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Newsweek
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The Pain Of The Last Taboo
For Many Survivors Of Incest, Struggling With Suppressed Memories Is The Hardest Battle Of All
Nina Darnton
NEWSWEEK

My name is Roseanne and I am an incest survivor. That is the nasty little secret that has taken all my energy and all my courage to keep." More than 1,000 survivors of childhood sexual trauma crowded into Denver's Montview Presbyterian Church to listen to the shaky, tearful testimony that echoed thousands of anonymous confessions in therapy sessions around the country. As anyone with a TV set now knows, this speaker was anything but anonymous. She was Roseanne Arnold, formerly Roseanne Barr, the TV celebrity who had just adopted her husband's name in a rejection of her allegedly abusive family.

It's easy to be cynical about the spectacle of celebrities stepping forward to confess the most excruciating details of their private lives. The American public is at least as interested in titillation as being "helped" by such confessions. Even so, the claims of childhood sexual abuse by Roseanne Arnold, Oprah Winfrey, La Toya Jackson, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Atler and others amount to more than just fresh perversion for the tabloids. They are among thousands of people only now confronting a searing childhood pain-abuse inflicted not by strangers (or kids playing doctor) but by parents and older relatives. Experts caution that some of these stories are delusions. Still, by any standard, breaking the ancient taboo against incest is now recognized as a fact of life across America.

Among recent autobiographies coming to bitter terms with the problem is "Dancing With Daddy," in which writer and Harvard graduate Betsy Petersen accuses her now deceased father, a respected doctor, of having sexually abused her from the time she was 3 1/2 until she was 18. In June, Mount Holyoke professor Carolivia Herron published "Thereafter Johnnie," a novel she claims was based on her own shocking experiences of rape by a male relative when she was 3. He vehemently denies the charges, calling Herron "crazy as a bat."

Statistics on incest are hard to come by. Most studies lump incest in with all sexual-abuse cases, whether committed by an adult family member or not. But because childhood sexual abuse generally does take place within families, the figures suggest how widespread the problem is. Most researchers agree that the best available figures on sexual abuse come from a national survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted in 1985 for the Los Angeles Times by psychologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues. The scientists found that 27 percent of the women and 16 percent of the men disclosed a history of some kind of sexual abuse during their childhood. (Sexual abuse by an adult is defined as the touching, rubbing or penetrating of genitals.) Even discounting contact with nonrelatives and nonsiblings, this is still a startling number of children victimized.

The number of incestuous sexual-abuse cases is either growing rapidly or being reported more often-probably both. In 1986, all of the nation's child protective agencies recorded 83,000 complaints against people responsible for the child's welfare. By 1990, the number had leapt to 375,000. Because many cases of abuse still go unreported, the actual number of victims--who come from all social classes, races and religions--is probably much higher. Whether it reaches the one in five Americans suggested by the Finkelhor study is pure conjecture.

In any event, incest survivors say that as long as they keep quiet, their numbers will increase. "This is a disease that can only thrive in silence," Arnold told NEWSWEEK. "I have a social and moral obligation to speak out." Arnold's story-and the manner in which it first surfaced in her conscious mind--is typical of many such cases. Two years ago, she says, her husband, Tom Arnold, phoned her from his drug treatment-rehabilitation program and told her that he had been sexually abused by a babysitter when he was a child. After she hung up the phone, Arnold says, she began to shake and sweat. "I started to see little scenes or pictures," she says. "Little flicks of memory. And then they kept coming and getting bigger and bigger. I knew I had been physically and emotionally abused and I spoke of it often. But I didn't remember the sexual part until two years ago, when my head burst open. It was like bad memories times 10." Her father, she alleges, told her to play with his penis in the bathtub. (He could not be reached for comment.) "I repressed it for 36 years," she says.

The sudden recovery of traumatic memory is common to incest survivors--and controversial among mental-health professionals. Victims' families often deny the charges and claim the accusers are delusional. Historically, that viewpoint was inadvertently buttressed by Sigmund Freud, who at first believed his women patients when they told him of incestuous assaults, but later theorized that some of the stories were fantasies based on the accuser's Oedipal desires for her father. Contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists aren't so sure. "There is a real phenomenon of recovering the lost memory of sexual abuse," says child psychiatrist Elissa Benedek, a professor at the University of Michigan.

Stirrings, flickers:

Most often, the child forgets because remembering is simply too painful. "You have to make up a fantasy world you live in and you need it to survive," says Van Derbur Atler, who went public last May with stories of abuse by her now deceased father. Later, often between the ages of 29 and 59, the memories start to come back--not all at once, but slowly, little by little. Survivors describe the process as stirrings, flickers, a sense of something rising from deep within the self.

But how does the recovery mechanism work? According to Dr. Stephen Herman, a child-and-adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale Child Studies Center, "A small part [of memory] that was dissociated or split off and hidden previously suddenly comes into consciousness because it is triggered by something." The trigger can be a dream, hypnosis or therapy. The survivor might have entered a relationship which calls forth strong emotions, or have a child who reaches puberty and suddenly, without warning, the memory materializes. The process is agonizing and the survivors describe themselves as filled with self-doubt. "Voices in my head say you're making this up," says Roseanne Arnold. "Maybe you took everything the wrong way. Maybe you imagined it. Maybe you're just making it up for attention."

Some people believe that those fears are justified. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington, an expert on memory, has seen the agony of parents who claim that their disturbed children are making false accusations. Loftus testified for the defense in the recent California case of George Franklin, who was convicted of murdering his daughter's playmate when, 20 years after the fact, his daughter claimed she suddenly remembered the crime. Loftus believes memories are often the result of imagination or suggestion. "My research has been about false memories," she says. "I can implant false memories into the minds of people in the laboratory and they will believe the memory is real."

The memories Loftus tinkers with, however, are unimportant details-not emotional traumas. She shows subjects pictures of an intersection with a YIELD sign, for example, and then, by distracting them with suggestive questions, makes them remember that what they saw was a STOP sign. Still, Loftus believes many people unconsciously use the "memory" of abuse to explain painful symptoms they don't understand.

Upside down:

Of course, retrieved memory is not the only way that therapists diagnose sexual abuse. They look also for clusters of symptoms; victims often have difficulty with intimacy and sexual enjoyment. A child abused by a trusted adult has his or her whole world turned upside down. Wrote Petersen in "Dancing With Daddy": "I am certain that if I sleep, my father will come and violate me, like the spider in my childhood fantasies. He has ceased to exist, but he will come after me and he will get me and there will be nothing I can do to stop him. My borders are not secure: He is within."

The confusion is often worsened by the fact that the abused child may feel pleasure, but knows it is forbidden. "The child feels guilty, so pleasure doesn't feel good-it feels humiliating," says writer Laura Davis, who co-wrote "The Courage to Heal," a 1988 best-selling handbook for survival based on interviews with more than 200 victims. "Being aroused is linked with shame, anger and confusion."

Whether memories are real or imagined becomes crucial when the issue is brought to the courts. Until 1988, in most states, the statute of limitations for sexual abuse in civil suits was three years after the child reached maturity-usually at the age of 21. Since memory of the abuse often didn't return until many years later, most cases never went to court. Kelly and Patti Barton of Seattle, Wash., helped to change all that. Patti, who claims she was molested by her father, wanted to sue him to help pay for the therapy she needed to repair her marriage. But she remembered the alleged abuse when she was in late to sue under Washington law. With the help of lawyer Barbara Levy, the Bartons lobbied to extend the statute of limitations. In 1988, the legislation passed; Washington became the first state to allow victims to bring suit for up to three years after the memory returns. That same year, Patti's father, who denies the charges of abuse, moved to Alaska-where the laws were similar to Washington's before the change. But the Bartons helped introduce new legislation there, too. Now, 14 states have passed similar laws.

"Secret shame':

Of course, in some cases the memories never recede. Oprah Winfrey claims she was raped on several occasions during her childhood by more than one relative and a family friend. "I've always known," she told NEWSWEEK. "I'm not one of the people who had it repressed. It was my secret shame." Still, she told no one until 1985. In the midst of interviewing an incest survivor on her show, she says she found herself saying, "Well, this same thing happened to me. I had no idea of the impact or the power of that statement," she says. "I had no idea that years later, everywhere I went, women would come up to me. I've been crossing the street in downtown Chicago and have had women come up to me and whisper, "Can I talk to you about something?' I always know it's about that."

One of the hardest aspects for outsiders to understand is the love that victims often feel for their abusers, even after their memories return. Jim Fereira, a 33-year-old psychotherapist from Boston, claims he was abused by his father, a factory foreman, from the age of 5 until 18. He says his father, who is now dead, was silent and cold during the day and had no relationship with him. "The sex was both like affection and violation," he says. "As a child, you're grateful for what you can get. " Writer Laura Davis, who claims she was abused by her maternal grandfather for years, repressed the pain so thoroughly that she wrote a glowing eulogy for him when he died. Seven years later, after she had remembered, she sat down and rewrote that eulogy. It began: "There's a few things I forgot to say about my grandfather."

Incest survivors say they will fight back with the weapon they believe abusers fear most: exposure. "We must say to every member of our society, 'If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will one day speak your name'," Van Derbur Atler told fellow victims of abuse in a memorable speech last year. "'They will speak every ... single ... name'." If incest survivors have their way, there will be no more forgetting.

Getting Help

Incest victims can become survivors. If your family is affected, here are the first steps.

Hot Lines

For victims: 800-4224453 Child Help National Child Abuse Hot Line For abusers: 802-897-7541 Safer Society Program

Self-Help Books

"The Courage to Heal," Ellen Bass/ Laura Davis, Harper & Row, 1988 "Adults Molested As Children: A Survivor's Manual For Women and Men," Safer Society Press, 1988 "Allies in Healing," Laura Davis, Harper & Row, 1991

KAREN SPRINGEN, LYNDA WRIGHT and SHERRY KEENE-OSBORN
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/127093

© 1991

 

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