abused by a parent to confront the offending parent. Therapists can argue the pros and cons of this method and never come to a conclusion, but the immediate effect of this method was that the client’s family was thrown into turmoil. Jack’s story, which I shall recount later on, tells of a family who accepted the truth of one such revelation. Other families did not, and ferocious battles in and out of the law courts followed. In the USA, where every problem in life is turned into a medical condition, False Memory Syndrome was discovered. Whole forests of trees were sacrificed as arguments raged between those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely true and those who said that all accusations of sexual abuse were completely false. Quiet voices of reason were lost in the clamour.
Eventually the dust settled and quiet voices of reason can now be heard saying that stories of sexual abuse in childhood may come from three sources:
1 Where the person has always clearly remembered the events of sexual abuse.
2 Where the person repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood but certain events in later life triggered recall of these memories.
3 Where the person had not been sexually abused by the parent but in other ways had been hurt by the parent, thus leading them to harbour a deep hatred and a need for revenge on the parent.
With sources two and three it is safe to assume that the person has suffered such a threat to their sense of being a person that a desperate defence, that of massive repression or a passion for revenge, is seen as necessary. When the person clearly remembers the abuse it can be that as a child they found the abuse extremely threatening and shameful. As an adult the person still feels besmirched, guilty and worthless. Or it may be that the person as a child did not find the actions of the abusive adult personally threatening. The child may merely have been intrigued with what went on, in the way that children can be intrigued by strange or bizarre scenes which an adult might find unpleasant, even revolting. As an adult I do not want to see any living thing killed, but as a child I would not miss seeing my father dispatch a chicken with an axe and proceed to pluck and eviscerate it. Or it may be that, for the child, the abuse brings comfort and pleasure, as the story of Jack will show, but this reaction can have the unhappy outcome that the child identifies with the abuser and goes on to become an abuser himself. Often the damage that is done to a child comes not from the actual abuse but from the behaviour of adults when they discover the abuse. The child may discover that adults see him as damaged or dirty, or as being responsible for the abuse. I was not sexually abused as a child, but, when I was fourteen, a man inveigled me into witnessing him exposing himself. I was amazed and somewhat disconcerted, because in our prudish household penises were certainly not on view, but not for a moment did I consider telling my mother about this event. I knew full well that she would blame me for what had happened. I should not have been on my bicycle, on that road, coming straight home from a swim on a hot Saturday afternoon. If I were not such a bad child this event would not have happened.
These three possible sources of the accounts of sexual abuse seem straightforward, but the stumbling block is a clear and agreed definition of sexual abuse. Some of the fathers accused of sexual abuse by their daughters insisted that they were lying and defined sexual abuse as sexual penetration. They would have agreed with Bill Clinton’s assertion that he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. However, all women know that there is more to sex than penetration. For a girl, a father’s lewd comments about her developing bosom or her sexual potential, or the father’s refusal to recognize the boundaries a girl creates to maintain her privacy, can seem to the girl as threatening and dangerous as a full sexual onslaught. A girl can clearly distinguish the warm, loving, sexual gaze of a man who accepts her as the person she is from the hard, sexual, threatening gaze of a man who sees her as an available sexual object. To women the first gaze is delightful; the second terrifying.
It was this second kind of gaze on the part of the father of a fourteen-year-old girl which made me certain that there was something seriously amiss in the family of this girl, who had been brought halfway across Britain to be a research patient in the psychiatric unit where I was working. This happened thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, when psychiatrists were completely convinced that there were such things as mental illnesses, and that these illnesses had a physical cause. My psychiatrist colleagues were researching what was called the biological basis of mood change, and this young girl, Karen, was deemed to be a suitable patient for a physiological study.
At that early stage in my career I was prepared to accept the psychiatric theories of mania and depression, and so I took part in the research by being a proper psychologist who administered tests. Karen seemed to exhibit only one mood, that of terrified shyness, but she submitted patiently to my demands and to those of the psychiatrists who were measuring certain physiological changes.
Karen’s degree of shyness suggested that she was frightened to do anything in case she made a mistake and displeased someone. This came out clearly in my tests, during which, if she made a response at all, it was guarded and extremely limited to the point of seeming childish, far below the level of intellect and maturity she had shown before she became ill. However, as the weeks went by, she gradually relaxed, though she remained shy, and this relaxation was reflected in her test responses, which became more able, various and creative.
There were a number of young patients in the unit, and I took it upon myself to try to make their time with us more interesting. The unit, an old house set in large grounds, was reasonably pleasant and comfortable, infinitely better than the traditional asylum where Karen had first been incarcerated, but there was little for patients to do except sit in the dayroom or carry out a few very simple tasks in occupational therapy. I helped to bring the young patients together so they could get to know one another, and occasionally we went for walks or into town to shop and to go to the cinema.
When I worked in Sydney as an educational psychologist, the only office I had was my car. I worked in schools and often visited a child’s family at home. This I found invaluable, because it allowed me to discover aspects of the child’s life which the family either kept secret or simply did not think to mention to me. Accordingly, though I had met Karen’s parents when they came to visit her, I wanted to see the family home.
Karen’s parents made me welcome. Her mother was quiet and undemonstrative, not given to hugging or kissing her daughter. Her father was much more lively and demonstrative. I felt that the parents had secrets, but it was not until one particular visit, when I was getting into the father’s van while he stood holding the door, that I had a clue as to what these secrets might be. I glanced up and saw him looking at me. He did not look away. He wanted me to see him looking at me with a searing sexual gaze that was both a threat and an invitation. Now I knew that the family secrets were, in part at least, sexual.
My psychiatrist colleagues did not think that my concerns about the family were in any way significant. Months passed. Karen started at a school close to the unit. She studied successfully and fitted into the school routine. Her physiological tests showed nothing of significance and so, eventually, she went home.
Karen and I kept in touch by cards and letters. Thirty years went by. Every Christmas she sent me a card and a letter with a summary of her year’s events. She left school, got a job, met and married a fine man. She continued working and had children who did well academically. We met socially sometimes when I was in her part of the UK, but it was not until after her father died that she phoned me and asked whether she could talk to me. Over the years she had suffered periods of depression, but she and her husband had learned to recognize the danger signs and deal with it effectively. Now, however, what was happening was different.
Karen remembered remarkably little of her childhood, and she did not speculate about the significance of what she did remember. She had not linked one memory of her father forcing her to eat baked beans with the fact that her choice of diet was extremely limited and not based on any theory of nutrition. There was a wide range of ordinary foods she could not bring herself to eat, just as she could not possibly eat baked beans.
Karen had a similar problem with sex. She loved her husband and she wanted to respond fully to him, but, while she could approach him with passion, at the critical moment she would pull back, frightened and not knowing why she was afraid. It seemed that from early childhood