ABSTRACT
Incest carries a dynamic apart from sexual abuse committed by a non-blood relative and quite unlike that wrought by a stranger. Strangers are untested and untrusted. Their betrayal is explicable more easily than betrayal by those charged to care for the child. Everyone is dismayed when a stranger assaults a child, but when a family member commits sexual abuse the injustice is unparalleled, and that is not lost on children. It leaves them more puzzled and angry than any other form of mistreatment. With all the prospects for sexual outlet in our modern world, how can a parent transform a child into a sexual object acting from the basest of impulses? How can parents betray their own progeny? Worse, the “why question” that so haunts all victims of sexual abuse is especially difficult for incest survivors as they ponder not only their own shame, but that of their own birthparent. Considering for themselves that they were born from one so evil or sick, they may question the propriety of their very existence, or as the client who wrote the opening passage put it, “if my father is a pervert, what…who does that make me?”
