and financial assistance were discouraged. It was considered shameful to seek help from charities and charities in turn were accused of encouraging the morally deficient to relapse into idleness. While social welfare department annual reports gave the impression that management knew what was needed for healthy child development, there was little acknowledgement of a collective responsibility for assisting children in impoverished circumstances. The solution was to place them in vast institutions to be cared for by a succession of untrained or minimally trained workers. This practice continued into the early 1980s, more than a quarter of a century after John Bowlby (1951) and the World Health Organisation drew attention to the long-term damaging effects of the institutionalisation of children and the need for consistent, safe, affectionate care86. The message was vividly brought to Australia by Drs James and Joyce Robertson who recorded on film the responses of children entering group care, foster care and hospitals87. Their messages relating to children’s emotional needs, attachment, bonding, security and preparation for change were taken on board by hospitals but appear to have been largely ignored by Family Courts and those responsible for children in foster care.
Dickey et al. (1986) confirmed that, in the meantime, although the Department gave lip-service to the importance of training for child welfare workers, the preferred qualification for children’s social workers in South Australia was membership of a centrally situated protestant church.
American research initiatives
Dr. Murray A. Straus founded the Family Violence Research Laboratory in 1975 at the University of New Hampshire at Durham. This unique centre gained international recognition for its seminal research into family violence. In the 1980s, Straus’ colleague, Dr. David Finkelhor, became co-director of Family Research and Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Centre which investigated and published findings on child sexual abuse. The University of New Hampshire takes a holistic view of family life, violence and abuse, including the physical, sexual and psychological abuse and physical punishment of children; domestic violence; intra-familial homicide; sibling and peer victimisation; pornography and missing and abducted children.
The introduction of Rape Crisis Centres
American rape crisis centres were established from 1972 in cities where women were politically active. Phone-ins were held to encourage victims to expose their abusive experiences and results were publicised. As more and more women broke their silence, a grassroots movement took shape with influential middle-class women taking part in political activism.
State-funded centres opened in Australia. They too held phone-ins which, for the very first time, exposed the extent of father-daughter incest. While it was helpful to publicise the size the problem, the emphasis on female victims was unhelpful in the longer term. Rape Crisis Centres had notices on doors that banned men from entering the premises. This confirmed the myth that only females were victims and only men were abusers. Unfortunately, men didn’t protest and say, “Hold on! Boys are victims too”. The only male voices heard were those labeIling the activists as lesbian man-hating feminists whose aim was to destroy the patriarchal family. It was not until 1993 that there was a phone-in for abused men in Western Australia. This confirmed that the abusers of boys were mostly men but one-third of caIlers reported being molested by females.
The early rape crisis centres were significantly different from their counterparts today. The first centres were mutual support collectives of survivors, sometimes assisted by counsellors. Many sought social change and saw their anti-rape work as political. The first abuse prevention and empowerment programmes were written and provided for rape victims. Changes occurred slowly. A major change was that sex abuse victims were no longer examined by (predominantly male) police surgeons in police stations; hospitals opened specialist sexual assault units staffed by both male and female doctors.
Male dominance and incest
Incest is when a parent, grandparent or sibling uses a child or sibling for sex. Incest is a serious crime throughout western society because it constitutes the worst possible breach of trust, role reversal (where the child has to keep the secret to protect the parent and family instead of the child being protected). If sexual abuse results in pregnancy, there is a high risk that the baby will be born dead or with disabilities.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the frequency of incest was exposed then suppressed several times. The truth appears to have been too threatening for a dominant paternalistic male society88. Sigmund Freud learned that many of his wealthy female patients were sexually abused by their highly respected fathers and grandfathers. Initially he accepted this, publishing his findings in 189689. Attacked by professional colleagues, his initial courage was short-lived. Within a year, he shifted the blame to victims, unashamedly presenting a revised explanation that his female patients’ descriptions of abuse were fantasies based on their sexual desires towards their fathers. Although these conclusions were not scientifically based, his opportunity to incriminate daughters instead of fathers provided a great sense of relief. It was much easier to accuse victims of lying than to accept or promote the truth90. Freud’s retraction did child abuse victims incalculable harm because, thereafter, analysts routinely dismissed rape and incest as being “desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual constitution”91.
De Mause (1991) showed that despite its lack of a scientific foundation, psychoanalytic institutes accepted Freud’s revised theory enthusiastically and taught students that memories of incest reflected children’s wishes to have sex with their fathers. They were instructed to look sceptically on incestuous sexual statements made by patients92 and anyone who accepted disclosures as real was scoffed at as professionally naive. Thus incest offenders were protected by the most powerful male health professionals on earth93. Psychiatrists neglected to routinely ask patients about their experiences of abuse until the early 1990s94.
Herman95 noted that the early textbooks on child abuse did not mention sexual abuse and even Helene Deutsch’s massive Psychology of Women (1944) ignored incest. As recently as 1975, an American psychiatry textbook dismissed the frequency of incest as one case in a million. Herman noted that the legacy of Freud’s retraction was so deeply ingrained that, almost a century later, children who dared to report sexual assaults were disbelieved even when there was incontrovertible evidence such as sexually transmitted diseases. They were explained away unscientifically as transmitted by towels, toilet seats and germs on sheets.
When incest was exposed again, it was by social scientists, not medical practitioners. However, both DeMause and Herman found that many of the authors were sexologists who advocated for paedophilia. They accepted that children were sexually abused but denied that it was harmful. Even now, some academics act as crusaders of sexual liberation, promoting paedophilia under the guise of equal rights for children, demanding the removal of laws relating to the age of consent, ignoring the inequality of power, enticements used to trap child victims and the fact that no child can be in control or exercise an informed, free choice when manipulated by authority figures. If adult relatives demand sex, most children will comply.
De Mause96, found that most writers on incest tried to justify the practice by showing its widespread nature97. Wardell Pomeroy, wrote that “incest between adults and younger children can be a satisfying and enriching experience …”98 De Mause found a staggering amount of literature promoting child sexual abuse without mentioning the harmful effects on children.
The Kinsey Reports99 discarded taboos around masturbation, extramarital sex and homosexuality but they minimised the trauma experienced by child sexual abuse victims and assured readers that if children were upset by their experiences, it was not the fault of the abuser but the result of prudish community attitudes. Ignoring issues relating to adult dominance and power, Kinsey took a position that advocated for greater sexual licence for men100.
Two years later, sociologist S. Kirston Weinberg published a scholarly work, Incest Behaviour, based on 203 cases reported to courts and social agencies. There was no public response and the book was soon out of print. The problem was buried again until the late 1970s and early 1980s when women became politically active. Herman quotes studies confirming that up to 97% of incestuous crimes were committed