 |
Austrian Case of Incest
May 9, 2008
|
|
| Click to listen to interview |
|
|
Most of us have been gripped by a recent case of the 73 year old Austrian father Josef Fritzel locking up his daughter Elisabeth in the basement of his house for 24 years and fathering seven children with her as a result of years of sexual abuse.
Statistics gathered from many countries across the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe suggest that incest is a fairly common occurrence, although it is not reported very often. In Australia, recent statistics indicate that 20% of Australian women have experienced childhood sexual abuse and the majority of these were committed by their fathers. Find out about this world of incest and child sexual abuse in A World of Our Own this week with me Shereena Sajeed.
There are many different and very complex psychological, emotional and familial reasons behind an individual committing incest. In general, incest offenders are not a homogeneous group. Dr Grace McClurg, a psychologist from the National University of Singapore explains.
GM: Biological fathers who abuse are significantly more disturbed and the sort of psychological profile is even more disturbed than step-fathers who abuse. Then I think if we think specifically of Josef Fritzel, he’s not typical of any kind of incest offender, he’s not typical of any kind of sexual offender, I think this man, he’s in a league all of his own basically and I think this offence, this horrible, horrible story that we’ve been hearing about and reading about over the past week has got very little to do with incest and it’s got very little to do with sex offending. I think it’s got a lot more to do with having absolute control and absolute power over another person, it’s got to do with ownership, which makes it I think, even more perverse and even more disturbing than the kind of run-of-the-mill incest offence.
Based on a large body of research from the 1970s, criminologist Dr Anastasia Powell from the University of Melbourne in Australia outlines what makes offenders commit such crimes.
AP: The motivations for sexual assault are as much, if not more about having power and control over another person, as they are about the sexual nature of the offence itself, so I think that’s the sort of context that we have to look at the motivations for why this offence would have occurred.
Incest can occur not just between a father and a child but also between siblings. Dr Powell cites a recent example.
AP: There was a case in Germany, in the news very recently where it was a brother and sister who had never know each other. The brother had been adopted out at a young age and he only met his sister as an adult. Now in a case like that, I think the reasons why a brother and sister might have established a relationship as adults having never known each other before, is quite different to the issues raised in the Austrian case or the motivations why someone might engage in an incestuous relationship.
Dr McClurg says that studies indicate that 16% of adult women are victims of some form of sexual abuse from family members during their childhood, so it’s not all that uncommon.
GM: It’s certainly not something that should be condoned and I think the courts will certainly take incest incredibly seriously. Legally, it holds very, very severe penalties and certainly psychologically for the victims, for the people who have been through these kinds of experiences, it has incredible, incredibly traumatic impact.
Children who are victims of incest suffer from adverse psychological effects.
GM: The child’s boundaries are kind of gradually breached, appropriate touching very gradually becomes inappropriate touching and the child themselves becomes confused as to what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate and they become incredibly confused about what they’ve consented to and what they haven’t consented to and offenders either overtly or covertly manipulate the child so that at somewhere the child becomes convinced that it’s compliant, that it’s kind of at least been complicit in what has happened, which of course is entirely, entirely incorrect. But when the child starts to feel that, that’s when you start to feel massive amounts of guilt and shame, they’ve got this horrible secret. The child feels unloved, it feels unworthy, it feels dirty, it feels it can’t share their secret, who’s going to believe them and if they do tell, what’s going to happen to them, what’s going to happen to their siblings, to their mother.
Child sexual abuse has grave consequences on its victims. As children we learn about ourselves and the world from our primary relationships with our parents and when that relationship is fundamentally abusive, Dr McClurg believes there is no way that these children can lead any semblance of a normal life.
GM: I mean developmentally, these children most certainly haven’t had any kind of normal developmental existence, they haven’t been allowed to reach developments in milestones, they’ve been completely deprived of an education, they’ve been completely deprived of an opportunity to socialize normally. Physically, they’ve been malnourished, they haven’t seen sunlight, it’s impossible, even to begin to unpick the kind of impact that this hideous situation would have on children.
Dr Powell agrees these children’s lives are not normal.
AP: Certainly, we would expect that these children would have a somewhat distorted view of what an equal relationship looks like, what a relationship without that power imbalance actually looks like, where there isn’t this kind of power and control by one person over another in that relationship.
Over the course of 24 years, Josef Fritzel fathered a total of seven children, and all of them were delivered in the captivity of the cellar. One of them died at childbirth. Dr Anastasia feels that the remaining children may have to endure the repercussions of their traumatic experience later in life.
AP: This is a man who has gone through extraordinary lengths to actually hide his crime, you know he’s built a purposed-build basement to contain his daughter, and their children and to actually hide them from the broader society. Now I guess any child that’s been raised with that kind of environment of coercion and sexual abuse is likely to experience ongoing impact of that abuse but is also perhaps less able to break out of that scenario once they are actually an adult.
Another question on everyone’s mind is how could Josef’s wife, Rosemarie claim she had no knowledge about the situation, in which her own daughter was treated as a prisoner and raped continuously by her husband. Dr McClurg shares her thoughts.
GM: If Rosemarie even at some level may have thought that something was going on, this whole situation is absolutely too unbelievable. I mean he is obviously an incredibly manipulative, clever, cunning man. So I think if he’s had a wife who he’s dominated, manipulated, terrorized into not questioning anything that he says to her and then put on top of that just the absolute surrealness and grotesqueness of this situation, I think there may well have been a level where Rosemarie was completely unaware of what was going on.
Dr Powell is particularly perturbed that there is a small section of the public that seems to be wrongfully blaming Elisabeth for what has happened.
AP: People are questioning how could she let this happened, how could she let this continue over such a period of time, how could she raise her children in this environment and it concerns me that this daughter and her children may actually be the subject of this kind of criticism and debate when they really are the victims in this scenario. What we don’t see is enough focus on the offender of the crime in these kinds of situation and there really needs to be that acknowledgement, I mean especially in this Austrian case I think the sole culpability and the sole social stigma ought to really lie with him. He’s the one who should really bare the stigma in this case and not his daughter or the subsequent children.
Dr Powell feels that laws are essential in ensuring that incest is punishable. So why are these laws so important?
AP: Most countries have passed laws which make it a criminal offence for close relatives such a parent and child or brothers and sisters to marry or to have a sexual relationship and these laws are usually justified by legal institutions and governments as a protection against birth defects essentially that might result from an inter-familial marriage or sexual relationship and certainly this is the kind of justification that you see in a recent case here in South Australia where a father and daughter, where the magistrate basically said that the reason that this is inappropriate because there is a risk of birth defects from that marriage.
Two years ago, there was a similar case of sexual abuse in Austria, in which a young 10 year-old girl Natasha was kidnapped, imprisoned and raped. But what impact has this latest case involving Josef Fritzel and his daughter Elizabeth had on the Austrian community as a whole? Dr Grace with more.
GM: What I personally find bizarre is that the time in which this all happened, has been inundated with tourist. So there’s been lots of tourists flooding into the town to take pictures and to have a look at this ‘house of horror’ and I think Austria have in this case, with Natasha, just two years ago a very different case but in some way similar in terms of the kidnapping and being help captive in a cellar, although I think with Natasha’s case, it was outside of the family. I don’t know whether it is coincidental, again there’s lots of stuff in the English press, lots of stuff about what happened during the war and the Third Rake and whether this has fundamentally affected some part of Austria’s population, I don’t know, I mean it’s not a culture I know a huge deal about.
|
|
edit2.gif)
