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

If you tell, I'll go to jail and you'll starve.
If you tell, they'll give you to someone who will really hurt you.
If you tell, you'll go to hell.
If you tell, I won't love you anymore.
Many abusers make good on their threats, but most don't need to. "Small creatures deal
with overwhelming threat by freezing, pretending to be asleep, and playing possum,"
says Dr. Roland Summit, the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist who, in a paper
titled "The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome," sets forth a widely
accepted explanation of how children behave when molested.
The classic paradigm for an incestuous union is between an older male (father or
stepfather or grandfather or uncle) and a younger female. The male is pictured as
seduced by a conniving and sexually precocious child who wants sex, power, and
presents. Or he is seen as a snaggle-toothed tree dweller with an IQ below freezing
who rapes his daughter because she is female, his, and nearer to hand than a cow. Yet
Massachusetts therapist Mike Lew, author of Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from
Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse, told me that as many as 50 percent of victims
may be boys. As therapist Karin C. Meiselman, Ph.D., writes in Resolving the Trauma of
Incest, "The fact that many males are abused as children and adolescents is only
beginning to receive adequate professional attention."
Difficult as it is for girls to talk about their abuse, it is even harder for boys. Boys are
taught that they must be strong and self-reliant. For a boy to report that he was abused,
he must admit weakness and victimization. If he was molested by a male, he will fear
that this has made him homosexual.
Then, too, many boys simply don't know they have been abused. Deborah Tannen,
Ph.D., professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author most recently of You
Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, suggests that girls and boys
are raised in different cultures. The world expects one set of behaviors and attitudes
from girls and another, quite different set from boys.
We teach girls to avoid sex, to wait, and to protect themselves. We teach them that men
are not allowed to do certain things to them. But we teach boys that any sex—any
heterosexual sex—is good, the earlier the better. We tell them they "scored," they "got
lucky." But consider the impact when a boy "gets lucky" with his mother.
Michael and Lisa
"My first really clear memory," says Michael Smith, 30, "is of my mother performing oral
sex on me. I was seven. My parents would make me watch them have sex before or
after my mother had oral sex with me."
Ralph Smith, the family patriarch, is now 65 years old. His wife, Betty, is 58. They are
gray-haired, churchgoing, God-fearing people whose eight children range in age from
20 to 40. The Smiths say they tried to give their kids a good childhood.
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