An open secret

By Larry Derfner

The Jerusalem Post - July 21, 2000, Friday

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 16

'Not long ago we had a boy, seven years old, whose father was committing incest against him, and he climbed to the roof of his school and tried to jump. We asked him why, and he said, 'So my body will break into pieces and I won't have to suffer anymore.'"

Dr. Hanita Zimrin has too many such shocking stories to tell. "I've seen cases of incest with an infant, (and) it's not unusual at all to get victims of three or four years old," notes the director of ELI - The Israel Association for Child Protection.

Even when it was never admitted or discussed, incest existed in Israel. In the last couple of years, though, the problem has become much more acute. It's happening more often, and the victims are getting younger and younger.

Kids being kids, they are beginning to imitate their elders. "A family came in this week - the parents are professionals, well-educated, financially well-off. The mother accidentally saw her son and daughter, one is 12, the other is 10, naked together and playing. She said it wasn't just childhood curiosity," says Zimrin.

Consequently, ELI, which until now has treated only child victims of abuse, is opening a new division at its Tel Aviv therapy clinic for child perpetrators of child abuse.

Incest is also becoming crueler. Fathers are sharing their daughters - over 90% of incest victims are girls, notes Zimrin - with their friends.

"A four-year-old girl told her nursery-school teacher, 'Abba lost me at cards.' The teacher asked her what she meant, and the girl explained that her father had 'given' her to a man to cover his card-playing losses," Zimrin says.

Between 1995 and 1998, the number of incest victims treated at ELI ran to 300-odd a year. Last year, though, the figure leaped to 811, and in the first six months of this year, 546 incest victims have already come in. "I used to say the number of victims was going up because people were reporting it more, but now I have to say that the actual incidence of incest is on the increase as well," she maintains. Based on past research of child abuse, Zimrin's "intelligent guess" is that the true number of incest victims is about 10 times the number reported. Over half of ELI's cases involve incest.

'We're seeing second- and third-generation incest," notes Barbara Reicher, head of child therapy at ELI. "A victim of incest will often choose a husband who she thinks, unconsciously, will do to her daughter what was done to her." This choice is motivated by an ambivalence towards the incestuous father, she says: "The father she hates is also the father she loves, the father she needs." All too frequently, a woman will complain to police that her husband is committing incest, then drop the complaint shortly afterward. Facing up to incest means admitting one's abject failure as a mother and a wife, which few women are prepared to do, relates Zimrin. Allowing incest to continue is a way of punishing oneself, and victimized women feel they deserve their plight, she adds.

A couple of weeks ago, Reicher notes, ELI was approached by a family in which the father, who is now in jail, had committed incest with his 17-year-old son, while another son had committed incest with one of his sisters. There are eight children in the family.

"I'll bet my life we haven't gotten to the end of it," says Zimrin.

She's convinced there are more incestuous combinations in the family to uncover, that this sexual practice is a family style. "What are the chances of getting two separate, discrete instances of incest within one family?" she asks.

At the same time that the problem of incest has been growing more acute, there is also encouraging news. In the last couple of years, the courts have begun handing out harsher sentences for incest. "Defendants have been getting 20 years in prison, 19 years, 15 years," says Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, director of the National Council for the Protection of the Child. These sentences are usually for incest that has been going on for years. In the past, Kadman notes, such aggravated, habitual incest might have been punished by six months in prison, maybe a year. That, however, is no longer the case.

Kadman's organization helps incest victims report the crime by easing their way through the justice system, from their first visit to the police station to their testimony in court - if they have the courage to testify. He mentions one case that concluded this year: "A girl, whose parents had been killed in a traffic accident when she was about 12, went to live with her uncle, who practiced incest with her until she was 16, when she ran away. A year later, she told her sister who called us. We made two appointments to go with the girl to the police, and twice she canceled, but the third time she showed up. This year the case was concluded - the girl's uncle got 15 years in prison."

The ELI clinic in Tel Aviv does everything in its power to look cheerful. The walls are painted purple, pink, and green; there are cartoon figures of Peter Pan and fuzzy forest creatures. The children who live there for up to a year - having all been removed from their homes - sing, dance, bang on drums, even commandeer the public-address system to razz the counselors.

Downstairs is the room where young victims come to be interviewed. The chairs are soft, there are dolls and games all over the place. Locked inside a cabinet are anatomical boy and girl dolls. Mounted high in the corners are video cameras - to record sessions for use as legal evidence.

'The Social Services Department learned of a five- year-old girl who was a victim of incest, and they wanted me to testify because they had no hard evidence," Zimrin says, recalling a case that came into the clinic a year ago, and which is still in court. "The girl came into the room holding herself very stiffly. Her father, who was in the waiting room, had obviously prepared her very well. Before I even asked her any questions, she said, 'Abba didn't do anything to me.'

"I took out the anatomical dolls and asked her to show me what her father does with her," Zimrin continues. "She placed the male doll on top of the female doll in a position of intercourse. I asked her how she feels when Abba does this, and she said, 'My back feels cold.' She couldn't make up something like that, she had to know it from experience. Her father was doing it to her on the floor. Then she said, 'I can't breathe,' and she placed the male doll's penis in the female doll's mouth."

The rate of incest in Israel is more or less equal to that in other "developed" countries, says Kadman, noting that it's hard to gauge how bad the problem is in Third World countries because incest statistics don't tell the true story.

That's about the way it was in Israel in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies and even, to a lesser degree, in the Eighties, he says. "The thinking was that incest didn't exist here, it wasn't something that Jews did. Israel was in total denial. In the last 10 years we've passed that stage, thankfully, and there's a great deal of awareness of the problem, and a much, much greater willingness to confront it."

In fact, this new-found moral courage to face up to the problem of incest is what Zimrin cites as the single "typically Israeli" feature of the phenomenon. "When I tell child-abuse professionals in the US and Europe that we get incest perpetrators themselves calling the hot line for help, they're amazed," she says.

Asked if there are any Israeli demographic groups in which incest tends to occur more than among others, both Zimrin and Kadman say no.

It has nothing to do with socioeconomic standing - "Just because you're poor doesn't mean you sleep with your daughter," says Zimrin. "Incest grows out of an extreme, aggravated personality disturbance," adds Kadman - it's an individual, not a group, thing.

If incest is associated with the poor and backward more than with the wealthy and sophisticated, this is because the rich can hide it better than can the poor, Kadman notes. "Adults (such as a teacher) are less likely to believe that the child of a 'good' family is a victim of incest. And the other sources who are likely to hear complaints of incest - social workers and police - don't hang around wealthy neighborhoods, they're mainly in poor neighborhoods," he explains.

"If a young girl in Herzliya Pituah is bleeding (vaginally) as a result of incest, her family will take her to a private doctor and it will go no further. If it's a girl in south Tel Aviv, she'll go to the emergency room of a major hospital, and it will get reported," adds Zimrin.

Yet at the same time, both Zimrin and Kadman imply that that there is an indirect link between incest and socioeconomic distress.

"Incest is not caused by social problems - for it to happen, the primary cause of incest must be present," says Zimrin. The primary cause, she continues, is "an inability to empathize with one's child, to see the child as a person in her - or his - own right, as someone who can feel pain. Instead the incestuous parent sees the child merely as an instrument to satisfy his own needs. And just like with rape, sexual gratification is not the important thing with incest; sex is only a symbol of the exertion of power. But," she continues, "if the primary cause is present in the family, and in addition, if the family suffers from poverty, drugs, alcohol, and such, then these social problems may contribute to bringing the incestuous tendency to the surface."

In Kadman's view, there is one social condition that often appears in cases of incest: isolation from other people. Consequently, the problem may be found more often among broken families where, for example, the mother has taken her children and moved in with a boyfriend, and is cut off from her extended family. (Sex between a mother's live-in mate and a child in the house is, from a psychological viewpoint, considered incest.) It may crop up with greater frequency among immigrants who've left their extended families behind and who find themselves adrift in Israel.

Zimrin adopts a broad definition of incest - it isn't limited to intercourse, it isn't even limited to sexual contact. She uses the term "psychological incest" to include flirtation between parent and child, or the inclusion of the child in the parents' sex play.

Incest, she says, takes place when there is an "erotic atmosphere in the relationship" between members of the family (including adult authority figures such as an uncle or mother's boyfriend). Under this definition, she's found that some poor immigrants from the former Soviet Union, even without intending to, have crossed into the realm of incest.

"A number of Russian immigrants purchase pornographic films - not only for sexual pleasure, but also as a gesture of freedom, of trying all the things they couldn't do in the Soviet Union. When they live crowded in a tiny apartment, the TV and video are in the living room, and the children don't have rooms of their own, so they end up watching the films with the parents," Zimrin says.

Two other demographic groups in Israel are set apart not because they have a higher-than-normal incidence of incest, but because their communities are so conservative and closed that incest victims are more terrified than normal to divulge what's happened to them. Their families and communities typically unite around the incestuous father, who is the unchallenged master of the house. Once the victim reports incest, she is treated as the guilty party.

These are the haredi and Israeli Arab communities, says Kadman.

"A few years ago we had a case of a haredi father in Bnei Brak who committed incest with his two daughters for years," he recalls. "Their aunt - the mother's sister - came to visit from the US, and the two girls told her what was going on. The aunt told her sister that if she didn't tell the police, she, the aunt, would, so the mother went and told." After this some of the local rabbis ordered that the girls and the mother be ostracized. Posters condemning them as slanderers went up on the walls near the home, and the two girls were kicked out of school.

The couple got divorced and the mother moved with the girls to another city, he continues.

"The father was found innocent in court - the judge agreed with the defense that the girls had 'consented' to have sex with him," Kadman says. "But then five judges in the High Court of Justice heard the appeal, and (Justice Mishael) Cheshin wrote a scathing opinion, saying the concept of consent in a situation like this is absurd, because the girls did not have the means of refusing the father's desires." Because the girls did not testify, the prosecution's case wasn't as strong as it could have been, so the father served only a few months in jail.

"But after he got out of jail he remarried, and committed incest with the daughter of this second wife," notes Kadman. "We were told about this, and we filed a complaint with the police, and soon afterward the father fled the country. He's living abroad now."

Arab society is similar to haredi society in this sense, he says - patriarchal, conservative, closed. "There is huge pressure not to talk, so as to avoid stigmatizing the family, which can hurt the other children's chances for a shidduch (marriage prospect) - although the pressure is not so extreme as it is in the haredi world. But in both haredi and Arab society, the reaction is to blame the victim," Kadman notes.

Both he and Zimrin see the rise in incest in the country as part of a general coarsening of society, a weakening of the human connection between Israelis. "Once upon a time, everybody knew what their neighbors were doing; it was hard to be truly cut off from the social environment," Kadman says. The relative transparency of private life in Israel made it that much harder for incest to occur. Today, so many troubled families - families in which incest is a latent or present menace - are out there on their own, he points out.

"I saw the phenomenon of incest here 30 years ago, when 'it didn't exist,'" adds Zimrin. But today people can buy child pornography in stores, or download it from the Internet, she notes. The media publicize it, but usually in a sensationalistic way that encourages "copycat" incest, Zimrin maintains.

There is hope, though. As best as ELI can judge from its follow-ups, more than half of the incest perpetrators treated at the clinic change their behavior permanently, says Zimrin.

It's a paradoxical situation for the therapist, she adds. "You hate the perpetrator for the atrocity he's committed, but you must see him as a person who is in pain and distress; you must see him as someone who was once victimized himself; you must bring him to the point that he is once again that crying child, before you can cure him," she says.

The therapy, which typically takes a year, is for the entire incestuous family, but especially for the perpetrator and the victim. "We have begun making the perpetrator literally go down on his knees and beg the victim for forgiveness - so he accepts his guilt, and so the victim knows that she is not to blame for this," Zimrin adds.

Can victims of incest ever become whole human beings again, capable of living decent, even happy, lives?

"I'm optimistic," says Reicher. "Incest can never be forgotten. But, to use computer terms, it can treated as a file that is stored in the memory, but which is not an active file." Zimrin chooses a different metaphor. "Incest is a wound that can be turned into a scar," she says. "It'll always be there, but it won't have to hurt all the time."

Ruti Shalev doesn't remember when her father began sexually molesting her. It was just something that he always did, from the time she was very young until his death in a traffic accident when she was 13.

When she was about 10 years old, the abuse became more psychological than sexual, Shalev, now 27, recalled in an interview earlier this week. Though her father would still touch her, he switched to other methods of control, such as not letting her go outside to play in the yard.

During those years, Shalev did not turn to anyone for help. Neither her mother nor her older brother were aware of what was happening. There were, however, some warning signs. For example, at school she was considered a problem child, and at the age of eight was sent for counseling. The school-appointed psychologist recommended that Shalev's physical contact with her father be monitored. But this was never carried out.

In fact, she only learned of this recommendation at the age of 24, when she confronted the psychologist who had treated her as a child.

"IDON'T remember when it started, but I always knew that it wasn't right. I didn't do anything. I was afraid to open my mouth - afraid I would pull out the rug from under my feet if I tried to stop it," she said. Although her father was a policeman, she does not believe that this influenced her decision to keep silent.

Instead of speaking out, she tried to forget what her father was doing to her, blocking out incidents in the process. She did not reveal the ordeal until seven years after his death because "I couldn't come to terms with the fact that the man whom I loved and who was my father was also crazy and abusive."

One day, after undergoing two very stressful incidents, her "defenses just broke down." Shalev began to address her past. One of the ways she did this was through writing because "it helped me bring my feelings to the surface." What she wrote became a book called Belly, recently published by Carmel.

Shalev also lectures to counselors and social work students. She asks them to look at the people they work with as equals - rather than judging them - and to try to put themselves in their clients' shoes.

She believes "good treatment" can break the vicious cycle in which incest victims "repeat history" by selecting potential child molesters as mates.

"My story is a sad one with a happy ending," she writes in her book, "...I suddenly know something that I've waited many long years to discover: I am in love. I fell in love with myself. And today I can hug and kiss...."-

Hotline telephone numbers: The Israel Association for Child Protection - ELI: 1-800-223966; The National Council for the Protection of the Child: 02-5639191 or 02-5639118.

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