Clayton Cramer has long pointed out the connection between child sexual abuse, mental disorders, and homosexuality, but only now is California eliminating the "incest exception" that resulting in far lesser punishments for men who abused their own children rather than strangers.
Why would a crime that usually results in an automatic prison sentence ever have been given a free ride? Because two decades ago what was most crucial to many family activists was keeping families intact. Groups such as Parents United lobbied for the incest exception, claiming that relatives who abused children were "situational offenders," not pedophiles. Life stress was said to have induced them to abuse once or twice. With a little therapy, it was claimed, situational offenders would never abuse a child again.Hank Giarretto, a psychologist and the executive director of Parents United in 1981, testified in Sacramento that lawmakers needed to be careful that the "father offender" who "had, usually, a very outstanding career both in industry and in his place in his community," was not mixed up "with the type of offender, the predator, the type of fellow who stalks his victims or who sets up situations through which he can molest these children."
By 1994, however, the American Psychiatric Assn. had rejected the idea of situational offenders, finding instead that there was no difference between a person who sexually abuses a stranger and one who sexually abuses his own child.
The awful irony of incest exception laws is that most sexual abuse of children 5 and younger occurs within families. Later, teachers, coaches, priests and neighbors join the relatives. Only 7% of child sex abusers are strangers.
In the posts I link to above Mr. Cramer discusses a longitudinal study of child sexual abuse in New Zealand that reports increased rates of depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and so forth among children who are abused.
It is cruel and discriminatory to minimize the experiences of children molested at home vs children molested by strangers. My daughter attempted self mutilation at 3 years old because she thought her vagina was nasty and bad after her dad licked and inserted his thumb into her under the guise of play. She had a pair of scissors and was preparing to cut her vagina off and throw it in the trash. Even after the abuse was found to be true and the father admitted to accidentally inserting his thumb into her, he was able to hide behind the exemptions spelled out in the law in california. I now have a child that has learned to minimize and protect her abuser and her experiences. This had led to further physical and verbal abuse which is making her a primary victim of domestic violence. i asked her if her child had been abused the same way, would she protect him or her. Her answer was, I don't know. This was after being placed in the custody of her sexual abuser along with her sister. She and her sister have been living in this custody for the past 7 years and I am looked upon as the trouble making unreasonable parent because I refuse to continue to be forced to mediate and share custody with a child molester who was also my husband. At fourteen years old she says that the best time of her life is when she is asleep and was wetting the bed until 12 years old. All these lawmakers and people like hank giaretto have done is destroy the only weapon that children had against child molestation, their voices. It is pure discrimination and a denial of of the human right to protect your child. How can such choices be made for everyone? Some of us still see the molestation of any child as a crime and not a situation, as though child molestation were some sort of accident. The hands of protective parents are being tied behind their backs and some of us do not know how to carry on anymore living with the failure of protecting our children. I feel like a failure. I feel like I just want to lay down and die.