Justice for Incest Victims--Here's the Thing...

I remember the bad old days when sexual harassment was teasing and date rape was just a bad date. I remember when rape was considered something that strangers did to careless women walking too close to dark alleys.

What changed? Many things. Women were allowed to vote, to own our children, to gain an education, to work in the professions, to inherit and own property, to serve on juries, to control reproduction. Women were able to become doctors and lawyers and elected officials and judges. We came out of isolation in patriarchal homes and roles. We started talking to each other, comparing our experiences.

But here’s the thing about children. There will never be a critical mass of empowered individual children. Children will never organize themselves into PACs. They will never control research about themselves. They will never elect their own officials to frame laws on their behalf. They will never serve on juries or be judges, or even become attorneys. They will never be the doctors examining other children. They will never be the psychologists questioning other children. Because they are children, they will always be dependent. Their rights will always be defined by and granted to them by adults. And rescinded. They will be treated as property of their parents, unless there is some kind of horrendous abuse that is brought to the attention of authorities.

Here’s another thing about children: They will always think like children. Their brains are still developing. They will have survival strategies that are functions of their helplessness and their stages of development. They can be trained so easily to believe atrocity is normal, that perpetrators are their protectors, because they do not have the prior points of reference of adult victims. Their silence can be coerced. They can believe that they are the cause of every abuse perpetrated on them, and that their perpetrators are their victims.

When a charge of sexual abuse is brought forward officially, it will always need to be an adult bringing it forward. There will always need to be adults eliciting, transcribing the story. And, as these adults attempt to bridge the language and perception barriers, they become vulnerable to charges of manipulating the child, implanting suggestions…  recruiting the child in an act of spite or revenge.

And then, of course, there is the narrative that a child constructs. The details may change. The chronology may double back on itself. The memory may be somatic, or emotional only. The more traumatic the incident, the more fragmented the narrative. Deprived of agency, the child does the only thing she can to alleviate the agony of powerlessness: She changes her thinking. There may be dissociation, amnesia, aphasia, confusion, contradiction, fusion with the perpetrator, overwhelm. And every one of these syndromes, modes of thinking, and disjointed styles of narration becomes justification for discrediting the child.

This is the situation with incest. This is why children are targeted. They won’t tell, and if they do, they won’t be believed, and if they are, it still can’t be proven. And nearly always there is more social capital in siding with the perpetrator who is, after all, an adult. Children have few resources, few networking connections of any use to adults. And their anger cannot result in slander, evictions, firing, scapegoating, and social shunning. Siding with the perpetrator nearly always carries fewer negative consequences for the bystander.

And, then, of course, there is the media circus around an incest accusation. The ordeal that the child will have to survive.  Many parents and sometimes prosecuting attorneys make the decision not to press charges. This is especially true when the perpetrator is a celebrity or public figure. And when charges are dropped, the world takes that as proof that it was all made up in the first place.

If the perpetrator is careful not to leave any physical evidence, he or she can pretty much count on indemnity.

If there were or could be such a thing as a court of children, there might be different standards. The shattered narratives might be read differently by a true jury of peers. The amnesia or chronological inconsistencies themselves might be assessed as an index of the severity of trauma, instead of evidence of "false memory."  A jury of child peers might react very differently to a celebrity defendent, unswayed by the celebrity's social position or reputation. They might have a visceral response to the creep factor. (And, yes, adult juries are influenced by emotional factors all the time.)

But this kind of justice is not possible for children. We adults must always interpret, intercede, mediate, judge, indict, sentence.  And we are doing a terrible job.