Don't Believe It: Not All Fathers Are Child Molesters
Tuesday, August 14, 2001
By Wendy McElroy
Don't Believe It: Not All Fathers Are Child Molesters
By Wendy McElroy
FOXNEWS
On April 17, 1971, the idea of fathers as sexual predators was inscribed
on the feminist agenda. A group called the New York Radical Feminists
held a two-day conference on rape at which social worker Florence Rush
declared, "The family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of
child abuse ... the sexual abuse of female children is a process of
education that prepares them to become the wives and mothers of
America."
In the latest issue of The Women's Quarterly from the Independent Women's
Forum, Rael Jean Isaac writes of the conference as a turning point. Radical
feminists had not really considered child abuse because, as Andrea Dworkin
commented, "we never had any idea how common it was."
How common is it? In her sensational and influential book Father-Daughter
Incest (1981), the psychiatrist Judith Harman estimated that victims of incest
numbered "in the millions." Is this a reasonable estimate? The answer calls
for some rough math.
According to a 1999 study on child maltreatment conducted by the National
Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect, the female child population that
year was 32,617,720. The sexual abuse rate is given as 1.6 for every 1,000
girls. Assuming that every attack was incestuous, this means 52,160 girls
were sexually assaulted by family members.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics basically supports this number. Its report,
Sexual Assault of Young Children, indicates that 50,700 (or 1.56 per 1,000)
girls were sexually assaulted by adult male family members during 1996 —
presuming a constant population.
If true, this means that about 2.9 percent of women were incestuously
assaulted before the age of 18. In a population of 130,000,000 women, about
3.7 million women would be victims.
These figures are probably inflated, if only because they assume that every
incident involves a new child and is not a repeat attack. Nevertheless,
Herman's estimate is plausible ... and horrifying.
Feminists should be applauded for shedding bright light on the sexual
abuse of children. But they should be deeply ashamed of how they have
used this information. Feminists have attached the pain of children to a
political agenda of their own.
Herman's book bluntly states that the rape of daughters is "an inevitable
result" of the "patriarchal family structure." That is, the traditional family with
gingham curtains in the kitchen and a father who comes home after work
each day results in the rape of daughters.
One obvious error in this attack is the math. If 2.9 percent of women
experienced childhood incest, then 97.1 percent did not. The data proves
exactly the opposite of what is being claimed. It shows that the overwhelming
majority of fathers, brothers and uncles are not child molesters.
Far from being an inevitable result of "the family," the rape of children is a
sharp deviation from what is normal. The key question becomes "why does it
happen at all?" For example, what roles do poverty or drug addiction play?
But there is no political advantage for radical feminists in such questions.
And, so, they employed a different strategy.
First, they greatly exaggerated the incidents of incest. The prominent
Catharine MacKinnon stated, "Some 4.5 percent of all women are victims of
incest by their fathers, an additional 12 percent by other male family
members, rising to a total of 43 percent of all girls before they reach the age
of 18."
MacKinnon's claim was probably based on a study of 930 women in San
Francisco, which was conducted by the extremely political Diana Russell.
Russell found that 16 percent had been sexually abused by a relative before
the age of eighteen: 4.5 percent by their fathers. Making a leap of math, she
claimed that 160,000 women per million — 16 percent or 19 million — may
well have been sexually abused as children. Such wording protected her
from contradiction.
Why don't 16 percent of women remember a childhood rape? As Isaac
explains, "The theory of 'repressed memory' provided the answer." The
trauma of molestation had driven the memory of it so deeply into women's
subconscious that they required special guidance to reconstruct the abuse
by fathers, brothers and uncles.
With no training or expertise, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis wrote the best
seller, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual
Abuse. They asked every woman to confront the possibility that she had been
raped as a child. Through therapy that included such tools as dream
analysis and guided imagery, women began to "recover" their memories in
droves. The fad of Recovered Memory Syndrome is largely responsible for
creating the belief that sexual molestation, especially by fathers, is epidemic.
The syndrome is now being debunked as a sham. But not before it spurred
on the astounding growth of the Child Abuse Industry. These are the people
— therapists, social workers, lawyers, researchers, feminists, foster care
providers, doctors, etc., whose incomes revolve around the issue of child
abuse.
A real problem exists: child abuse. But it must be separated from political
agendas and bloated bureaucracy. It is families that offer children the
greatest protection from both.
McElroy is the editor of www.ifeminists.com. She also edited Freedom,
Feminism, and the State (Independent Institute, 1999) and Sexual
Correctness: The Gender Feminist Attack on Women (McFarland, 1996). She
lives with her husband in Canada.
foxnews.com
Overstating the case a WEE bit, I'd say. |
