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

Abuse Sexual Offense Unit of the Montgomery County, Maryland, police department,
writes: " Many police and social service personnel are finding themselves bombarded
with these cases. Yet there are not enough qualified personnel to investigate cases
adequately and deal sensitively with the families and particularly the children who are in
a crisis. "
In all 50 states, incest, whether specifically called so by statute or covered under other
child-sexual-abuse laws, is a felony offense. But its definition varies from state to state,
and so does the punishment. What is consistent is that incest per se is harder to prove.
It also carries fewer and lighter penalties than any other form of sexual abuse, due
largely to the fact that in many states incest laws were conceived not to protect children
but rather to prevent closely related adults from marrying and procreating. In any event,
most incest cases, even in states where an incest statute exists, are tried as child
sexual abuse or rape, charges that are often easier to prove. Assuming these cases get
tried at all.
There are problems from the outset. Many cases never progress beyond the initial complaint,
if they even reach that stage. Children refuse to tell, typically out of loyalty to their
abuser; they remain silent out of love and fear. Those who do tell usually retract. So do
their families. "You find families hiding the abuse, families accepting it, families passing
it on," says Philip Caroom, an official in the Maryland judiciary whose docket includes
child-sex-abuse cases.
Sandra Butler Smith, a municipal court judge in San Joaquin County, California, and
author of Children's Story: Sexually Molested Children in Criminal Court, says that
"adults faced with the disclosure of sexual molestation often find reasons for denying
belief, but more often, even if the child is believed, have difficulty in perceiving of such a
case as a fit subject for a criminal proceeding."
Police investigators and social workers not only must deal with the victim's
unwillingness to talk about what happened but with their own beliefs. "Unfortunately,
extremely competent investigators find allegations of child sexual abuse very difficult to
deal with on a personal level," writes Cage. Just because someone is a cop or a social
worker doesn't automatically mean that he or she is a sensitive questioner, able to earn
and keep the trust of a frightened and abused child or a distraught parent. Nor do these
investigators necessarily know what information is needed, how to get it, or how to
organize it into a cohesive case.
In Manhattan each of the ten family court judges starts the year with 500 to 600
unresolved cases of every kind that are held over from the previous year. About 3,500
new cases then come in. Generally, more than half of these involve physical or sexual
child abuse. "The implications of these figures are profound," Judge Gallet says.
"Nobody can look for quality of disposition, only quantity of caseload." Judges are
worried, even scared. Their decisions, based only on the testimony and evidence
brought before the bench during the presentation of each case, can wrongly convict
someone or can free an offender to abuse again.
I asked Judge Gallet about false allegations of sexual abuse. He said that while he sees
some cases where the charges are trumped up, " a horrifyingly large majority are not. "
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