Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

Once I broke a bone in my foot. It healed, but sometimes it aches. When I broke that
bone, I thought about it all the time. Now I almost never do. Only if I go back to the
place where I got hurt. Or if I put a certain kind of stress on the bone. Or, sometimes, on
gray days. There were times when I thought about my abuse every day, all day. And
dreamed about it at night. But I rarely think about it anymore. For the purposes of this
article I'll speak about it for a while. Then I'll go on to something else.
Healing from incest is possible: Victims become survivors. Those of us who were
kidnapped in our childhood and carried into darkness have the opportunity to transcend
and transform that experience, to know love in its most sinister forms as well as in its
finest, and to have the power of that knowledge. But while it is possible to survive and
even to triumph over incest, it is a destructive and infectious crime for which we all pay
emotionally, financially, and spiritually. It affects more of us than cancer, more of us
than heart disease, more of us than AIDS.
We must look at incest for what it really is, not what we fear it might be or wish it were.
Incest is a crime committed by adults against children, by the strong against the weak.
Incest is not a crime determined by gender. To really understand incest and to help end
it, we must allow ourselves to see that women as well as men abuse. That women
probably abuse as often as men and for the same reasons—because as children they
were sexually abused themselves. We must acknowledge women as the sexual equals
of men—down to the darkest impulse and act. Men must learn to recognize their own
victimization—equal, in this instance, to women's. We must learn that the consequences
of child sexual abuse damage everyone, male and female, adult and child.
We need to do more than survive incest. We need to stop it.
Heidi Vanderbilt is an award-winning writer who lives in New England.
CASE STUDIES
Rikki and Nick
Rikki and Nick's parents were members of a satanic cult. The children were sexually abused and
tortured. When the parents left the cult, they got their children into therapy. Rikki is three. Nick
is four. Both have full-blown multiple personality disorders.
Lauren
Lauren was five when she told her mother that a family friend who often took care of her had
"fooled" with her. Her mother was relieved when the doctors found no physical evidence of
sexual abuse. She wondered if her daughter's story was true. Then Lauren told her mother that
the friend had taken photos of her. The photos were found; they revealed that Lauren had been
raped and sodomized over a period of more than a year.
Sharon
Sharon's mother masturbated her to sleep from the time she was born. As Sharon grew older, her
mother would sometimes stare at her for long periods. "I love you too much," she would, repeat,
over and over. Now 44, Sharon says, "I still don't know where my mother ends and I begin.
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