Mental Health Blogs

The story of Jaycee Dupree is a sad and tragic one.  Stories of children being abducted from their homes are often seen in the news and sometimes recounted in movies or mini-series.  The alarm is raised and parents frequently worry themselves and warn their children about “stranger danger”.  What is rarely, if ever, discussed is a much greater danger to our children - their own families. 

I am reading The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.  Masson provides a detailed account of Freud’s discovery of sexual assault and incest among young female children, the backlash from the psychiatric community against Freud’s discovery, and Freud’s eventual recantation of his claims.  Masson also cites the work of Dr. Paul Brouardel.  Dr. Brouardel was a doctor working in Paris who did numerous autopsies on murdered children and found that a large number of them had died from abuse in the home; physical and sexual.  Brouardel wrote in his book, Les Attentats aux moeurs (1906, p.8), ”Sexual assaults are crimes of the home” (emphasis added).  More than 100 years later this is still true. 

Having worked with numerous clients struggling with sexual abuse I have found the majority of their perpetrators are not strangers but family, or friends of the family.  Fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers and mothers’ boyfriends have been the predominant threats to clients with whom I have worked.  Yet the issue of child sexual abuse is still a clouded one.  When a claim of sexual abuse is made it provokes all kinds of reactions, many no better than those of Freud’s Victorian era.  If a mother reports that her child is saying the father molested her (the daughter), the mother may be accused of being a vindictive ex-wife.  The father’s rights may be invoked.  People may tell the mother to keep quiet and not embarrass the father.  People may deny that the father could do such a thing, since he is a prominent member of the community.   (Freud discovered this was a common argument against claims of child sexual abuse.)  They may call into question the mother’s sanity for making such a claim. 

Freud discovered this in the 1900′s and tried to make the public aware of it but was shouted down by the psychiatric community.   It seems we have made very little progress in the past 100 years. 

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