If slightly more than half of patients had always been women, then women, too, had changed. Liberation and the focus of feminism had transformed sexuality itself and reproblematized it. The women’s movement had pinpointed wrongs: these were to do not only with the culturally ordained look and feel and experience of the body, but with what physically penetrated it–men. Rape and other sexual violence came early and importantly on to the women’s liberation agenda as key crimes against women. Rape was first characterized as stranger rape, a violent assault by an unknown. It was quickly extended into boy-next-door or date rape, and rape in that part of the world women have always known best, the family, which had its very own embodied patriarchs.
Battered wives, pornography, sexually abused women and child abuse began to preoccupy the women’s movement. In the English-speaking world, these gradually through the eighties became more prominent than the original calls for social and sexual equality–the right to contraception, abortion, liberated sex, alongside the freedom to desire. These latter–the very matter implicated in the birth of psychoanalysis–remained well after ’68 the calling-cards of French feminism. With its close links to Lacanian and post-structural theory, the women of Psy et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique), for example, postulated a new feminine language grounded in the passions of hysteria. French feminists’ points of attack, alongside social ills, were the organized systems of knowledge which had always excluded women. They were concerned to show how meaning itself was entangled in a hierarchy of power-relations which placed masculine reason at its pinnacle.
If French ideas circulated in academic spheres worldwide, they didn’t percolate on to the streets with quite the immediacy of rape and incest. Through the seventies and eighties, a vocal part of the women’s movement in Britain and America took on the aura of a Victorian vice squad, the original purity movement from which one branch of early feminism had sprung, a moral brigade for whom the sexual slid with hardly an intervening moment into rape. Men, those agents of patriarchy, emerged less as lovers, let alone husbands and fathers, than as perpetrators of sex crimes and exploitative pornographers. Whereas at first these crimes were against women, by the late 1980s and 1990s they had become crimes against children, or against the girls the women had been. Consciousness-raising had initially involved speaking out and breaking the silence so as to change present and future. Remembering soon displaced it as a collective injunction. The very identity politics that feminism had given birth to robbed it of its agenda of change. Constituting identity meant not only having the flexibility of the masquerade, the trying-on of parts and the gender-bending that the postmodern theorists explored. It also meant looking into the past where the causes of what had made life go wrong could be found. The bonding narrative of women’s identity moved from liberation to abuse.
Borrowing the prevalent tropes and mood of Holocaust history and slavery narratives, women found their identity in past wounds and wrongs. All of these caused illness and made that very illness a badge of courage. ‘Hysteria’, as the influential psychiatrist Judith Herman proclaimed, ‘is the combat neurosis of the sex war.’ In a replay of late-nineteenth-century politics, women became the walking wounded, trauma and its effects their clarion call. The talking cures, now heavily populated by women therapists, both played into and helped to shape this newly vulnerable woman trapped in bad (remembered) sex and a fragile body; a woman newly infantilized, extending, perhaps projecting, her ‘abused’, tortured state on to children, so like the child she had once been. To be a woman who had been molested as a child and entered the path to recovery was to be a ‘survivor’. Life had become all too quickly an afterlife filled with shady memories all but impossible to shed. Already in 1971, the New York Radical Feminists had held a Rape Speak Out, in which women shared their rape experiences. Their manifesto read:
It is no accident that the New York Radical Feminists, through the technique of consciousness raising, discovered that rape is not a personal misfortune but an experience shared by all women in one form or another. When more than two people have suffered the same oppression, the problem is no longer personal but political–and rape is a political matter…The act of rape is the logical expression of the essential relationship now existing between men and women.
In 1975 with the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s mass bestseller Against Our Will, the battle against rape became a primary rallying call of the women’s movement. Positing rape as the fundamental relationship between the sexes, Brownmiller argued that ‘man’s structural capacity to rape’ corresponds to woman’s ‘structural fragility’, and is as basic to sex as the primal act itself. ‘Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon’ has meant that from prehistoric times to the present ‘rape has played a critical function’, which is to intimidate women and keep them in a state of fear.
That fear and fragility were at first to be fought. In 1976, the International Tribunal of Crimes against Women met in Belgium and held the first Take Back the Night march–a candle-lit demonstration protesting violence against women. Marches followed in quick succession in Italy, Germany and in various centres in Britain through 1977. In November of that year, in San Francisco Andrea Dworkin addressed some three thousand women, who walked through the city’s red-light district to demonstrate not only against rape but against pornography and the sexual exploitation of women. By December, the twenty-five-point action plan that grew out of the vast National Women’s Conference in Houston, and which included a large proportion of prolife, pro-family Republican activists, called for education in rape prevention, shelters for wives who were physically abused by their husbands and state-funded programmes for victims of child abuse.
Mobilizing against rape had many benefits. Rape crisis centres and hotlines sprang up in every city and on every campus. Speaking out about rape lessened the terrible shame women had long borne in secret. Judges, men, fathers and even mothers, who had indulged in blaming the victim for the crime in such recurrent asides as ‘She was asking for it’, were contested and brought up short; it is clear that many still need to be. Battles to increase sentencing and change the procedures related to rape legislation were engaged in, and continue.
But the ideological battle-cry which made all men (potential) rapists had a debilitating side-effect. The very fear and vulnerability Brownmiller had evoked as fundamental to femininity reinforced women’s self-image as powerless. Woman as victim became a core identity for American feminism. If men were all rapists, then women were always in danger. No amount of self-defence training could counter the anxiety of constant alertness. With potential predators everywhere, who didn’t ever and always attack, violence against women began to slip from its initial designation of forced, non-consensual sex to encompass a wide set of behaviours: molestation, harassment, aggressively flirtatious speech. A Canadian government-financed survey by two sociologists revealed that an astonishing 81 per cent of university women had suffered what they called ‘sexual abuse’: it transpired that the ambit of abuse included taunts and insults during quarrels. By the eighties, sexual violence had tumbled into a generalized category of ‘abuse’ which increasingly also embraced children.
The idea of ‘child abuse’ both transfixed and indelibly marked the moral climate of the turn of the century. Here, too, the initial focus had a radical intent: if child abuse could be eradicated, the generational recycling of violence could be stopped in its tracks and society emerge as a humane place. The many books of Alice Miller–the Polish-born, Swiss-based psychoanalyst who turned against her profession for what she saw as its wilful blindness to and perpetuation of abuse–focused attention on the way in which children were deformed by parents who had themselves been neglected, unloved, unprotected, uncared for, not to mention beaten, battered and humiliated. Miller, who as a ten-year-old had experienced Hitler’s rise to power in Berlin, was, as she stated in a 1992 interview, scarred and transfixed by the experience: ‘I watched dumbfounded as millions of supposedly “civili
sed” people were transformed into a blind, hate-filled mass who enthusiastically allowed a primitive, arrogant monster to lead them to murder their fellow human beings…I have tried to understand how it is that people can be so easily manipulated and where are the invisible sources of their latent hatred.’
Miller found her answer to the riddle of Hitler’s monstrosity in his brutalization by a father who was partly Jewish; she also found evidence of abuse in all the greats from Dostoievski to Joyce, Proust and Kafka. In the next round of psychological fashion, manic depression would be attributed to a similar list. Miller came to believe the old adage that we grow into our parents was true. Although she was a renegade to the psychoanalytic fold, she believed it in a particularly analytic way: adults were destined unconsciously to repeat what they themselves had suffered but forgotten. ‘It is well known that fathers who bully their children through sexual abuse are usually unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse.’ Only in therapy, even when it is ordered by the courts, do they discover that they have been re-enacting ‘their own scenario just to get rid of it’. The cycle of abuse could only be broken with the help of an ‘enlightened witness’, to whom the child or the child within could recount and replay her history of suffering.
A similar strategy would make its way into the care professions together with its underlying paradigm that children were more likely than not to be abused, and the adults they became were unlikely to remember. Only by eradicating abuse could society be saved.
In Miller’s understanding, the abuse was not only sexual or disproportionately aimed at women: it extended broadly to include both sexes and almost all behaviours–‘a poisonous pedagogy’ that the inevitably powerful parent might enact before a helpless babe. It became a version of original sin. But Miller’s ideas, including their Holocaust colouring, played into the women’s movement and the care professions, helping to legitimate the notion of ‘recovered memory’ that fired America through the nineties.
The philosopher Ian Hacking has brilliantly teased out the ways in which child abuse became a defining category for our times, enmeshing science, popular culture and institutions of state, to make up a new kind of person. What began in 1962 with a medical notion of ‘battered child syndrome’, designed to draw attention, with the use of X-rays, to children who had been beaten and were physically damaged, escalated into a growing nationwide problem. In January 1965, Time noted that if all cases of parents who ‘beat, burned, drowned, stabbed and suffocated their children with weapons ranging from baseball bats to plastic bags’ were reported, the number killed would be far more than ten thousand and would top deaths by ‘auto accidents, leukaemia or muscular dystrophy’. Newspaper headlines and media programmes merged with added social-science definitions, to extend the abused-or battered-child category into one which accommodated both physical abuse and neglect–a category which psychiatrists at that point thought was far more damaging to the child, nullifying emotional life and development.
In the USA statistics for abused children rose and rose, together with official bodies to count and care for them and experts to advise. Forced to attention, politicians could not allow the obvious equation between battery, poverty and neglect to be made, for fear of a rising demand for costly welfare programmes: instead, a generalized cross-class and national abuse problem had to be emphasized. By 1969, all fifty states had new ‘child abuse’ statutes on their books, and in twenty states some form of law asking doctors to report cases to a central register was in place. In 1976 the scale of reported abuse was still growing. The American Humane Association found that 413,000 cases had been reported to state and local authorities that year. By 1981 the count had doubled to 851,000 and was still climbing.
Into this thicket the women’s movement tossed the flame of incest and sexual abuse, which had until then been kept quite distinct from the child abuse classification. In April 1977, Ms Magazine carried an article headed ‘Incest: Sexual Abuse Begins at Home’. Just as women had joined children where battery and physical abuse were concerned, children now joined women as victims of sexual violence. The lived horror was real enough, as Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography had so movingly evoked. But the noisy proclamations of vice and virtue, evil and innocence, which attended the brutality of the experience fanned abuse into insurmountable atrocity.
As the forest fires of moral panic leapt and spread, they touched everything within their reach. Child abuse grew to encompass everything from touch (which could be good or bad–though how could your neighbours tell?) to fondling, to molestation to intercourse to purported satanic rituals. Analysed in articles in a growing number of journals dedicated to child welfare and documented in any number of real-life programmes, emotive fictions and memoirs, discovered prevalence of abuse escalated. Ellen Bass, who was later to write what became a popular manual for discovering multiple personality disorder, in 1983 put together a collection of writings by survivors of child sexual abuse, I Never Told Anyone. In her preface she states:
Like rape of women, the rape and molestation of children are most basically acts of violation, power, and domination. Parents United…estimates that one out of four girls and one out of seven boys will be sexually abused. Other studies find the ratio of girls to be higher, closer to ten girls for each boy. The sex of the molester, however, is consistent from study to study. At least 97 percent of child molesters and rapists are men; 75 percent are family members…The true numbers may be greater.
The anguish of the contents of this volume is real enough. So, too, in the retelling of sexual violence, is the unintended whiff of pornography. By 1991 researchers were estimating that between 200,000 and 360,000 cases of child abuse occurred each year in the United States. The help-lines were up. There were reports of satanic rings, horrifying accounts of abuse so vile, their iconography seemed often enough to have leapt out of the wilder reaches of the porn industry. The family, nuclear or extended, had become an increasingly dangerous place.
Throughout Britain, too, in the eighties and nineties, cases of child abuse and the satanic child abuse which soon joined it were, it seemed from arrests in Cleveland, Newcastle and elsewhere, on the rise. The NSPCC sponsored a series of adverts that chilled with its figures and its portrayal of victimized waifs. Everywhere slips of girls with bruised faces looked plaintively out of billboards expressing their plight. Primed by their American kin, British social workers in a dawn raid in February 1991 took–with all the force and attendant terror of kidnappers–five boys and four girls aged between eight and fifteen from their homes on South Ronaldsay in Orkney and subjected them to a month’s interrogation in order to discover the shameful satanic secrets the social workers ‘knew’ existed on the island. If the judge, in this instance, ultimately threw the case out and deemed there were no secrets to be discovered, the social workers remain convinced to this day that sexual abuse had taken place. As a 2006 BBC documentary made clear in enacting interview tapes of the time, what can only be termed an ideology which insisted that secrets existed and were always held back fuelled the questioning. There was a passionate moral crusade on the march here, one aimed at righting the great injustice that was the sexual abuse of children.
The most articulate exemplar of that moral conviction is the American psychiatrist Judith Herman, who presents a cogent analysis of the ways in which an abused child adapts to her condition by various defences and so can present the appearance of normality so important to her family:
The child’s distress symptoms are generally well hidden. Altered states of consciousness, memory lapses, and other dissociative symptoms are not generally recognized. The formation of a malignant negative identity is generally disguised by the socially conforming ‘false self’. Psychosomatic symptoms are rarely traced to their source. And self-destructive behavior carried out in secret generally goes unnoticed…Most abused children reach adulthood with their secrets intact.
If the underlying notion of care workers is that children can keep abu
se so well hidden, then extracting the assumed secret from them can take excessive forms. In the Orkney case, the experience for the children–with its surprise dawn raid, forced separation from parents, clothes, toys and everything they knew, hours and days of repeated interrogation by unknown adults, the horrors of fostered life–took on an aura of torture which was not unlike abuse itself. The vice squads in the modern garb of care professionals had become the keepers of a punishment park which paraded as a space of safety, an asylum.
The rounding-up of the abused, let alone those who would be accused once testimony was obtained, made everyone aware that a new kind of being had gradually taken shape: one who could not speak her or his sexual secrets without the help of professionals to guide her through the horror, fear, inner stigma, helplessness–in a word, ‘the trauma’–of the experience. The trauma, it was gradually accepted, involved a vast range of behaviours, from rape itself to being photographed. The truth, it also seemed to be agreed, must come out, since early abuse would destroy adult lives.
A dynamic abuse narrative had been moulded: it took for granted that the entirety of a life was misshaped by the experience of early sexuality. Without help, the once chronically abused would remain eternally damaged, would fail in life and repeat the abuse on their own nearest and dearest, as well as unconsciously eliciting it from encounters with others. The developmental story line was at once potentially true and a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly in the disciplinary hands of an interventionist state and its often police-like social services, which too readily tore already vulnerable children away from the world they knew, however vile some of its dimensions.
This understanding of child abuse demanded the acquiescence of all right-thinking people–in the way that earlier vice of self-abuse had of the Victorians. Sexual cruelty to powerless children came to seem, as Hacking notes, ‘the most heinous of crimes’ because it bundled together four distinct kinds of harm: ‘We used to have quite different types of moral revulsion against a parent wilfully neglecting a baby, against a person savagely beating an innocent, against a stranger molesting a child, and against incest.’ But when these are run together into child abuse, ‘a compelling new constellation of absolute moral evil’ is born. Though loath to state that evil is in part ‘merely relative to our culture’, Hacking suggests that ‘there is so much morality, so much righteousness here that one can begin to suspect that some sort of pseudomorality is creeping in’.
Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors Page 49