INCESTUOUS SEXUAL ABUSE
Making Intervention a Birthright
A different version of this article was published in Sexual Assault Report, November/December 2002, as "The Mother Question: What's Up With Men?" For a copy of the report, please contact their website.
This article is meant to generate discussion about the need to improve the South Asian community's response to child victims and adult survivors of incestuous sexual abuse. Many of my observations about intervention also apply to families and communities across different cultures. However, my focus on South Asians is because, as a South Asian, I have a personal interest and particular urgency in pushing for this community to step up intervention and prevention efforts -- both here in North America and in South Asia.
In South Asian families, it is particularly ironic that while men (even those living in the United States and Canada) have more power and privilege than women, they do not exercise this greater power and privilege to do something about incestuous sexual abuse. In fact, when we hear about child sexual abuse the first thing many of us (including feminist activists) ask is: "What about the mother? What was she doing?" We do not pose these questions as much to fathers.
Do we as a community believe that no child is safe around a man? Do we feel that men are incapable of protecting their children because they just don't care enough or that they care less than mothers? Many South Asian women say, "There is no language even to talk to fathers about one's body, let alone sexual abuse" -- and by language they mean both verbal language and emotional language. Others say, "Most abusers are male so a girl is not going to turn to her father for such matters, she will turn to her mother." Even more frequently, women say, "Men just cannot handle such information. They'd get so mad, they'd probably kill the perpetrator" or "They'll just fall apart because they'll feel they failed as fathers, failed to protect their families." Several adult South Asian survivors of incestuous sexual abuse add this: "I couldn't tell my dad because it would destroy him." Some feared their fathers would keel over with a heart attack. Some were convinced their fathers would become depressed. The majority did not have this anxiety about their mothers.1 How interesting that we protect men in this way from their feelings and adequate or inadequate responses.
On one hand, it is convenient that fathers are culturally off the hook from needing to provide emotional care giving. On the other, it is tragic that fathers position themselves (and get positioned) as male figures and not sources of refuge in their daughters' lives. In light of how rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and wars are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men on men, men on women, men on children -- what does this say about the real or imagined inability of men to take on the aftermath or prevention of violence? Yet, we often hear about men, including South Asians, engaging in rhetoric and violent actions to defend female honor as a way of preserving male prestige, honor and reputation. And we have heard of male judges handing down rulings that have worked against mothers whose children are being sexually abused by fathers and judges who have granted custody of sexually abused children to those who are unable and unwilling to protect them.
Some South Asian feminists point out that the patriarchal (paternalistic) notion of guardianship as well as the tendency of male authority figures to ignore or perpetuate sexist power dynamics within families should be regarded as a danger sign. They wonder if we really want men participating more actively in protecting their children, especially girl children, when there already is a sense of male entitlement, a license to surveil and control female sexuality, female bodies, and women's behavior across the age spectrum. The concern is that instead of protecting children, especially girl children from abuse, men will end up restricting their daughters' freedom or handing girl children over to the very people who violate them.2
So What About Mothers?
If we do let men off the hook from protecting children from incest perpetrators in their immediate and extended families, then what about women who are not the biological mothers? Should we not hold other women who may be in a child's life up to the same standards of accountability that we hold mothers - such as other relatives or mothers of other children? Why expect mothers to know how to protect their children better than anyone else in the immediate or extended family? By insisting that it is the mother's job more than anyone else's to protect children, we compel all children to turn to their mothers more than to other women (or men) in the immediate or extended family. We confine relationships that require children's trust to child-mother relationships. We restrict children the freedom to develop safe relationships with other adults and to expect other adults besides mum to defend them.
Someone once pointed out that there is a false impression that all mothers like their children when in fact some may not. The same impression applies to children. All children are expected to like their mothers. In fact, some do not and should not have to, any more than they should be expected to like their fathers.
Not All Mothers Are Able To Protect Children
If parenting is by and large a skill that is learned through osmosis and observation, then why is the protection of children from child sexual abuse not such a skill?
- Should we not consider mothers who may be incest survivors themselves and have never told anyone about their childhood trauma? If so, why would they suddenly be able to deal with the abuse of their child? Is it not possible for them to get re-traumatized by having to remember what happened to them in childhood? Under these circumstances, many people would become emotionally paralyzed and incapable of action, let alone intervention.
- What about mothers who have never experienced belief, protection, or intervention when they were going through the abuse and do not know how to offer these to their children?
- What about mothers who believe that since they survived sexual abuse in childhood without adult intervention, so will their children?
- How about mothers who have lived their lives believing that what happened to them as children was their fault, that they were selected for abuse by the perpetrator because they somehow invited it? If they never imagined that the abuse could also happen to someone else, why would they imagine it could happen to their children? Why would they anticipate that their children needed protection? To give protection, you first need to believe it is necessary.
- What about situations where mothers are battered women, where the incest perpetrators are fathers holding the entire family hostage with intimidation and violence so that the mothers feel powerless to intervene? What happens when mothers are terrified that their abusive partners will kill the incested child and/or other members of the family if there is any attempt to expose what is going on? And what if, as part of the cycle of domestic violence, batterers force their wives to also participate in sexual abuse of their child?
All the scenarios listed above frequently happen. They underscore that motherhood is not necessarily synonymous with the ability to protect children from danger, just as fatherhood does not automatically imply safe guardianship. They also speak to the injustice of blaming and penalizing mothers for failure to protect their children against physical or sexual abuse.
But in as many situations, the incest perpetrator is not the father of the child. He may not be battering his wife. He may not be someone of whom the child or mother of the child is afraid. He may be the victim's brother, a family friend, a distant relative or a worker in the household. One assumes that in such situations where perpetrators do not wield as much power in the family, there should be no reason for mothers not to intervene. However, this is a dangerous assumption because mothers may still fear exposing the abuse as much as the abuser for other reasons. For instance:
- The perpetrator may be a favored relative and mothers may be afraid of getting him into trouble with the law or with family.
- Mothers may fear being labeled bad mothers and being punished for this.
- Mothers may not feel strong enough to stand up against those who side with the perpetrator. They may fear punitive actions from these people, such as turning others in the family against them, verbal abuse, or economic blackmail. They may not want to deal with the recriminations of those who feel "tainted" by the allegations of sexual abuse because of their relationship with the perpetrator.
- Non-intervention like silence may be viewed as a culturally appropriate response to sexual abuse because there is a false hope that the perpetrator will not perpetrate again.
- On the other hand, mothers may believe that drawing attention to the abuse will damage the girl child's future, her reputation and, by extension, the family's reputation. Covering up the abuse and silencing the child may be seen as most sensible in the long run.
While these fears are understandable, none of them are reasons for non-intervention because they all come at the expense of the victim; in fact, they factor out the suffering of the child.
Having someone else in the family as an ally makes a valuable difference in these situations because it means mothers do not have to deal with the abuse in isolation and make difficult decisions alone. More importantly, if their support in the aftermath of the abuse is not forthcoming or wanes, the victim is not left to fend for herself because she has no one else to turn to. Allies need not only be female members of the family. They should also include non-abusive husbands, fathers, brothers or male cousins because when it comes to incestuous sexual abuse, there are no innocent bystanders.
In Whose Interest?
Wanting to intervene does not always translate into actual intervention. Actual intervention does not necessarily mean safe, effective or successful intervention. Experts on child abuse intervention agree that informed and strategic intervention is critical if the results are to be in the best interest of the child. However, in situations of incestuous sexual abuse, the best interest of the child is not always in the best interest of the family, including non-offending family members.
For instance, trusted male allies in South Asian families have frequently reneged on their responsibilities when otherwise close relationships are threatened or in danger of ending. Male family elders have withheld support from women interventionists to protect the status of the perpetrator within the family, even when he admits to the abuse. Some male interventionists with the best of intentions have deployed their male privilege in ways that ended up disempowering the mother and the abuse victim. Others have ganged up with the perpetrator against the non-offending female guardian because they rejected her accusation that the perpetrator was capable of committing sexual abuse against a child, let alone someone within the family?3
On the other hand, many South Asian mothers and grandmothers do support their children and intervene when there is abuse. But a significant number also do not. Some of the mothers do not believe their children. Some are more willing to abandon their daughters than lose the relationship with the perpetrator and the benefits that the relationship provides. Others attribute the perpetrator's abuse to the victim's behavior - "You seduced him." They are more likely to intervene if the child is close to or at the age of puberty because of the risk of pregnancy - which will draw attention to the abuse and the perpetrator, and ruin the daughter's reputation and that of the family. Mothers may also be more willing to rescue a daughter if she is a small child because they see her as being more helpless and therefore "more innocent."4
The older the victim and the longer the abuse lasts, even if the abuse began when the child was very young, the greater the chances that the child will be accused of letting the abuse happen or letting it continue. Most people also tend to ascribe equal responsibility for sexual abuse if the victim is an adolescent or teenaged girl (as opposed to someone under 10) because they assume that an older child "should know better," "should know it's wrong and therefore been more willing to resist the perpetrator and stop the abuse." Why would a 12 or 15 year-old girl feel any less vulnerable or terrified than a younger child? Age alone does not automatically confer power on children if conditions in a home erode their self-confidence and self-worth. More importantly, why would a perpetrator employ any less intimidating and brainwashing techniques to silence, guilt-trip and over-power an older girl? If anything, the pressure by the perpetrator to ensure silence would be greater. In addition, an older child feels more shame and self-blame - she is after all coming to terms with her own sexuality and the changes in her body. To expect a child to protect herself when she does not have the wherewithal to do so is a way for the adults in her world to escape responsibility and deny accountability. As one South Asian incest survivor recalls in The Children We Sacrifice video:
My mother grew up with a mother who became widowed at a very early age. And in India, her mother had to rely on her brothers to give her housing and shelter and protection. So my own grandmother didn't treat my mother very well. I think my mother grew up with a sense that girls are worthless, that we can't do anything and she always treated my brothers better than me and she always gave them more love and affection than me. So I never felt that I could even talk to my mother about anything. Also in our culture, older brothers are revered. They are the ones that are supposed to protect you. We have this ritual in August called Rakhi in which sisters tie a rakhi, a thread, around the brother's wrist. This means that brothers are supposed to protect us. So my brother was supposed to protect me. And when I think back and I think if it had been an uncle or a teacher, or a male cousin, maybe I would have been able to say something, but because it was my brother [who sexually abused me], there was no way I could talk about it. No way at all.5
It Happened To Me And I'll Never Let It Happen To You
Some South Asian mothers who exposed sexual abuse and confronted those who violated their children have had the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrators exposed and punished. But others have been villainized. For instance, judges have accused mothers of fabricating lies against their husbands in divorce and custody cases. In Sri Lanka, a husband battered his wife to death when she tried to prevent him from sexually abusing their daughter.6 If the System does not protect women who do intervene, should we demand that they do so anyway?
Similarly, if the culture, the community, and families, whether here in North America or in South Asia, fail to make it safe for women to intervene, can we expect them to do so? If we don't make it possible for women to talk about their own abuse, can they understand how this can also happen to their own children? Will they necessarily grow up knowing how to protect and comfort their own children? Will they want to re-visit the horror of their own betrayal, even if it means betraying their own children?
Still, there is a powerful argument to be made about traumatized individuals who never want someone else to go through what they were put through. They promise to protect their children from abuse precisely because they themselves were not protected from it. They defy efforts to silence their children because they understand firsthand how silence compounds the abuse and results in a punishing isolation. It is as if the experience of childhood sexual abuse helps survivors develop a voice inside them that vehemently says, "I will never put someone else through this, especially a child. I will not turn away from those who have no power to rescue themselves."
The Strongest Links
There is a fundamental issue of integrity and courage when it comes to finding a balance between placing the onus of protection solely on mothers and not excusing mothers for failing to protect after abuse is revealed. Yasmin Tambiah, a Sri Lankan feminist and a survivor of incestuous sexual abuse, says:
I refuse to believe that women are purely victims in a society that carries out systematic violence against women. If a child has had the good fortune, even if she has been sexually abused, to have a mother to intervene on her behalf, and the mother says, I don't care what society thinks about me, this is my child and I will protect her or intervene in the best way I can, in some ways that child grows up stronger and I think both mother and child gain each other as allies. What happens is that we're often so split from our mothers for a number of reasons including the fact that our mothers want to look good in society and are willing to sacrifice us to do that.7
But another incest survivor in India, who is herself a mother notes:
The rationale is that a woman has to bear everything that happens to her and the more she bears, the stronger she becomes. So if that's the rationale that you grow up with, then you just put up with it, you don't speak up because it's a part of being a woman. And you teach that to your daughter because it's a part of your upbringing and it's something you pass on…If the daughter were to ever insist that her mother do something about the abuse happening to her, the mother would be so scared that the daughter would disrupt the peace she has worked so hard to establish. She would be angry with the daughter and ask her to keep quiet about it.8
In a survey of five major Indian cities, 36 percent of college-age women said they had told about being sexually abused by someone in their family. Of this group, 26 percent told their mothers and 12 percent told a sister. Only nine percent told both parents. These statistics suggest that South Asian women are most often the receivers of disclosure. They are the ones in whom victims and survivors most often confide.9 If we, as activists, are working to increase women's agency, this agency should also be about women protecting those less powerful than them, such as children -- whether or not the children they protect are biologically their own. So, yes, we need to get more men to take on the responsibility of incest intervention but in trying to bring about changes in men, we cannot ignore or downplay the need for changes in women, including mothers who do not try in any way to stop the abuse.
Examples Of Interventions
Too often the media and entertainment industries are overly fascinated with mothers who neglect and abandon or are too powerless to intervene. What we need are more stories about mothers who have intervened. These stories may be about simple interventions or harrowing ones, interventions carried out by one person or a cluster of people within a nuclear or extended family.
The following examples of intervention are not necessarily grand acts of courage but they are inspiring. These were interventions that did not involve openly confronting the perpetrator or publicly exposing the abuse. But they did protect the children.
A mother in India, who found out that her husband was molesting their two young daughters, installed a lock on the inside of the bedroom door and asked the girls to keep the key. She also made sure that her husband was never alone with the daughters. Although locking bedroom doors is not customary in South Asia, in this case, the woman was able to communicate to her husband what she knew without actually verbalizing it.10
Two older sisters who realized that their widowed father was abusing their younger sister devised a plan to create a commotion every night on the pretense that something was scaring them. Soon after the father stopped having his youngest daughter sleep in the room with him.11
Manel Kumari, a mother in rural Sri Lanka refused to let the police bully her into withdrawing charges against the family friend who raped her daughter. She and her husband, both farmers from a poor family, sought medical attention, took their daughter to the police station, and filed a complaint. When the police pressured Manel to settle the case out of court, she responded:
This is not about land or property. He has damaged my daughter's life. I want to go to court. I want to file a case. The most suitable punishment is life imprisonment.12
Considering the stigma associated with rape, this mother defied the risks to herself and her family. And considering that she came from a village setting where everyone knows everyone, she and her husband defied the fear of publicity that a court trial would generate.
Across South Asia, in extended families or joint family gatherings that involve sleepovers, women sometimes organize sleeping arrangements so that the girl children and single women are not within easy access to known perpetrators in the family circles. Old women often act as buffers between suspected child molesters and potential victims.
Numerous women household workers have thwarted sexual abuse of children in the families they work for by finding ways to keep the children away from those they suspect to be perpetrators -- such as male household workers, neighbors, or even male relatives of the family. They sometimes do this despite the power differential between a servant and a family member or family friend.13
Intervention By Extended Family
Sehba, a Muslim incest survivor from Delhi, India describes how she looked out for the children in her extended family, something that many parents choose not to do because they only want to protect "what's theirs." As she explains:
I tell my cousins who have daughters to keep their daughters away from the men in the family I know are abusers. There are tricky situations, like one guy I know as an abuser, his younger brother has two daughters and they are very close, obviously, to their elder brother's family. And I realized that it was not safe for those two girls to go out with him for outings and picnics. I spoke to the mother. I told her that I was abused by this uncle and this cousin and to keep her daughters away from these two men. She did that.14
An aunt in a middleclass Hindu family in Madras, India intervened when she discovered that her niece was being fondled by one of the brothers-in-law, living in their household. According to the activist who tells the story:
The niece made the aunt promise not to tell anyone because she was afraid of getting into trouble. So she honored the niece's request but the next day, when everyone was at home, she said in a loud voice, 'I know that someone in this house is doing something he is not supposed to. If I find out that he is bothering any of the children in this family again, I will catch him and beat him up.' She made this proclamation to no one in particular but whoever was the abuser heard it loud and clear, and the abuse stopped. This aunt intervened on behalf of her niece, and she did it in such a way that sent a message to the perpetrator that his secret activity would be exposed and something bad would happen to him if he continued doing what he was doing. She was a very fierce woman and maybe that's why she did what she did. But it worked.15
Incest Perpetrators Are Our Own
Most children, even when they try, do not have the power to stop incestuous sexual abuse. If they tell someone, the telling is meaningless when they are not believed, nothing is done, or the intervention is ineffective. Those who commit incestuous sexual abuse understand this very well. They count on it.
Two assurances can help make a difference. First, potential victims and potential perpetrators of incestuous sexual abuse need to know that there are women and men in their families who will fight to protect and defend the children in their circles from ever being abused. Second, victims and perpetrators need to have a clear sense that there are adults who will do whatever it takes to stop the abuse from happening again.
As difficult as it might be to accept that children in South Asian families are being sexually abused by those they love and trust, it is a fact. It happens. And it happens as much as it happens in all other communities -- which means, there are many more victims than we know about and many more perpetrators than we care to acknowledge. Remember the African adage that has become so popular among Americans, that it takes a village to raise a child? In fact, it also takes a village to raise a perpetrator of incestuous sexual abuse. Those who perpetrate incestuous sexual abuse are not strangers, they are our own. They live with our families, sit at the dinner table, come to family functions, play with our children, work in our homes, visit frequently. So it will not only take a village to protect a child and assist its victims, but also, to detect, intervene, prevent so that perpetrators do not have as many opportunities to deceive and violate.
ENDNOTES
1 These comments are based on interviews with incest survivors in India, Sri Lanka, Canada and the United States.
2 Interviews with Anita Ratnam, Bangalore, India and Sunila Abeyesekera, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
3 The Children We Sacrifice video documentary, Grace Poore, SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000. For more information, contact: www.shaktiproductions.net or shaktivideo @ gmail.com.
4 Interviews with grassroots activists and NGO field staff in Sri Lanka and India, as well as incest survivors in Canada.
5 The Children We Sacrifice video documentary.
6 Based on archival research of English language newspapers at Inform, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
7 The Children We Sacrifice video documentary.
8 "What Would I Say When I Don't Have The Words For It?" Grace Poore, The Children We Sacrifice: A Resource Book, p. 50, Silver Spring: SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000.
9 The RAHI Findings: Voices From The Silent Zone: Women's Experiences of Incest And Childhood Sexual Abuse, New Delhi: RAHI, 1999.
10 Interview with grassroots activists and staff of Samvada, Bangalore, India.
11 Ibid.
12 The Children We Sacrifice video documentary, SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000.
13 Interview with immigrant woman from India, now living in the United States.
14 The Children We Sacrifice video documentary, SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000.
15 "What Would I Say When I Don't Have The Words For It?" Grace Poore, The Children We Sacrifice: A Resource Book, p. 60, Silver Spring: SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000.
Top of Page