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Grace's Story: Prolonged Incestuous Abuse From Childhood Into Adulthood Michael Salter Violence Against Women 2013 19: 146 originally published online 17 February 2013 DOI: 10.1177/1077801213476459 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/19/2/146

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Grace’s Story: Prolonged Incestuous Abuse From Childhood Into Adulthood

Violence Against Women 19(2) 146–165 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077801213476459 vaw.sagepub.com

Michael Salter1

Abstract Some sexually abused women in mental health settings are reporting prolonged incest and yet little is known about the circumstances that enable fathers to sexually abuse their daughters over a period of decades. This article draws from the life history of Grace, a woman who survived prolonged incest, in order to document and analyze the interplay of familial, social, and political factors that entrap girls and women within prolonged incestuous abuse. Keywords incest, life history

Over the last few years, a number of high-profile cases of prolonged or long-term incestuous abuse have received global media coverage. This trend began in 2008 with the arrest and prosecution of Josef Fritzl of Austria, who held his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, captive in a complex underneath his family home for 24 years. The Fritzl case, with its revelations of incestuous pregnancies, underground confinement and decades of captivity, garnered worldwide media attention and gave heighted salience to other cases of prolonged incestuous abuse. Kitzinger (2000) used the term “media template” to refer to the news frames that form around key events and are applied to subsequent events, homogenizing news reporting and lending a sense of coherence and narrative to coverage of social issues. Prior to the emergence of the Fritzl case, a number of cases involving the abduction and prolonged captivity of girls and young women, such as Natascha Kampusch, Sabine Dardenne, and Laetita Delhez, had come to the attention of the authorities and the global media. However, the Fritzl case introduced a new and sensationalist element to this established media 1

School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW, Australia

Corresponding Author: Michael Salter, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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template in that, unlike previous reports, the victim was the daughter of the perpetrator. The intensity of coverage around the Fritzl case appears to have bought a range of other prolonged incest cases to the forefront of media attention, with a growing list of men labeled “Fritzl” perpetrators spanning Columbia, Italy, Poland, Australia, Argentina, Croatia, Britain, and Germany. Prior to the Fritzl case, the substantiation of prolonged incestuous abuse could spark local or national interest, but it did not garner worldwide attention. It has been the Fritzl case that has increased the profile of other cases of prolonged incest, lending a new sense of relevance to complex cases of sexual abuse that had less salience in the past. What distinguished the Fritzl case from other instances of prolonged incest was the degree of physical confinement endured by Elizabeth Fritzl and her children. Imprisoned within an underground complex for many years, Elizabeth Fritzl and her children were abjectly defenseless, and hence their plight had immediate resonance in a media industry attuned to depictions of “ideal victims” (see Christie, 1986). However, in cases of sexual abuse in which victims are forced into contact with perpetrators over years or decades, it is rare that their circumstances conform so closely to social norms of “real” victimhood. Their captivity may be a function of emotional manipulation and coercive control rather than iron bars and locked doors, and in such instances media treatment has often been neglectful or ambivalent. As Herman (1992, p. 72) astutely noted, “A man’s home is his castle; rarely it is understood that the same home may be a prison for women and children.” That some women and children face abuse and incest while held physically captive is a matter of great concern. Such circumstances can nonetheless be positioned on a continuum that includes the experiences of children and women who are entrapped in prolonged incestuous abuse through relational bonds and social indifference rather than physical confinement. The way that physical captivity has been signified in the media as the condition of the blameless “ideal victim” has often positioned other victims of prolonged abuse as somehow culpable and their plight as less deserving of recognition. In France, Lydia Gouardo was tortured and raped by her father for 28 years until his death in 1999, giving birth to seven children conceived through incest. Her history is a harrowing one of sadism and abuse made possible by the inaction of authorities whom she repeatedly notified of her plight throughout her childhood and adulthood. Her case came to light after the death of her father in the late 1990s and, while it received media attention in France, it did not garner worldwide attention until it was linked to the Fritzl case in 2008. At this point, media reports distinguished Gouardio’s plight from that of Elizabeth Fritzl by noting that Gouardio was “not locked up” (Herald Sun, 2008) or “not imprisoned” (Sky News, 2008). In prolonged abuse cases, it seems that imprisonment is an important media criterion for public interest and sympathy. Some journalists and members of the community view allegations of sexual abuse with a degree of suspicion so pervasive that nothing short of total, unrelenting physical confinement will keep it at bay. The emergence of the Fritzl case to public awareness was preceded by the publicity surrounding a similar case involving the reappearance of Natascha Kampusch of Austria in 2006. Kampusch had been abducted by Wolfgang Priklopil at the age of 10 and held for eight years until she escaped and notified police, whereupon her

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captor killed himself (Kampusch, 2010). The media response was initially in support for her, until it was revealed that Kampusch felt some affection for Priklopil and won occasional favors and concessions from him, including being released for short periods of time. Consequently, she received a deluge of hate mail accusing her of “enjoying your time with your kidnapper” or lying to the public and “playing us for fools” (Malley, 2006). British journalist Ruth Elkins (2006) characterized Kampusch as the “calculating” and “coldblooded” child who had dominated her “woollyminded” captor. Far from being the “helpless, vulnerable little girl who had no option to obey,” she was instead the “hostage from hell” who, having escaped the confines of her prison, was now intent on manipulating the public at large. In her autobiography, Kampusch (2010, p. 163) refers to the “unconscious aggression” and “hate” that was directed at her when she publicly resisted the role of the “broken” victim of a “monstrous” perpetrator. Kampusch’s insistence on her own agency, both in the context of her captivity and in her subsequent refusal to endorse a “black and white” interpretation of her ordeal, breached the narrow confines of the stereotype of the “ideal victim” and instead invoked the countervailing cultural image of the “willing victim” who invites and enjoys abuse. It seems that implicit social norms are operating in the community and the media that prioritize suspicion over sympathy for female survivors of sexual abuse. Physical imprisonment may serve to exculpate girls and women of suspicion of culpability but “the victim must be broken and must remain so” (Kampusch, 2010, p. 163). A victim who embodies a less than complete passivity may fail to meet the moral standard for empathy and compassion. With a growing roster of “Fritzl” perpetrators, it may appear that the media have “discovered” prolonged incestuous abuse, but it is more accurate to suggest that the media frame has simply shifted from neglect and skepticism to sensationalism. Media treatment of these cases presumes that they are rare aberrations, but research and clinical experience suggest that women who have been incestuously abused since childhood present with some frequency in mental health settings. Epidemiological studies of child abuse have not asked detailed questions about abuse duration that could provide an accurate measure of the community prevalence of experiences of child sexual abuse from childhood into adulthood. Questions about abuse duration have been included in surveys of clinical populations, although it is common for these studies to categorize all reports of abuse longer than two or three years together as the “upper limit” of abuse duration. However, those studies that provide more specific information on abuse duration find a significant proportion of sexually abused adults, usually women, report abuse of longer than 10 years duration and/or abuse into adulthood. Convenience samples of patients in mental health settings reporting sexual abuse find the average duration of sexual abuse to be approximately 12-15 years, particularly among women with a dissociative diagnosis (Anderson, Yasenik, & Ross, 1993; Ross, Anderson, Heber, & Norton, 1990; Rudd & Herzberger, 1999). The proportion of sexually abused clients in mental health settings reporting abuse of over 10-years duration varies from 11% to 32% (Gold, Hill, Swingle, & Elfant, 1999; Lundqvist, Hansson, & Svedin, 2004; Steel, Sanna, Hammond, Whipple, & Cross, 2004). Sexual abuse of 10-years duration or more is

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associated with incest, rather than extra-familial abuse. Gregory-Bills and Rhodeback’s (1995) comparative study of women reporting extra-familial abuse and women reporting incest found that women reporting incest were significantly more likely to report a duration of abuse over 10 years or more. Clinical samples of people reporting child sexual abuse tend to report more severe abuse than community samples (DiLillo, 2001), and therefore these findings are not indicative of the average duration of sexual abuse in the community. Nonetheless, they highlight the long duration of sexual abuse reported by many people (particularly women with dissociative disorders) in mental health settings. Importantly, longer duration of abuse and/or high frequency of abuse (which is often a feature of prolonged incest) are two factors associated with poor psychological health and life outcomes in adulthood (Briere & Runtz, 1988; Nash, Zivney, Hulsey, 1993; Ullman & Brecklin, 2002), and hence adults reporting prolonged incestuous abuse are likely to present with complex psychological and psychosocial problems. The acuteness of their needs may account for their apparent overrepresentation in mental health settings, since they may be driven to seek mental health care due to the severity of their mental health symptoms. In light of the frequency of reports of prolonged incestuous abuse in mental health settings, the lack of information in the research literature about the contexts in which it is possible for the sexual abuse of a girl to continue undetected into adulthood is concerning. Gathering such information is also a crucial step in dispelling the unfounded but culturally entrenched suspicions that obstruct women’s and children’s efforts to disclose such abuse. This article draws on the life history of Grace, a survivor of prolonged incest, in order to explore the contexts in which prolonged incest takes place and the social arrangements that make it possible. The testimony of sexual abuse victims has been the subject of considerable media skepticism over the last 20 years, with allegations of prolonged or sadistic abuse widely dismissed as products of “false memories” or “moral panics” (Salter, 2008). It is therefore fitting, as evidence of the trustworthiness of such accounts surfaces, that the testimony of a survivor of prolonged incest is documented in order to analyze the ways in which normative and socially legitimized domestic arrangements facilitate serious and prolonged sexual offenses against girls and women.

The Life History Study Grace was interviewed as part of a study on organized child sexual abuse (Salter, 2012), defined by La Fontaine (1993) as the sexual abuse of multiple children by multiple perpetrators acting in a coordinated way. This study was not focused on prolonged incest, but nonetheless there is considerable overlap between incest and organized abuse, since sexually abusive fathers may facilitate the sexual exploitation of their child by others (Cleaver & Freeman, 1996; Itzin, 2001). In the interview, rather than describing a history of multiple perpetrators, Grace described how her father engineered the life of her family in order to isolate her geographically and emotionally so that his sexual abuse of her could continue into her adult years. She volunteered for the organized abuse project because she felt her abuse was highly organized, as indeed it was: Her father had gone to considerable lengths

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to enable and conceal his abuse of her over two decades. Her interview was excluded from the organized abuse study, since it did not meet the criterion of multiple abusers, but with her consent, it was written up separately as a case study of prolonged incestuous abuse. The following discussion is based on Grace’s life history, with all names and other potentially identifying information removed. The project utilized the life history approach, which involved a semistructured and conversational interview style in which the research participant is invited to tell the history of their life (Plummer, 1983). A common opening question is “Please tell me your story,” at which point the research participant can begin their narrative where they see fit. The work of the interviewer is to explore themes and issues as they arise with the research participant and to occasionally prompt them to discuss particular periods of their life that have yet to be covered in the interview. It is an approach that is particularly suited to gathering “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973) of everyday experience in order to “uncover more than is immediately obvious in the individual life” (Dowsett, 1996, p. 50) and explore social processes. The life history method is a “good fit” in practical as well as methodological terms in qualitative research with traumatized populations, such as sexual abuse survivors, since the interviewee maintains control over the flow of information and is free to avoid topics that they are reluctant to speak about. In an interview context in which participants feel empowered, comfortable and safe, abuse survivors are unlikely to be exposed to unexpected upset that may trigger trauma-related responses (Becker-Blease & Freyd, 2006).

Grace’s Story Grace is an Anglo-Australian woman who, at the time of interview, was in her 50s and living in a regional town. She was divorced with adult children and worked part-time in the town center. She was an active member of her community and family, but she felt that she put a lot of effort into hiding her emotional state from others. She described herself as Putting on a facade for the outside world and pretending I’m something else. But that’s not me at all . . . I’m not happy with my life. Sometimes, I don’t want to be here. It’s just, sometimes, all too much. . . . If I have a day off I can just sit in the same spot all day. I find it very difficult sometimes. Grace indicated that she frequently experienced distress, depression, and anxiety, and that these problems had recurred throughout her adult life. While sometimes feeling that it was “all too much,” she also described herself as “a strong person.” In the 10 years prior to interview, she had actively sought support for her mental health needs persevering with the fragmented care that characterizes mental health service provision in many regional and rural areas in Australia (see Judd & Humphreys, 2001). She spoke about her life with a quiet confidence and was assured in her ability to manage the potentially distressing emotions associated with an interview about sexual abuse. She said, “It’s better, sometimes, not to think about it. Just talking to you now is making me think about it again. But I’m dealing with talking to you okay.”

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Despite generally preferring not to think or talk about her history of abuse, Grace’s decision to participate in the research project was motivated by her altruistic concern for the well-being of other abuse survivors. She stated, “If sharing my story helps just one person and assists in the education of sexual abuse, I would be very happy.” This underscores the significance of qualitative research for victimized populations, such as sexual abuse survivors, who rarely have the opportunity to attest publicly to the crimes committed against them. Becker-Blease and Freyd (2006) emphasize the harms caused when abuse survivors are not engaged in research and, consequently, their experiences are made invisible. It seems that some abuse survivors have identified the harms of this silencing and may proactively seek out opportunities, such as those offered by qualitative research, to overcome the marginalization of their own and others’ experiences.

Isolating the Victim:The Move to the Country Grace began her life history in her mid-teens, when her family moved from the city to a farm outside a country town. This move represented a seminal break in the continuity of Grace’s childhood, severing the established friendships and habitual patterns of her life in the city and leaving her isolated with her family on a rural property. Grace was the youngest child in her family and the only daughter. Her father was a wealthy business owner who had managed a large firm in the city, and Grace was unable to explain his decision to move his family to the country other than to suggest that it was a way for her father to consolidate his control over her. Sexually abused from the age of 5 by her father, she felt that the move to a rural property was her father’s response to her emerging adolescent autonomy and independence. What happened with that was that I was, basically, I had no peers, no friends, nothing. I was cut off from all the normal social activities of a 14-year-old. Looking at that now, that was a way to stop me having any close friends to disclose things to. Because when you are getting into your mid-teen years, that’s when you start thinking, “Hang on, this isn’t right, whatever is happening.” And you’d probably start talking about it to friends and stuff. So I thought that was one of the main reasons that we ended up moving out to the farm. . . . The problem was that, where we moved, there was nothing around. Dirt roads. Tank water. It was quite primitive. So that was a big shock for me, coming from the suburbs. And I think that was part of his plan. Grace had relatively little to say about her childhood prior to the move to the country in her mid-teens. Her few references to her life in the city were characterized by friends, social activities, and hobbies, in sharp contrast to the claustrophobia and loneliness that pervaded her descriptions of life on the farm. Her father built a compound on the farm in which the family’s living quarters were on the first floor above the warehouse and offices of his company. Grace’s older siblings and some extended family members worked in the family business, so all of family life—nuclear and extended, economic,

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and emotional—converged on the farm, while all authority converged on her father. This was power that her father used to delimit the bounds of Grace’s life. My dad never wanted me to move away. I was never allowed to have boyfriends, or any male friends at all. Even up until I was 25. I was never allowed to have anyone over at the house, even for tea, nothing like that. At my 18th or 21st birthday parties I wasn’t allowed to invite any friends. It was just family—old people, old uncles and aunties, stuff like that. I think my dad was very jealous of any friends that I had. There was a muted but unmistakable sense of outrage in Grace that her father had disrupted her life to such a degree for his own purposes. On the farm, she was not only cut off from the opportunities that had been available to her in the city, but she was also forced to confront the full extent of her father’s obsessive desire to control and dominate her physically and emotionally. This was a desire that came to order all of family life, as her father utilized the power available to him as patriarch and breadwinner to structure the emotional dynamics of the family in order to leave Grace isolated and wholly dependent on him. Grace’s sexual abuse came to constitute the hidden core of family life around which her father fashioned a regime of denial, secrecy, and control.

The Gender Regime of Incest Morris (2009) drew on the concept of the “gender regime,” formulated by Connell (1987), to theorize the interplay of gender and power in households dominated by sexually and/or physically abusive men. A gender regime is the localized configuration of gender relations in a particular circumstance or institution, which generally reproduces the masculine domination that characterizes the gender order of society (Connell 1987). Morris (2009) observed the ways that particular strategies of masculine domination can be applied and intensified by abusive men within their families so that they are positioned as the preferred parent and the source of authority in the home. This resonated with Grace’s description of her father’s totalitarian control of family life, and the alienation that she felt from her mother and siblings. Her father’s capacity to dictate the terms of family life was so entrenched that it went largely unspoken. Grace’s mother acquiesced to him in all matters, while Grace’s father played her siblings against one another so that they were constantly competing for his favor and were distrustful of her. In Grace’s account, there were subtle emotional dynamics operating in her family home that implicitly characterized her father as the warm and loving parent to whom she looked for validation and support, while construing her as the “spoiled” and untrustworthy daughter. This was a regime that directly facilitated her father’s abuses. In Grace’s childhood, home life was structured around a strict division of labor whereby her mother remained on the farm most of the time, undertaking housework, childrearing, and occasional administrative duties for the family business. While her father pursued the high-value work of business management outside the home, returning at night in a jovial mood to play with his children, her mother’s burden of domestic work meant that her

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engagement with her children was more mundane and disciplinary in tone. She recalled that her mother was often tired, punitive, and unresponsive to her children. As the youngest child with older siblings, Grace was frequently struck by her mother and rarely received words of affection or praise. I think she was just very frustrated. And she would use anything she could find in the house, and hit me with it. So I remember going to school with cuts on my arms, because she would hit me with anything—the bread knife, the jug cord, the feather duster, whatever she could find. And I don’t think I was that naughty. In retrospect, Grace felt that the pressures and isolation of the farm contributed to her mother’s parenting difficulties. Her father was a “workaholic” who was “never home,” and she suggested her parents had a “very distant relationship.” Her mother was the “frustrated,” lonely parent responsible for disciplining Grace, while her father was only present at night, bestowing gifts and praise. In contrast to her mother, her father appeared to be a relatively kind and affectionate parent. He frequently told Grace that he loved her and bought her gifts to the point of inciting jealousy from her siblings. Grace did not comment on the possibility that her mother may have shared this sentiment, although jealousy is a common response among women partnered with incestuously abusive men (Candib, 1999). In light of her parents’ cold and unemotional relationship, her mother may have viewed her husband’s “special” relationship with their daughter with some resentment. As a child, Grace was considered her father’s favorite and a “spoiled child.” “Yeah, he was very touchy feely. He’d want you to sit on his lap, he’d bring home chips and chocolate and stuff.” Her father’s attentions were, in Grace’s experience, synonymous with sexual abuse. When I asked her how frequently sexual abuse occurred, she said Well, every night. He’d always come into my room every night. Sometimes I hadn’t seen him at all during the day. I always dreaded it. I remember, sometimes, when we was home and my mum would say, “I’m going to bed now”—we’d all be watching TV—and I can remember plain as anything . . . as soon as mum was out of the room I wanted to be away from him. The ways in which family life was structured in Grace’s home created tensions between Grace and her mother that could be exploited by her father. Grace’s unmet needs for affection were then taken advantage of by her father, who made emotional support contingent on sexual abuse. The paradox that faced Grace as a child was that she was being abused by a parent who was mostly absent while this abuse was ignored by her mother, the primary caregiver whose presence served to provide at least temporary protection. Grace felt that her mother would “have to know” about the abuse but “she’d never admit it,” even to herself. She recalled the “ridiculous amount” of sport and extracurricular activities that her mother enrolled her in as a young child and wondered whether “in a way she was trying to keep me away from the house,” but otherwise Grace did not recall any possible sign of acknowledgement from her mother of the abuse.

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In assessing Grace’s mother’s unresponsiveness to her daughter’s plight, it must be acknowledged that, realistically, she had few options available to protect her daughter or to maintain her independence from an abusive husband. Grace grew up before the advent of no-fault divorce in Australia in 1975. Prior to this, fault-based divorce was legally difficult and very costly to obtain, and it associated with significant social stigma. Single-parent families certainly existed at the time however, historical records suggest that their plight was extremely difficult (Gordon, 1989). In light of the constraints imposed on women of her generation, maintaining a state of denial may have been the only strategy available to her. Immersed in a culture of silence about child sexual abuse, it is also possible that her mother was entirely unaware of the abuse. In Lukianowicz’s (1972) study of 26 cases of paternal incest in Ireland, 16 of the mothers were unaware of their daughter’s abuse, and two filed criminal charges once informed. Grace’s distance from her mother was not just produced by her parents’ working arrangements; it was also an explicit strategy pursued by her father. Morris (2009, p. 418) observes that abusive men can draw on “the power (traditionally conferred on men) of defining people, events and relationships” in order to alienate family members from one another and bond their victims to them. In Grace’s experience, her father systematically worked to isolate and undermine her within her family by construing her as troublesome and untrustworthy. Her father’s “spoiling” of Grace was a beneficence that he bestowed in spite of what he claimed were her troublesome and untrustworthy characteristics. Grace described how, in construing her this way, her father had foreclosed any opportunity for her to disclose her abuse to other family members or to develop more nurturing and supporting family relations. Well, he always used to say to mum that I’m a troublemaker. “Don’t believe a word she says.” And if he’s saying that to mum all the time, then that’s what she’s thinking about me. So mum has got quite a warped view of me via my dad. My siblings and I aren’t close at all now, we don’t see each other. And I think dad has groomed them as well in the same way. “She’s a trouble maker, she’s a liar, don’t believe anything she says.” So if I did disclose something they wouldn’t believe me anyway. And I think dad set it up that way. The gender regime established by Grace’s father drew on and intensified the uppermiddle-class norms of the time so that his perspective was the determining one in the family, operating to shape the views of his wife and children “in complex and interlocking, but frequently intangible, ways” (Morris, 2009, p. 417). Grace was raised in the 1950s and 60s when men’s control of women’s domestic labor and domination of the family environment were considered patriarchal prerogatives. Grace’s father manipulated and capitalized on this socially conferred power in order to enmesh Grace within a family environment that conferred on her a diminished status. She occupied this diminished position with her mother, who was relegated to a variety of endless, low-status domestic duties, but her father appeared to have set her mother against her so that they were each alone with their respective hardships. This corresponds with the patterns of maternal

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alienation observed in incestuous families by a number of researchers and clinicians (Herman, 1981; Laing, 1999; Morris, 2003).

The Disruption of Social Supports and the Diminishment of Opportunity Grace’s father constructed her family environment in ways that isolated her and forced her to become emotionally dependent on him. Laing (1999) has observed the influence that incestuous men can exercise over their partners and families by shaping their views of the victimized child, and how this constricts the child’s opportunities to disclose the abuse or find support. In Grace’s account, her isolation at home was reproduced at school, where she acted out the troublesome and untrustworthy role scripted for her by her family. The sad irony was that, at home, Grace was quiet and rarely openly defiant of her parents. Any expression of distress or anger would have been interpreted as further evidence of Grace’s “disruptive” nature, so Grace was at pains to recast herself as the obedient daughter and thus earn her parents’ regard. This was in stark contrast to her behavior at school, where she described herself as “obnoxious,” a “troublemaker,” and a “bully.” She remembered regularly “punching my girlfriends. My best friends!” and “being generally disruptive and rude in the classroom.” Reflecting on the discontinuity between her conduct at home and school, Grace said, “I was keeping it under control at home. Or—I was controlled, I suppose.” As a result of her behavior at school, Grace never developed close or supportive relationships with peers or teachers that might have facilitated disclosure. It was only at school that she could express her frustration and anger, but because her behavior became increasingly challenging, she was eventually expelled. Entirely absent from Grace’s narrative was any indication that another adult, such as a teacher, ever recognized or responded to her distress for what it was. To the contrary, her behavioral symptoms of abuse were misidentified as evidence of a moral failing. By expelling her, her teachers had inadvertently conspired with her father by further restricting her life choices and increasing her dependence on him. As a result of the expulsion, she was refused her school certificate, and she noted with sadness the effect that the expulsion has had on her life opportunities. “I did a course for six months that was probably the only training I’d ever done until recently. So I was very limited about what I could do or my choices about things.” Unable to pursue her education and too young to independently find work, Grace acted as a secretary in her father’s business from her mid-teens. Her world contracted down to the two storeys of the office and family home. “So my life was living upstairs and then walking downstairs and going to work and then going back up the stairs and going home.” The discrediting effects of the gender regime established by her father thus extended far beyond the family home. The emotional consequences of her abuse disrupted her ability to form potentially supportive relationships outside her family and the response of school authorities to Grace’s behavior reinforced her subordination to the paternal authority that her father misused to sexually abuse her.

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Incest Strategies In Grace’s account, her father engaged in a range of strategies designed to ensure her compliance and silence. Enmeshed within these strategies were his own powerful egoistic and narcissistic investments in his abuse of his daughter, including his belief that he and Grace were engaged in a mutually desired romantic relationship. His assurances of love resonated powerfully for Grace, who, due in no small part to her father’s manipulations, lacked supportive relationships within or outside her family. This sounds really sick but I thought I was in love with my father, and he thought he was in love with me. He thought he was in love with me. On Valentine’s Day he used to send me flowers and things like that. . . . That kind of thing started happening from my early-teens into my mid-20s. . . . He would always say, “I love you,” you know, “it’s all right,” and this kind of thing. Lang and Frenzel (1988, p. 306) note that “[s]ome incestuous fathers’ experiences with their girls are, in their minds, romantic experiences and they may truly believe they are ‘in love’ with them.” In Gilgun’s (1995, p. 270) qualitative research with 11 incest perpetrators, “almost all of them defined incest as love and care. The types of love they expressed ranged from sexual and romantic to care and concern for the welfare of the children.” Some of the men that Gilgun interviewed imagined running away with their daughters and beginning a new life with them away from their spouses (p. 271). In Grace’s case, it may be that her father’s efforts to sequester her on the farm was an expression of his desire to consolidate his incestuous delusion of a “romance” with his daughter in parallel with, rather than separately to or as an escape from, his marriage and business affairs. Grace’s father’s expressions of love for his daughter served as the backdrop to a shifting array of manipulations and strategies that he employed in an attempt to shape her sexuality according to his needs. Reports from incest offenders and victims in treatment make it clear that offenders engage in deliberate tactics that are designed to leverage their victim’s compliance in subtle and strategic ways (Laing, 1998; Laing & Kamsler, 1990). While establishing himself as the only family member to whom Grace could turn for affection, he consistently sexualized her need for care and support. For example, if she was upset or uncooperative, he would claim she was “cranky” and “needed sex” because she “didn’t have a boyfriend.” Gilgun (1995, p. 273) notes the ways in which incest offenders can encourage their victims to associate sexual pleasure with stress relief in an effort to heighten the child’s interests in sexual activity, while encouraging them to “avoid peer heterosexual relationships.” The gifts and favors that he used to substantiate his claim that his sexual abuse of Grace was a romantic and mutual relationship were also highly sexualized. As I was growing up, dad would buy me pornography books. They’d always be about men, I remember that. They would just have men in them. He’d go to the city and come back and say, “I’ve got something for you.” And they would be sex books. And I’d be thinking, “That’s really warped to do that.”

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The use of pornography is a common strategy used by incest offenders (Lang & Frenzel, 1988) and, in this case, it may have been an effort by Grace’s father to normalize sexual activity with her. However, Grace recalled experiencing these books as “warped” and went on to mention another occasion when her father’s conduct seemed inexplicable and “sick” to her. On this occasion, Grace’s father positioned himself as his daughter’s pimp, pretending to arrange a sexual liaison for Grace with a “friend” before revealing himself to be the “friend.” He arranged for me to meet someone in a motel in a couple of night’s time. He said, “I know this bloke and you can meet him and have sex with him.” And I agreed to that. And then, in the morning of that day, I said, “No, I’m not going.” And he said, “Oh well, it was going to be me anyway.” These were just the sick things that he would do. This “romantic” relationship that her father attempted to establish with Grace was premised fundamentally on her father’s claim to right of access to her body. Grace’s reluctance or protestations did not dissuade him and, indeed, could be met with an abusive and insulting response. I remember one time, when I was working for him, and my aunty and uncle were visiting. They were upstairs and we were downstairs in the office, and dad was trying to touch me up in the office. And I just went off. And he started yelling out, that I was a slut, I might as well go away, “you’re a trouble maker,” and all this. So it did make him very angry if I rejected his advances. Grace’s father’s outright hostility to her resistance to sexual abuse was mirrored in the cruelty with which he attempted to discourage her from pursuing friendships or relationships. In her late teens, when she bought a car, her father’s response to her burgeoning social life was vitriolic: I can remember—I had a car—I remember, every time I walked out the door, if I was dressed up, dad would be calling me a slut. “You look like a whore. What are you going to do tonight?” And I’d be walking out the door, crying and shaking. And all I’m doing is going to a friend’s place or going to a pub to listen to some music. And that would ruin the whole night. And that happened the whole time. When Grace was in her late teens, she decided to leave home. She recalls her mother’s characteristically “unemotional” response: “She just said, ‘Okay,’ and gave me a box of food.” Her father, on the other hand, told her, “If you leave home, you’ll be written out of the will, and I never want to see you again.” During the time that she lived away from home, “my dad didn’t talk to me and he didn’t want to see me at all. It was as though he thought I was being naughty.” Integral to her father’s incest strategies was a persistent infantilization of Grace whereby she was not considered capable of responsible conduct

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without her father’s direction or approval. Having grown up in a heavily ordered and structured environment, Grace struggled to establish a life independent of her family. After being shut out of family life for 18 months, she eventually moved back home, and the sexual abuse continued.

Coercion, Invalidation and Dependence The regime of control that Grace’s father established over his family not only misconstrued Grace to her mother and siblings, but it also seems to have fundamentally undermined Grace’s assessment of the value of her own thoughts, feelings and needs. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her father had dictated to her what she could do, whom she could see, and where she could go. On a more fundamental level, he had told her who she was and how she should feel. This may explain why, despite her life-long discomfort and resistance to her father’s abuse, she initially acquiesced to her father’s instructions to meet a “friend” in a motel room, or why she returned home after moving away. Her sense of autonomy had been persistently disrupted and undermined by her father. She had learned that she could only find a sense of worth through parental approval, and this was contingent on her obedience and loyalty. In effect, the systemic invalidation of Grace’s inner experiences and the coercive imposition of her father’s perspective upon her made Grace dependent on her parents to give order and structure to her life. She wanted to live independently from her family and away from the sexual abuse, but at the same time the notion of a life outside the heavily regimented environment of the family home was a frightening one. Sometimes I think I should have just made different decisions along the way. To walk away free would have been very difficult for me—because I wouldn’t have known how to handle it. Grace remained at home until her mid-20s, when she became engaged. This signaled the end of her sexual abuse. “As soon as I announced my engagement, I wasn’t touched again.” When she got married and left home, new and perturbing questions about her father’s conduct began to surface. She felt comfortable around her husband, but she was disturbed by the ways in which she instinctively associated sexual relations with her father. I was starting to get triggered, thinking about how dad did this or that, and thinking to myself, “Hang on, that’s not normal.” So it all came back to me. Grace began to experience “flashbacks” during sex in which she was unable to differentiate her husband from her father. We’d be in bed together and I’d have to push him away and I’d be going mental. Because I’d be getting flashbacks and thinking he was my dad. It was very difficult.

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Grace was able to discuss her experiences of incest openly with her husband, who wanted to sever ties with Grace’s parents and move away from them. However, by this point Grace’s parents had become deeply involved in the new couple’s finances and living arrangements. They bought a house for Grace and her husband and promptly sold their farm and moved in next door, where they insisted on seeing Grace every day. This inevitably created great friction between Grace and her husband, who was determined to cut off contact with her father. Grace, on the other hand, was habitually accustomed to tending to her parents’ needs and obeying their wishes. Her parents’ largesse was also a strong inducement for Grace to maintain her relationship with them, and they used their financial contributions to Grace’s mortgage to ensure that she remained geographically and emotionally proximate to them. He [the husband] was saying that he hates my dad, and he just wanted us to move away. And it would have been the best thing. But the house we were living in, my parents gave us the money to pay it off. And I have both my parents telling me, “Don’t you dare sell that house.” And it was the best house in the street kind of thing. So my husband is saying, “Hang on, let’s move away, stuff the house.” So that was probably one of the things that helped break the marriage up—I was always leaning towards mum and dad’s decisions. After having children, Grace and her husband eventually divorced, which was a source of great sadness for Grace. She felt that her parents’ enmeshment in her emotional and financial life had contributed directly to the breakdown of her relationship. She had been told by her mother that she would eventually inherit a substantial sum of money and, on a practical level, Grace felt that this was the only way that she could secure her financial future and that of her children. She understood that this had created an intolerable situation for her husband. My parents would be coming around for dinner or something. My husband would know what has happened [incest], saying he hates him and stuff like that. And I would be saying, well, there is this dangling carrot of money. My mum would always say to me, “One day, you will be able to do whatever you want.” In the interview, Grace berated herself for not having been “stronger.” Nonetheless, Grace acknowledged the ways in which her parents had manufactured her financial dependence on them. She was the only one of her siblings not to have been made a director of the family business, so she was dependent on her parents’ charity if she was to receive any benefit from her family’s money. Her marginal position within her family’s economic arrangements went unquestioned by her other family members and resonated with the unspoken alienation of Grace by her father, mother, and siblings. She felt that the silent singling out of one person was very much part of her father’s modus operandi, but she wondered if her gender played a role as well.

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There were six people in the family. But in the family company, there were five directors: Dad, mum and my siblings. I was never in it. So I feel like, I don’t know, I’ve been punished in some way. Because I was a woman or a female? I don’t know. But just doing something like that, putting one person on the outer—I think with me and mum, he didn’t think very highly of us. Grace’s father’s regime of control and domination thus outgrew the family compound on the farm and became a pervasive feature of Grace’s life, perpetuated through her family interactions and embedded in the disposition she developed as a response to her abusive childhood. Her father continued to wield significant control over Grace well into her adult life, but the mechanisms of control were not only invisible, but also they were to a large degree devolved to Grace’s mother, siblings and even Grace herself. The family story of Grace as “spoilt” and the favorite concealed the unspoken injunctions that placed Grace at the periphery of family life, where she was dependent on her parents’ favor. In sociological terms, the ubiquity of her father’s domination was such that she internalized it as an objective condition of living, generating what Bourdieu (1977) called a habitus or disposition orientated toward a future in which her sense of self would be determined by the dictates of others. This was a practical adaptation not only to the conditions of her childhood, but also to the realities of her adult years. As a direct consequence of her abuse, Grace’s capacity to independently earn a good living had been compromised. The disruption of her education had limited her earning potential and she bore a burden of depression and distress that was, at times, disabling. The flashbacks that had affected her marriage in her 20s persisted to the time of our interview, and she reported recurrent nightmares and insomnia. She experienced other ongoing and intrusive trauma symptoms as well, such as hypervigilance. If someone touches me—I have a partner now, and we’ll be in bed, and he’ll roll over and his foot will touch my foot—and I’ll just scream. Just little things, little touches. . . . I went away recently and had to share a room with another woman. It was dark when she came in and I could hear her getting changed—and it just sent shivers up my spine because I thought it was my dad. And I had to turn the light on to check—and this was only two weeks ago. Grace’s mental health needs and limited education prevented her from earning a good income and she was concerned that she could not provide properly for her children. By maintaining relations with her parents and acquiescing to their wishes Grace was seeking to ensure her own and her children’s economic well-being. She knew that her parents could provide things for her children that she, on her own, could not. Nonetheless, this ongoing contact with her parents perpetuated the emotional dynamics whereby Grace was driven to attain the approval that seemed forever out of reach in her efforts to overcome the diminished status to which her parents had assigned her.

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I still see my mum every day. Always trying to please my parents, bringing them cups of tea, that kind of thing. Even to this day I’m like that with my mum. Reaching out to try and get their acceptance but that’s never happened. In the claustrophobic confines of the family compound, Grace’s father set into operation a web of perpetually invalidating relations that left Grace lonely, miserable, and disconnected from her own thoughts and feelings. This pattern of invalidation and coercion would ultimately outlive Grace’s time on the farm and follow her throughout her adult life, as her parents employed financial and emotional strategies to ensure that she remained nearby and compliant. Importantly, the subordinate subject position crafted for Grace within her father’s regime of abuse also persisted long after his capacity to directly control her had diminished. She continued to act as her parents’ “waitress” to the time of the interview. She suggested that acting otherwise would endanger her inheritance, but she acknowledged that she was also doing so in the pursuit of a deeply held wish for the validation and support that her parents promised, but never provided.

Conclusion The media treatment of prolonged incest has emphasized sensationalized cases involving physical captivity, while neglecting or casting aspersions on victims of prolonged incest in the general community. Through the lens of a survivor’s life history, this article has revealed how the everyday operations of power in family relations enable abusive men to entrap and silence their daughters in sexually abusive relationships over years and decades. The themes of control and captivity that characterize the prolonged abuse cases that have been grouped together under the “Fritzl” media template were also present in Grace’s story, albeit in more mundane and everyday forms. Grace’s father also sought to isolate his daughter from the world and restrict her movements, but there was no need for a separate prison for Grace. The family home and his unquestioned authority as her father were enough to achieve his purposes. The media construction of the “Fritzl” template has set physical captivity as the criterion for media interest and public concern, but this draws an unnecessary distinction between experiences such as those described by Grace and those that have hit the media headlines. Trapped in the family compound on an isolated farm as a child, Grace faced the extraordinary extent of her father’s criminality and disregard for her well-being. She endured over two decades of sexual abuse and she continues to suffer the consequences of it to the present day. The media have repeatedly pondered how the “Fritzl” cases were not detected, as though egregious sexual abuse would invariably draw attention. The methods of control utilized by Grace’s father were largely invisible but deeply effective, based as they were on the political and social structures of paternal authority. In liberal democracies, the “private” sphere of the home and family has been demarcated as the space in which a man can pursue the “good life,” including the fulfillment of his needs for “emotional and sexual intimacy free from legal regulation” (Naffine, 1995, p. 26). This ideology has been robustly critiqued by feminist theorists who have argued that it has, in effect, constructed the family as

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a site of masculine hegemony (MacKinnon, 1989; Pateman, 1988; Thornton, 1995). Grace’s father’s abuse of her was part of a system of domination through which he determined all the conditions of her family’s life, but this system was effectively a microcosm of the wider gender order that bestowed upon him the power to do so. Cases of prolonged incestuous abuse foreground the political antecedents of sexual abuse and the ways in which normative social arrangements enable and camouflage forms of abuse and control that, at times, can reach totalitarian proportions. Such cases breach the analytic binaries that construe child sexual abuse and rape as distinct offenses committed by distinct categories of offenders, instead highlighting the continuity between child and woman abuse (Kelly, 1996). Emerging from Grace’s story is a picture of a father obsessed with establishing complete control within the “private” spaces of his life and forcing a narcissistic fantasy of sexualized domination upon his daughter. This fantasy played out along the dimensions of Grace’s powerlessness, which included her immaturity as a child but, as she grew, came to include her vulnerability as a systemically invalidated and belittled woman. Implicated in her experience of abuse and invalidation was not only her family but also her local community and school, where she only came to the attention of others as a “troublesome” student who warranted punishment and expulsion rather than care, support and protection. The neglect and invalidation that characterized Grace’s childhood and enabled her father to abuse her for two decades continue to resonate in Grace’s life today in her struggle to find effective care in a health system that largely ignores the needs of female survivors of sexual abuse (see O’Brien, Henderson, & Bateman, 2007). This is just one of the consequences of the social invisibility of prolonged incestuous abuse for victims and survivors. Detection of prolonged incestuous abuse requires an acknowledgement of its possibility. Yet, this acknowledgement has been absent in public discourse, which instead has either ignored or belittled women’s reports of prolonged abuse and the extreme victimization associated with it. The Fritzl case dramatically extended the boundaries of what the media had considered to be real or possible in incest cases, but suspicions over women’s and children’s reports of sexual abuse remain so embedded that only in the most extraordinary cases are the sufferings of victims considered wholly undeserved. It is clear that severely abused children and women rarely encounter an environment in which they feel safe and supported to disclose abuse, or where sensitive but proactive inquiries are made into the origins of troubling or disturbing behavior. There is widespread social denial about the extent of victimization made possible by the designation of the home as a “private” sphere, free from oversight and regulation. Kampusch (2010, p. 162) argues that society “needs the image of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head.” She contends that the media’s sensationalist focus on cases of abuse and imprisonment such as hers enables society to “divest itself of responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps—even when they ask for help” (Kampusch, 2010, pp. 162-163). Women and children are frequently held individually responsible and are punished when, through challenging or problematic behavior, they breach the “public-private” divide by acting out “private” troubles in “public” spaces. This punitive response effectively polices the

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boundaries of the “private” sphere and intensifies the effectiveness of the strategies used by abusive men to control their children and partners. Within the tabloid frenzy over the “Fritzl” cases, the social and political factors that enable the prolonged incestuous abuse of children into adulthood remain unacknowledged and undiscussed. However, it is clear that the socially legitimized authority granted to fathers in the “private” sphere has created a zone of impunity in which abuse of extraordinary and devastating proportions can take place without detection. Women and children subject to prolonged incest will continue to suffer unless steps are taken to address their systemic invisibility and disempowerment.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography Michael Salter has a PhD in public health. Currently, he is a lecturer in criminology at the University of Western Sydney and a research associate at the Centre for Gender-Related Violence Studies at the University of New South Wales. His research on child sexual abuse has focused on adult accounts of organized and sadistic abuse, as well as the barriers that adult survivors experience in the health system and criminal justice system. Much of his work is concerned with gendered violence, health, and culture.