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The Violation of Trust
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20098 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
4,328 Words |
| Author
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
THEREAFTER JOHNNIE
Carolivia Herron
Random House, New York, 1991
243 pp., $18.95
THE LION'S SHARE
Rochelle Ratner
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 1991
174 pp., $10.95
Incest is as natural as murder. The morality that modulates desire and rage, giving them socially acceptable from, is something we have to be taught. The forces of civilization--family, school law--are usually successful. The newspapers, and prisons, are full of the failures.
To say that something is natural is not to say that it is good. In our ecologically conscious time, there has been a sentimentalization of nature that is in itself neither good nor evil. From the human point of view, nature is both good and evil good because it gives life, evil because it takes it--the source of both pleasure and pain. Much of human life-from the house that protects us against nature's elements to the laws of behavior that protect us from unrefined human nature-is a struggle against nature.
Incest, and, by extension, the sexual abuse of children, strikes civilized people as particularly heinous, almost unthinkable. But the twentieth century with its death camps and killing fields has clearly demonstrated that the unthinkable can all too easily become reality. People do horrible things. But incest, unlike war, is private violation, one that typically happens in the home. And it has always been under a double taboo-the taboo against committing the act and the taboo against discussing it.
In recent times, that latter taboo has, to put it mildly, been lifted. Celebrities like Roseanne (Barr) Arnold and La Toya Jackson have gone public with their own stories of sexual abuse as children. Like many other aspects of human sexual behavior, incest now appears to be much more prevalent than most people would have suspected. Statistics on the subject are necessarily incomplete. A recent (Oct. 7, 1991) issue of Newsweek ran a story called "The Pain of the Last Taboo" and noted:
Most researchers agree that the best available figures on sexual abuse come from a national survey of more than 2,000 adults
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