latter. Exemplarity relies on a basic analogy between character and reader that, at its extreme, generates a fantasy of exact repetition: the ideal patient Griselda , for instance, should be possible for wives to imitate. Many readers have seen that Chaucer’s Griselda may not, in fact, be imitable because of the resistance of real-world women, the imperfection of Walter’s judgment, and the unbearable brutality of such suffering.2 For Gower, as for Chaucer, the extreme version of exemplary repetition constitutes not a communicative ideal but a potential trap. Throughout the Confessio , in fact, Amans’s responses generate discussion between himself and Genius about the applicability of stories to his own love affair.3 1 The tag ‘‘moral Gower,’’ which Chaucer bestowed on his contemporary, has been complicated by many critics since the work of John Fisher in John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964). For classic explorations of the connection between morality and poetics in Gower, see Charles Runacres , ‘‘Art and Ethics in the Exempla of the Confessio Amantis,’’ in Gower’s ‘‘Confessio Amantis’’: Responses and Reassessments, ed. Alastair J. Minnis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 106–34; and R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 1990). On the morally formative powers of art in Gower, see James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alain of Lille’s ‘‘Anticlaudianus’’ and John Gower’s ‘‘Confessio Amantis’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 136–38. For recent treatments of the ways in which literary effects complicate clear moral truths and demand practical wisdom, see, for example, Patricia Batchelor, ‘‘Feigned Truth and Exemplary Method in the Confessio Amantis,’’ in Re-Visioning Gower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus...

"Acting Out the Oedipal Wish": Father-Daughter Incest and the Sexuality of Adolescent Girls in the United States, 1941-1965

The impact of Freudian psychoanalysis on the interpretation of father-daughter incest in courts of law, the social sciences and child-serving agencies during the postwar period was not, as has commonly been assumed, to uniformly silence discussion and prosecution. In fact, psychoanalysts themselves began to pursue case histories of incest between fathers and adolescent daughters in the 1940s. These case histories - couched as examinations of female adolescent Oedipal behavior - reinforced ideas about paternal power by focusing on girls' psychological need for paternal sexual attention. Court cases from Cook County, Illinois, dating from the same period reveal that judges often believed girls' claims of incest, even when contradicted by testimony from adult members of the family. While psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic social workers diminished and even dismissed the idea that father-daughter incest was damaging to adolescent girls, and concentrated instead on the importance of Oedipal desire, lawyers and judges viewed father-daughter incest as a particularly heinous crime. That psychoanalytic social workers and the legal community were so at odds with one another suggests that postwar society was conflicted about father-daughter incest, rather than uniformly invested in denial as a way to shore up paternal power and the ideological parameters of familialism.

"Too Close for Comfort": American Beauty and the Incest Motif

Through a reading of the film American Beauty, this article explains how the structure of father-daughter incest, working through displacement, has provided a narrative that links a series of recent cultural developments: the sexualization of ever-younger girls, cinema's erasure of mothers and of career women as sympathetic figures, and efforts to remasculinize the middle-aged white male.

Commentary on a First-Person Account of Sexual Abuse: From Experience to Theory and Treatment

Penelope Hollander’s first-person account of the outcome of sexual trauma provides an important opportunity to view how a sophisticated writer with knowledge of psychoanalytic theory can understand the experience of sexual abuse. As discussants of this work, first we thank Ms. Hollander for her willingness to allow the scientific community access to her experience, her reflections, and her scholarly ideas about her experience. We are privileged to have the opportunity to join with Ms. Hollander in thinking about the many complications that arise when a parental role is perverted and the child is used inappropriately as “the wife of the father and the best friend to mother.” While Ms. Hollander is painfully familiar with the many negative effects of her experience, including vomiting, migraines, and adolescent acting out and underachievement, this paper is about how the experience affected her capacity for attachment. In particular, she explores the difficulty distinguishing subjectively between a real and a fictionalized attachment. She is aware of what she calls the paradoxical response to the trauma in which she has developed a fierce desire for attachment and implied, strong erotic heterosexual passions. The intensification of the erotic wish fulfillment, which she believes was a sequala of the father-daughter incest, leads to a dissociative experience in which the pain associated with the memory of the original traumatic relationship is defended against through the reconstruction of another relationship, presumably derived from the conflicts associated with the original. She has interesting ideas about how relationships with adult women can be reparative for a woman who has suffered from the trauma of an overstimulating father and a dependent mother as they provide new experiences of relating and allow for the reworking of some elements of the trauma. We will take two of the many different aspects of the paper that could serve as the basis for a commentary. The first is related to the author’s central question of how her experience of the sexual abuse generated a powerful erotic striving and at the same time “crippled” her relationships with men. From our point our view, an aspect of the traumatic experience remained operative in sexual relationships that could not be transformed into mature functioning of adult sexuality and object relations. In adding our ideas to Ms. HolPsychiatry 67(3) Fall 2004 239

The Daughter's Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss"

El s Kathryn Harrison points out, one of America's most popular misconceptions, especially in the white middle-class family, is that father-daughter incest is a rare occurrence. The crime of incest often goes unreported and unpunished in part because of a silence around it. While exact figures are hard to pin down, current data suggest that anywhere from one in four to one in three girls experiences sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or surrogate fathers. In the 1980s scholars such asJudith Herman and Diana Russell provided data that suggested incest was at least as prevalent in white middleand upper-middleclass homes as it was elsewhere.2 Far from confirming that incest only happens in certain homes, this research suggests that the sexual abuse of daughters is a ubiquitous practice that cuts across racial and class lines. Nonetheless, familiar narratives of incest construct the white middle-class family as a nurturing unit in which the rapacious father is an impossible character. In particular, these narratives often relegate incest to the homes of cultural others or attempt to dismiss a daughter's first-person account of sexual violation as fantasy (Doane and Hodges 2; Wilson). In 1997, Kathryn Harrison published her controversial memoir about fatherdaughter incest, The Kiss, a book that disturbed the silence around and as-

Seduction by Law: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession in Thereafter Johnnie

In Carolivia Herron' s 1991 novel Thereafter Johnnie, none of the five main characters comprising the protagonist's family are able to grasp the meaning of the past any more than they are able to relinquish their insistence on its hold upon them in the present. As the above epigraphs suggest, the central characters of the novel are haunted by an unfinished past the generations distant past of African American slavery, certainly, but also the contemporary past in which an episode of father-daughter incest has destroyed the

‘This dark echo calls him home’ Writing Father-Daughter Incest Narratives in Canadian Immigrant Fiction

‘This dark echo calls him home’ Writing Father-Daughter Incest Narratives in Canadian Immigrant Fiction

Intrafamilial sexual abuse: brother–sister incest does not differ from father–daughter and stepfather–stepdaughter incest

Objective: Three groups of girls who were sexually abused (by either brothers, fathers, or stepfathers) were compared. The purpose was to identify the differing characteristics of the abuse, the family environments, and the psychosocial distress of these children. Method: Seventy-two girls aged between 5 and 16 were assigned to one of the three groups. Subjects were matched between groups on the basis of their actual age. Children completed measures of traumatic stress; their mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist-Parent Report Form (CBCL) and other self-report questionnaires on family characteristics. Workers in child protective services completed information regarding the nature and severity of the abuse. Results: Results suggested few differences in the characteristics of sexual abuse between the three groups. However, penetration was much more frequent in the sibling incest group (70.8%) than in the stepfather incest (27.3%) or father incest (34.8%) groups. Ninety percent of the victims of fathers and brothers manifested clinically-significant distress on at least one measure, whereas 63.6% of stepfather victims did. Compared with father and stepfather perpetrators, brothers were raised in families with more children and more alcohol abuse. Conclusions: The authors conclude that the characteristics of brother–sister incest and its associated psychosocial distress did not differ from the characteristics of father–daughter incest. These findings suggest that theoretical models and clinical practices should be adjusted accordingly and that sibling incest should not necessarily be construed as less severe or harmful than father–daughter incest.

Sibling Incest

During the past 20 to 30 years, professionals have given increased attention to intrafamilial incest, primarily addressing father-daughter incest. More recently, sibling incest, a type of intrafamilial incest, has received notice from mental health professionals; how-ever, many professionals still do not recognize the seriousness of the problem. Some professionals have asserted that sibling incest is as common as, and possibly more common than, parental incest. The prevalence of sibling incest can only be estimated because sex between siblings as a phenomenon has been poorly researched. This article reviews current research on the individual and family dynamics that allow sibling incest to occur, the effects of sibling incest on victims, and current treatment protocols.

Sociogenetic structure in a free-living nocturnal primate population: sex-specific differences in the grey mouse lemur ( Microcebus murinus )

The grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) has a dispersed social structure, within which female sleeping associations are common. These sleeping associations have been hypothesised to confer anti-predatory and thermoregulatory benefits, especially when rearing offspring. The genetic composition of these associations was determined using microsatellite markers to test predictions derived from kin selection theory. 161 (99 males, 62 females) individual M. murinus belonging to a free-living population in Ampijoroa, north-western Madagascar, were genotyped and observed over a total of 13 months distributed over the dry seasons of 3 successive years (1995–1997). Kin selection theory predicts that these female associations should consist of closely related members, and that female philopatry and male natal dispersal should characterise the dispersal pattern within this species. These predictions were confirmed by the data. Five out of six female sleeping groups consisted of one or more closely related dyads. Females that slept alone did not have close female kin in the vicinity or within the population at all. Closely related female dyads lived in significantly closer proximity than closely related male dyads and closely related male-female dyads showed intermediate proximity. In combination with the result that females possessed significantly more relatives within the population than males, these findings support the behavioural hypotheses of female philopatry and male natal dispersal. Matrilinear grouping patterns and sex-biased dispersal are therefore genetically established in a dispersed primate social organisation for the first time. The results further indicate that several generations of mouse lemurs live together within a given area, implying both an effective mechanism of kin recognition to avoid father-daughter incest and the potential for social learning to ensure individual recognition.

La fille «perdue» et «retrouvée» de Lévitique 18

In a previous issue of the review (ETR 75, 2000, p. 415-420), J. Joosten asserted, by making use of categories of greco-latin rhetoric, that the father-daughter incest, though not explicitely mentioned, was implied by the writer of Lv 18. The application of rules of Semitic rhetoric and the consequent structural lay-out of the chapter add to these results and also confirm the skill of the writer : by placing the prohibition of father-daughter incest in the very middle of his speech, he combines opposing oratory requirements and succeeds the feat of concealing this delicate issue without undermining its importance.

School Professionals' Attributions of Blame for Child Sexual Abuse

This article reports the results of two studies comparing school professionals' attributions of blame to a child victim, a father/perpetrator, and a nonparticipating mother in hypothetical vignettes of father–daughter incest. Vignettes depicted a 10-year-old female responding in an encouraging, passive, or resistant manner to her father's sexual advances. Results from both studies indicate that participants assigned significantly more blame to encouraging victims than to passive and resistant victims. All professional groups (i.e., school psychologists, teachers, school counselors, and principals) assigned some degree of blame to the child victim and nonparticipating mother, and they assigned very much or total blame to the father. Participants with less traditional gender role attitudes assigned less blame to the child. In Study 2, participants who reported a personal history of child sexual abuse (CSA) attributed less blame to the child, and participants who assigned some level of blame to the child were older and had received less hours of formal course training in CSA compared with participants who assigned no blame. The results of these studies support the need to educate school professionals about the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome and the importance of not attributing blame to child victims regardless of their behavioral presentation.

Brother-sister incest—father-daughter incest: a comparison of characteristics and consequences

Objective: One group of women who were sexually abused by brothers and a second group who were sexually abused by fathers are compared with the intent to identify the differing characteristics of each type of abuse and the effects of the abuse on their adult functioning. Our hypothesis was that there would indeed be differences in the characteristics of the abuse and its effects, and that this would necessitate differing treatment strategies. Method: Surveys were distributed to women attending support groups for incest survivors. Of the 62 women completing questionnaires, 14 women (23%) had been sexually abused by a brother. A similar number of women (15) who had been sexually abused by their fathers were chosen from the overall sample for comparison. Results: The absence of the father as a vital force in family life played a key role in the sexual abuse of women by their brothers in every case. The duration of the sexual abuse for brother-abused women and father-abused women was lengthy. The characteristics, including use of force, are equally as serious for sisters as for daughters. The family circumstances surrounding the abuse were examined for both groups and the results yielded a fuller understanding of the incestuous family. Despite an appearance of normalcy, the level of family-wide disturbances, for example substance abuse, mental illness and pervasive family-wide violence were profound for both groups. In this study, we also examine the effects in adulthood of the serious disruption of childhood developmental phases for both brother-abused and father-abused women, taking into account the incidence of substance abuse, depression, suicidality, and eating disorders. Conclusions: The authors conclude that the characteristics and consequences of brother-sister incest are of equal seriousness to those of father-daughter incest. This would suggest that brother-sister incest is one of the current blind spots in incest research, and one that we cannot afford to ignore. In-depth knowledge of the dynamics and effects of brother-sister incest suggest specific treatment strategies are indeed necessary and these are discussed in this paper.