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

The interior is depressing, monotonous, and confusing. In the six days I spent there, I
never could figure out which floor I was supposed to go to or whether I was already
there. All the corridors look the same: flesh-colored walls, orange and blue seats made
of molded plastic and bolted to one another and to the floor. Drug addicts slump. Babies
scream. Once in a while a fight breaks out. All too often I saw small children with bored,
baffled, or frightened faces.
Manhattan family court is blessed with social workers who care passionately about their
work and the children, with bright and dedicated Legal Aid Society lawyers for those
who need them, and with good judges. Each judge hears thousands of cases every
year, more than half of which have to do with child abuse—including child sexual abuse,
including incest. But even given the high numbers, fewer than 10 percent of the incest
cases ever get to court. One reason is the traumatic nature of the process, which can
involve weeks of agonizing testimony.
Everyone from the victim to the judge wants to avoid a trial if at all possible. To many
critics, it seems that the system is designed to protect the accused, not the accuser.
And this becomes unreasonable, even abusive, when the accuser is a child who must
participate and withstand cross-examination as if an adult. New York Family Court
Judge Jeffry H. Gallet, for one, does all he can to keep children from having to testify. In
his courtroom—or part, as it's known—the child is almost invariably the last witness
scheduled in the hope that the case will have resolved itself before that point.
The agencies that intervene to stop the abuse frequently, if unintentionally, maintain it
instead. And it is the child victims, those most in need of care and consideration, who
receive the worst treatment. A child may be questioned 20 different times by as many
different people in perhaps as many different places—hospital emergency rooms,
attorneys ' offices, police stations, courthouses. The children are exposed to drunks,
criminals, and their own parents in handcuffs. I knew one terrified little boy who had to
wait for hours on a bench in the courthouse hallway, across from his abuser. This
happened to him six times over a period of years.
From the child ' s perspective the process is a nightmare, and it is almost as arduous for
the child's family. Mothers who report that their children have been incestuously abused
are often regarded as unreliable or vindictive, particularly if the accusation comes during
a custody dispute.
Oliver's parents were divorced when he was just one year old. He lived with his mother
in the country and visited his father in the city for holidays. As he grew older it became
evident that Oliver didn't like to visit his father. His mother thought it must be normal
separation anxiety. When he was five, Oliver told her his " butt hurt. " Then he described
to her how his father had anal intercourse with him, shared him with friends, and put him
in pornographic movies. Oliver ' s mother reported all this to the county mental-health
clinic and a social worker was assigned to the case. "I don't know about her, " the social
worker told me later. " She just seems so . . . hysterical. "
Eight years ago child-sexual-abuse cases rarely got to court. Today courts across the
country brim over with them. In Vulnerable Populations: Evaluation and Treatment of
Sexually Abused Children and Adult Survivors, Detective Richard L. Cage of the Child
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